Embracing Change: Transforming Insurance Through Customer Feedback
There’s no better way to inform a company’s transformation initiatives than through customer feedback, and insurance companies are no different. Insurers who listen to and incorporate customer feedback can drive meaningful change and enhance the customer experience for long-term engagement and sustainable sales growth. Special return guest Tara Kelly, SPLICE Software President and CEO joins host Janet Sachs, Sapiens’ Senior Marketing Writer, to discuss how customer feedback can serve as the catalyst for transformative change in insurance organizations in our latest podcast.
Janet Sachs|Tara Kelly
Janet Sachs: Hello, welcome to the Sapiens Insurance 360 podcast. I’m your host, Janet Sachs, Senior Marketing Writer at Sapiens, and I’m so glad that you’re out there listening. This is where we discuss the latest news, trends, and issues from across the insurance solutions and technology spectrum.
Change is never easy, especially for insurance company members and customers when facing a multi-year technology transformation. Although a modern platform with automation, AI solutions, and predictive analytics that streamline the claims lifecycle, makes the transformation worthwhile, it’s managing the change process that is often a significant chunk of the heavy lifting. But insurers who listen to and incorporate customer feedback into their transformation initiatives can drive meaningful change and enhance the customer experience for long-term engagement and sustainable sales growth. With us to discuss today’s episode, “Embracing Change, Transforming Insurance Through Customer Feedback,” is Tara Kelly, President and CEO of SPLICE Software.
Tara is a serial innovator, published author, and believer in technology’s potential to change lives for the better. She has channeled that belief into developing technologies that enhance operations, enable better service delivery, and improve the customer experience. This has resulted in her creating three customer experience companies and turning an innovative idea into a patented proprietary technology that harnesses data streams to create personalized and automated messages.
Tara, we’re so glad to have you with us today. Welcome back to the program!
Tara Kelly: Thanks Janet, it’s really great to be back.
Janet Sachs: Excellent, Tara. So let’s begin. Talk to us and how customer feedback can serve as the catalyst for change within insurance organizations.
Tara Kelly: So when we think about customer feedback, there’s so many ways that we can get customer feedback, right? And so I do want to talk on a few. The first I always like to call out is the panel or the advisory group. And I think it is really critically important and it’s probably the area we’re going to talk less about today. But I think when we think of roadmap and innovating against where we’re going, knowing that you really have the customer at heart is an important piece. And so having those advisory customer panels are so, so important.
But the area that I really want to talk about is the customer effort score (CES) and so CES and the NPS, the Net Promoter Score. So CES is really what it sounds like. It is determining how hard was that for your customer. And so it’s definitely looking at more of the interactions, the transactions, smaller things. You know, how hard did you have to work to get that done? And so at a time where we’re doing so much online and the policyholders uploading and sending in a lot of information, we really do want to take a hard look. And that’s often done with that scale of, you know, one to five or one to seven, and we’re trying to get the lowest possible effort score. Whereas NPS is a broader question. It’s about would you promote? You know, how likely are you to recommend? And that is that question. So we want to have as many promoters, we don’t want neutrals or definitely not detractors. And that’s going to be a broader, more open-ended question and kind of where I think for a lot of people, that’s where you want to spend your time. If you’re asking that question, am I really delivering the value? But there is a lot of good, cheap wins. I call them cheap wins, but just because they’re easier, there’s a lot of really great wins in that customer effort score as well. So picking which is better suited to your organization is an important step.
Janet Sachs: Thanks for that Tara, it’s a lot to unpack. So can you share some practical examples of how insurance companies have effectively used customer feedback to drive that meaningful change?
Tara Kelly: Yeah, so sometimes they can be something relatively simple. And I love the fact that often they’re not a question you would have asked. So you may not have actually sent out a survey that said, do you feel like your data is secure enough? Do you like our new form? How is this working? But this is one that came through at customer effort score was that customers were feeling they were giving away a lot of person identifiable information, a lot of health records, a lot of additional pieces, and that they just really didn’t have that assurance they were looking for. And so just by adding additional pop-up and just by extra information on the screen, letting them know what that privacy policy is in a little bit, you know, bolder way, a little bit more plain English than sort of linking it through to a privacy policy page with the officer. I love that example because it really was noticeable for them within less than two months, they saw those scores start to come up because they just had such a rich quality coding process that really created this uncertainty of, okay, you know, is my data safe?
Another really great story that was very interesting was around policy renewal and not going out too early and making sure that when you do notify of a policy renewal, you’re providing all the necessary information and just a really easy link back in where they can see inclusively all of their coverage, what this looks like, what their payment rates are, et cetera. And so the customers were finding that they were dissatisfied and they were shopping more because it was coming really, really early and they couldn’t answer their questions and it was making them search around. And so those are really nice examples of something that you might not have thought of, but through open-ended questions or specific check-in points on how was that experience, we’re able to see those come forward and they were quick wins. And they were there was really great for the organization because it was something that was within reach and they were small iterative changes.
Janet Sachs: Great, Tara. So with those iterative changes, it really makes change much easier to achieve. It’s hard to achieve, but clearly worth it. So that said, what are the key components of a successful change management strategy in the insurance industry? So how will insurers know if they’re getting the change management process right?
Tara Kelly: That’s such a great question. And I think it’s one that I would love to say like, it’s just one, two, three. But I don’t think there’s a better way. I really think there’s 10 key components, and they’re all very, very important. So number one is a clear vision and purpose. Why are we doing this? Where are we going? What is the level of change we can deploy? Making sure it’s really well understood. And that goes to the next one. Number two is effective communication. And so it’s not enough to have a clear vision and purpose if we’re not communicating it and we want to communicate internally. We want to communicate to our other stakeholders, whether it’s our agent network, our distribution network, adjusters, the entire community, and of course the policyholder included in that. And so employing that effective communication strategy. Number three is stakeholder engagement. And lots of times that’s very internal, making sure they have a two-way channel to get some of that feedback in and that we’re understanding, you know, what is the dev team hearing, what is the product team hearing, are we giving them feedback in a way that they can really use it? And that obviously is the goal. So that stakeholder engagement is critical. And then training and development. If we’re not documenting and training and growing that muscle, it’s going to be really hard to truly improve. And so you want to see that documentation and training just continue to grow as you strengthen that culture of really being able to change and to adapt. Leadership support, number five, and I always debate if it should be the first one, but I think vision and purpose really is the first. But leadership support, you’re nothing without it. It’s not enough just to have it in your financial summary at the end of the year in your publication. You need to see it in your weeklies, your huddles, your meetings. We need to know that leadership really does care about those metrics and that they’re buying into that level of change management. And then six is a change management team that’s not leadership. These are the people that are really digging in and getting it done. These are the folks that are involved with like the RACI — responsible, accountable, consulted, informed. This is the power team that’s bringing it across and often these are cross-functional teams. Number seven, because it’s going to happen, addressing resistance. Anytime there’s change, there’s going to be resistance, so you can count on that. And you want to make sure that you’re creating an open space to listen and to make sure that they’re heard and that you’re able to address the pieces you can and then loop that back into training, right into that manual. So there really is those flywheels happening all the time. Number eight is just celebrate quick wins. Probably one of my most favorites. I always think we got to get marbles in the jar so we can take marbles out when we need them, right? So we want to celebrate the quick wins. So in a case where it was really just increasing the pop-up for data security and that sense of, okay, my information is safe here, that’s a really great win. Seeing that score come back up quickly was really fantastic. So really celebrating them, making sure everybody knows when you’re winning is important. Flexibility and adaptability, things are going to need to change, you’re not going to get it right every time, you want that training manual to grow and improve and that change management team to really have the info they need to get the job done. And then of course, last but not least, probably the foundation of all great things is a culture, a positive culture and a belief that we’re showing up to work today to do important meaningful work. I think we all want that.
We want that every day and the belief that we’re growing together to really deliver on our brand promise, it’s exciting. And I think that that changes the culture and the mindset when you can celebrate those wins and see that change happening. Nobody really expects perfection from each other, but we expect to be in this committed journey forward. So I really think it can do a lot for culture and it can really do a lot for the experience that staff have on a day-to-day basis.
Janet Sachs: Everyone loves a top-10 list and that one was particularly helpful. So just to take our talk in a slightly different direction, how can insurance companies measure the success of their change management efforts and continuously improve their processes?
Tara Kelly: Yeah, that’s a great question. So good news, both customer effort score and NPS are hard metric numbers. So you do actually have a hard data point you can point to. You can say, are we actually improving the score? So it’s not just, are we bringing a new product? And within our core platform, we’re having more AI, we’re having more automation, and therefore it’s better. But how many changes have we actually been able to bring forward? How many times have we closed the loop?
So there’s a lot of really strong hard metrics. You can also benchmark yourself against industry. You can benchmark yourself against other product in similar category. And so there’s really some hard numbers there that you can look to, which is awesome. And I encourage organizations to set those goals and targets. You want to make sure that you’re iterating at the right level and that you’re keeping that engagement up.
Janet Sachs: Great points, Tara. So to sum up today’s discussion, really, in what ways can technology and automation support change management initiatives in the insurance sector?
Tara Kelly: Yeah, so that’s a really important question. You don’t want to go without automation on this one. It’s great and all to do a one-time survey on something specific and say, we’re launching this survey in July, right? And this is what this looks like. But you really need to be having it on an iterative and ongoing basis. And so in order to do that, you need to utilize an API within that core system. And so you want to make sure that you’re meeting the customer where they are. And so if you’re having a text discussion, if you’re having an online web chat, If it’s an email, if it’s a call, you want to ensure that you’re in every channel. So call, text, email, chat, you know, it’s really important. And then it’s happening at a regular interval during those touchpoints. So if you know that you’ve made some big changes in an area, you might drop in an additional touch. How was that experience? One of the really key areas to make sure you have the automation working for you certainly is in chat as we bring in the bot and AI is really taking it to the next level. People do have a very big desire to self-serve, we are seeing this continue to grow. However, when they’re nervous or something’s really important, they want to have that assurance of a human. But as AI gets smarter and smarter, those interactions are starting to improve dramatically and we’re seeing that change incredibly quickly. And so sometimes somebody that is not as informed on the subject matter might actually perform worse than a bot-based response. That’s the kind of data point you need to know when you think about routing of agents and other things or making sure that your agents are as equally enabled as that bot is to have all that data. So there is a wonderful lift that technology can do for you and ensure that you’re utilizing APIs, that it’s happening with automation, and it’s really creating that consistency and that ongoing iterative touchpoint.
Janet Sachs: Great. So it’s about the technology lift and the touchpoints. Thanks so much, Tara. You presented so much insight today on how customer feedback can drive iterative change within insurance organizations and what to do with stakeholder comments once they’ve been collected and assessed. Really important information. I’m certain so many of our listeners will really take your suggestions to heart when planning their own technology transformations. Thanks again for appearing with us today, Tara. Great information, great narrative throughout.
To our listeners, as always, thank you so much for spending your time with us here today. We love hearing from you. So if you have comments or would like to follow us on social media, please reach out to us on our channels and don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. And thank you as always for listening. We’ve got more coming. So be sure to tune in next time to Sapiens Insurance 360.
