Customer experience assessment and vision for a large P&C insurer

The company, a leading personal lines insurer, had experienced a gradual decline in market share over the last several years, primarily due to decreased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention rates. Company leaders believed there was an urgent need to embed customer-focus across the enterprise.

Challenge
While multiple initiatives had been launched to improve customer experience (CE), most were uncoordinated and insufficient, and efforts were tactical in nature and limited in scope. To create the desired impact, the insurer engaged A.T. Kearney to help them align the enterprise on a common CE vision and strategy that would ensure coordination, prioritize efforts, and drive fundamental change.

Approach
A consumer-insights-driven methodology and research was used to identify critical touchpoints and customer expectations during their journey with the insurer (across an end-to-end process covering shopping and service interactions). These insights guided the design of an “Experience Promise” (EP) with service principles that align key functions to consistently deliver on the insurer’s brand promise at critical touchpoints.

The team then developed and applied a comprehensive CE framework and Stages of Excellence to define the insurer’s CE vision and future strategy. Gaps in customer focus, organization capabilities, and governance were identified, using the CE framework and leading industry and cross-industry practices. Finally, the team defined a targeted future-state along all dimensions of the CE framework, which enabled the insurer to operationalize EP and CE vision. A 3-year transformation path was developed for migrating the enterprise towards delivering first a consistent, “predictable” experience and then a “branded/differentiated” experience.

Results
Creating organizational alignment on the EP and CE vision was a critical element of the overall enterprise effort to improve customer loyalty and retention by 2-3%.

In addition, the insurer now has the necessary foundation and structure for further evolving and embedding customer experience into strategic and operational initiatives for continued success:

• Targeted EP/CE future state and vision that aligns the enterprise on a common purpose and goal for customer-focused actions
• Initiative prioritization framework that focuses the enterprise on high impact actions to improve CE, while rationalizing low impact ones

Contact

For more information, please contact:

Mike Hales, partner in the Chicago office

Joe Reifel, partner in the Chicago office