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The recession has changed consumer psyche foreverHylton Kallner
Globally, many inches of newsprint have been devoted to the impact that the recession has had on the psyche of the average consumer. While experts continue to debate whether or not the world economy is in recovery, they appear to agree on at least one front: that the way consumers relate to institutions, and particularly financial institutions, has changed forever. By extension then, the way institutions relate to and service their clients must adapt as well.
At Discovery, we are seeing evidence that clients no longer measure our service based purely on the speed and convenience of our servicing channel or the friendliness and efficiency of our call centre staff. Instead, they are more interested in the question of trust.
Because our products are intangible, our service interactions with our clients are in many ways our product offering. If we are able to demonstrate to our clients, in a myriad ways – which still include speed, convenience and friendliness (in fact, it has to be quicker, easier and friendlier than ever) – that our service is good in the ethical sense of the word, we may receive their approbation and, ultimately, earn their trust.
The same is true of our service offering to the financial advisers who entrust their clients’ business to us.
Technological advances and the emergence of social media as a driver of consumer behaviour have empowered consumers with the tools, resources and platforms to make their demands heard and felt. For institutions like ours, these advances also provide the inspiration and means for exciting service innovation.
So while the demands are so much higher, our ability to meet and exceed them is enhanced. In our view, in fact, service innovation is as important as product innovation in creating compelling offerings that attract new clients and retain them for our business.
The issue of service is therefore no longer a ‘soft issue’ in our industry. It is the battleground upon which companies must compete relentlessly for the loyalty of their clients. We believe that companies which rise to the challenge will be rewarded.
In a world where people trust strangers online more than their bank, companies who lose the service battle are likely to lose the battle for market share. At Discovery, we are certainly conscious of the mounting pressure and we constantly are evolving our service offering to ensure we deliver to the highest standards.
In meeting this commitment, we have adopted a number of principles we believe differentiate our service offering and echo many of the themes of a post-recession, social media-driven consumer environment.
This commitment manifests slightly differently in our various businesses because the dynamics of health cover are different from those of life assurance. The frequency of health claims means that we interact far more often with the members of Discovery Health than we do with the policyholders of Discovery Life.
User ratings
To help Discovery Health evaluate the quality of our call centre’s service to clients, we collect feedback from them daily through e-mail and telephonic surveys. All our surveys are personalised and contain details specific to that client’s interaction.
We have adopted the client feedback score as a significant determinant of an employee’s performance measurement and remuneration. The score that clients give, indicates their perception of the quality of their service experience – and ensures that the client services consultant is held accountable for it.
Discovery embraces a culture that seeks to reward exceptional performance and motivate every individual to deliver at the highest standard. The nature of this structure promotes healthy competition between individuals and teams, further improving the level of service.
Clients also value the opportunity to rate their service experience, particularly in the context of the growing culture of online consumer ratings made possible by the aforementioned social media platforms.
Open source
Transparency and the free flow of information between a company, its employees, the intermediaries that act on its behalf and its clients are critical to the trust relationship. A client’s perception can often be swayed by a clear explanation of the facts relevant to his/her situation and a sincere and empathetic response to his/her concerns.
A critical success factor in enabling our client services employees to respond appropriately is to create an organisational structure where the knowledge is not restricted to particular individuals, but is accessible to any individual in the company.
Knowledge management is only as good as the information generated, collaborated, stored and communicated.
A number of mechanisms exist to allow Discovery employees to question the information that is available to them. This supports the approach that knowledge sharing is no longer about ‘pushing’ information out, but about opening channels to allow clients to ‘pull’ the information they require from us when they need it.
By doing this, we are able to resolve queries the first time and enhance service quality, both to our clients and to the financial advisers who serve them.
Relevance intelligence
To ensure relevance of one’s service offering, it is important to understand the different needs of clients at different stages of the life cycle of their relationship with the organisation. Service companies such as ours typically hold a vast collection of data about their clients, which with the smart technologies available can be used to tailor the service offering at specific stages.
For example, in Discovery Health we have been able to use our data to construct models that predict client requirements and highlight clients who require proactive attention. Calls are routed to different areas within the client services division based on this data, ensuring that clients’ queries are dealt with more effectively.
For Discovery Life, which has far fewer interactions with clients than Discovery Health, the most service intensive stages are the application stage and claims stage. We therefore have focused on understanding how to streamline these experiences for our clients and their financial advisers, and have built a number of tools to achieve this.
The element of surprise
We have found that the task of earning consumer trust is more complex than merely being transparent, reliable and consistent in one’s service. While good-enough service may earn consumers’ respect, it will not excite them or necessarily inspire their loyalty and trust. The truth is that consumers have come to expect that intangible something extra, a feeling of delight.
With the concepts of customer relationship management and loyalty programmes first introduced in the 1990s now firmly entrenched, added value has become the norm and every sales pitch ends with “But wait, there’s more”. As a result, consumers paradoxically expect to be pleasantly surprised in every service interaction.
For Discovery, the powerful benefits of our science-based Vitality wellness programme and the way it unlocks value across our various product offerings is an important asset in this respect. It has provided us with learnings that we are applying increasingly to our service offering as well, helping to provide further competitive differentiation and drive client loyalty and trust.
In closing
At the outset of a new decade and in the wake of the recession, it is clear that consumers will hold companies that fail to meet their needs to greater account than ever before.
We believe that the only way to succeed in business is to succeed in service – and the only way to do that is to guard against complacency and do everything in our power to earn, and keep, our clients’ trust.
Sources:
“Emerging from the storm: The day after tomorrow for insurance”, PwC special report 2009
“Consumers in a post-recession world: A Nielsen Report”, September 2009
“Global Advertising: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual Strangers the Most”, Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey, July 2009
“The Post-recession Customer”, Lior Arussy, CRM Magazine, July 2009.
