I believe companies absolutely must provide a great customer experience (which should come as some relief to the people who pay me to help do that). Especially in mature, low engagement, largely commoditized businesses like mine (insurance), client experience is perhaps the only differentiator left. It’s the best way to stay relevant in a world of rapidly changing expectations and competitive threats.
Note that I said we need to provide a great experience. Not fantastic. Not earth shattering and certainly not – gulp – delightful. So why do so many of us talk about delighting customers? Telling ourselves we’re going to make insurance, or pest control or half-inch rubber gaskets fun (oh, come on)? Or sexy (whatever that means)? That doing business with us will be so amazing that social media, grocery store checkout line chatter and Thanksgiving dinners everywhere will be monopolized by unceasing praise and promotion from our clients?
Bottom line: delighting customers is stupid. Every minute and dollar spent trying to be the [INSERT CURRENT HOT CONSUMER TECH COMPANY HERE] of your industry would be better spent on becoming great at the things that actually matter to customers and contribute to profitable growth (something those same people who pay me also seem rather interested in).
Like Dirty Harry Said: You’ve Got to Know Your Limitations
It took me a while to accept that people will never love us. Like the friendly accountant next door who lends you his air compressor whenever you need it, they may be glad we’re in the neighborhood but a passionate affair just ain’t in the cards.
And yet we often mistakenly think that for our products and services to be meaningful, the experience must be magical. Most of us are not Disney or Apple. And we’re taking the wrong lessons from what they do. At the core (no pun intended), Apple isn’t successful because their products come in an elegant box that makes a cool swoosh sound when you open it. They’re successful because they laser focus on delivering a great experience that, above all, makes it easy for clients to get the value they’re after at every stage of their journey.
Building a Great Experience
So now that we’ve accepted the reality of our place in the world and want to get serious about building a great client experience, what to do?
- Listen to clients – Build a robust voice of the client (VOC) program that gathers client data at every key touch point across your client journey. Dig into call center data and literally listen to your customers. Hoarding these priceless insights is the thoroughly unsexy but oh-so-vital job #1 of any client experience effort. Without it, everything else is just guessing and hoping.
- Figure out what really matters to them (and your business) – As you dig into your data, you’ll likely find the improvement opportunities are practically infinite. You can’t fix them all so focus on the ones that clients actually care about and that will help your business results. The intersection of those two is what to target. Usually, it’s the “boring” stuff that makes the most impact. In all the tens-of-thousands of client’s verbatims we’ve analyzed, I’ve never heard a client yearn for more delight when working with us. They want the experience to be faster. They want it to be easier. And they want it to be right. My hunch is the same will be true for you.
- Take action to be great at those things – Figuring out what matters to clients is the easy part. Having the discipline to actually deliver on those priority expectations is where it gets tough. Relentlessly prioritize your efforts on what you can do to be excellent at the touch points you’ve identified as the most important to your clients and your business. Forget the rest. And then just do the work. Insight without action does you no good. It’s not the water in your canteen that saves you in the desert, it’s drinking the water that does. We use a SAFe Agile approach to ensure we’re constantly evaluating customer needs, prioritizing actions and delivering new functionality, services and capabilities to our customers. We measure the results, lather, rinse and repeat.
What a Client Wants
Most customers – especially in “boring” businesses like insurance — don’t want to be delighted. They want to be taken care of. They want a great experience that’s easy, reliable and provided on their terms. They want to know they can count on us when they need us and not be a problem when they don’t. Deliver that kind of experience and clients will choose you, stay with you and recommend you to others, which might be the most delightful thing of all.
As Chief Client Experience Officer, Scott Campbell leads American National’s client experience team, which includes UX/UI, client insights, client service center operations and the company’s strategic innovation efforts. Additionally, he oversees the company’s corporate communications, PR and brand programs.
Scott holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has been an active member of several insurance industry committees throughout his career and was named by LIMRA as one of the industry’s Rising Stars of Innovation.
