CustomerThink Inside Scoop
Interview recorded May 2, 2014, transcribed and edited for clarity.
Bob Thompson:
Hello, this is Bob Thompson of CustomerThink, and welcome to another episode of my Inside Scoop interview program. My guest is Matt Inman, Director of Customer Experience and Satisfaction at American Family Insurance, based in Madison, Wisconsin. I met Matt at a conference recently, and he had a super story about Voice of Customer (VoC) data and how to drive change, so that’s mainly what we’re going to be talking about today. Matt, welcome to Inside Scoop. Glad to have you with me.
Matt Inman:
Thanks, Bob, I appreciate being here.
Bob Thompson:
For the benefit of those who don’t know about your company, let’s start with just a quick intro. What kind of insurance does American Family Insurance provide?
Matt Inman:
American Family Insurance is predominantly property and casualty, so auto and homeowners insurance. We also sell life insurance and commercial insurance. Even though we’re one of the top 10 insurance companies in the country, we’re only based in 19 states. If you’re from the south, far east or some places out in the west, you might not have heard of us before because we don’t operate in all states. Within the states that we’re in, we have usually a pretty substantial market share.
Bob Thompson:
Big in the Midwest, I would presume, since based in Madison.
Matt Inman:
Very heavy in the Midwest, and also quite a bit of exposure out west. Not as far as California, but just about every other state surrounding California.
Bob Thompson:
This VoC program, how long have you been associated with it?
Matt Inman:
I’m one of the very few people in the company who has been there since the day one that we started kicking off the concept of this, starting to map it out and roll it out to our field. It’s been about 10 years now that I’ve been involved, first on the research side, and then moving over to the program administration, working with the rewards and recognition side of it, as well.
Bob Thompson:
Can you go back that 10 years, and quickly explain what was it that caused you or other company leaders to say, “Hey, we need a VoC program”?
Matt Inman:
It was a couple of things. As an organization, we had always prided ourselves on our focus with our customers and really felt that the fact we had an exclusive agent model really helped highlight that as a strength of how we could focus on our customer. We didn’t have any formal ways of truly measuring that or getting a sense of how we were doing other than the very few industry benchmark studies that were out at that time.
There was a day when our Vice President of Marketing had walked into an auto dealer to get a car repaired, the standard routine everybody gets, you get the survey afterwards and a person asks to fill out the survey, get a good score and stuff like that. He started reflecting on that, thinking gosh, how come we don’t do this to get a better sense of what our customers think of us, as well? That was kind of the inception of the concept, and from there, we started sending out RFP’s to get a better sense of what that would look like. It has grown substantially from that point, but that’s really where the concept began about 10 years ago.
Bob Thompson:
In the big picture, do you feel 10 years in now that it has helped your company in some measurable way, and if so what would that be?
Matt Inman:
It has helped enormously in quite a few different ways. When we originally started doing just some satisfaction research at an aggregate level for the company, a lot of the data was looked at as kind of nice to have. We would go out and present the things that impact the satisfaction and talk about the best practices for our agents in other areas of the company. What we got was a lot of, “Oh, that’s nice.” When you would get down to the agent level and you would really be trying to push, “Here’s what your customers are looking for, these are the practices that really help drive satisfaction and retention within your agency and here’s what’s going to be able to help you move your bottom line better,” we were getting a lot of pushback from agents, saying, “That’s nice and all, but my customers aren’t looking for that.”
The key of the program was for us to make sure we were getting feedback down to the individual agent level. Not only were we getting that feedback at the agent level, we tried to made sure that when they logged on to the results site, they would log right on and see exactly what their customers were telling them, not only from a quantitative perspective, but from a qualitative perspective, as well. We would cross their satisfaction scores, based off of the behaviors they had, such as “Do you offer an annual insurance review? Do you call people personally when they’ve had a claim? Do you talk to people often enough throughout the year?”
By being able to show those graphs specific with their customers, it kind of put them in one of those positions where they said, “Oh, well those are my customers, and they are actually wanting this. They just don’t always tell me that they want that.” That’s where just because somebody doesn’t tell you that they want you to call you once a year doesn’t mean that they don’t have that expectation of you. That was one of the biggest components that just getting the information back from our customers was able to drive.
Secondarily, we were able to use the data then and start doing some modeling internally to go beyond just our agent model, looking into the billing, the correspondence that we send out, the experience we were delivering through the care centers, the web and things like that.
Bob Thompson:
You were looking more at the total experience, not just the agent interactions?
Matt Inman:
Correct. The agent interaction is by far the biggest driver of overall satisfaction, but we wanted to make sure we weren’t leading with one area and everybody else was really kind of dragging.
Bob Thompson:
One question I had when I was listening to you at your conference presentation was why isn’t the policy the main driver of customer satisfaction? Isn’t that what they’re buying?
Matt Inman:
Yes and no. In a lot of the other research we’ve done, not a big surprise, people don’t like to think about insurance. It rates very low as something they think about on a day-to-day basis. When we look at our target customer research, essentially the reason that they’ve gone to get an exclusive agent is basically, they outsource this responsibility to us so they don’t have to worry about that and carry that burden. They basically say, “Hey, I’ve got an agent, and I know that they’re thinking about this for me, so that’s one thing I can just check off my list and know that I’m covered.” By doing that, it frees them up to pursue the other aspects of their life.
Bob Thompson:
So, they’re not worried about the details of the policy because they’ve entrusted the agent to do that for them, is that what you’re saying?
Matt Inman:
Correct. The policy, in and of itself, is really intangible. Essentially all they get from us is a piece of paper, and it’s really a promise. In a lot of cases, it’s probably unique because it’s one of the very few products or services in life that you pay for at a fairly substantial rate that you hope you never have to use. It’s a unique concept, as a result.
Bob Thompson:
It’s clear that the agent customer interaction is really critical to your business success. You spent all this time collecting data, going back 10 years. It sounds very simple. You take the data, you put it in front of the agent, they have that information and they are going to jump right to it and start making changes, based on that information. Does it work that way?
Matt Inman:
Oh, I wish it did. My job would be so much easier and my staff would be a lot smaller. You start to look at the more holistic framework that you need to build out when it comes to the customer experience. Providing the data is clearly a critical cornerstone of what you need to be able to provide, but then in addition to that, you also have to be able to provide the tools so they have access to the data in a relevant way that speaks to them, as well, not just to the agents, but also to the company.
In addition to that, you also have to start proving to them, “What’s in it for me?” We do that in a couple of ways. The salesforce, in particular, tend to be a very, very competitive group. We do a lot of things, showing them how do you rate, relative to your peers, how do you rate, relative to the industry, as well? If there’s one thing that gets a salesperson really motivated, it’s showing them a ranking chart where they’re not on the top. They’re just very, very driven that way, so that’s been a very effective tool for us.
Bob Thompson:
Is it a kind of a form of gamification?
Matt Inman:
Absolutely, it’s very close to that. With our rewards and recognition, we also have platforms out there that show them, based off of these quarters’ results, here’s where you rate, relative to everybody else, and here’s where you are in a certification program where you have to perform at certain levels with the best practices and with their overall scores, as well. One other thing we’ve added in is we aligned the rewards and recognition for that, as well. Their bonus has a heavy component related to how they perform with the customer satisfaction. It’s tied to their ability to go to the annual sales incentive trips, whether or not they’re going to get transferred customers when another agent retires, publications, media and all kinds of other supplies.
Bob Thompson:
Do you feel in general, that adding bonuses, recognition, these ratings and so on have helped to get the agents to focus on improving how they interact with their customers?
Matt Inman:
It’s helped them take seriously the best practices that are out there. Most of the agents are very good people persons. What the program has done is helped them align with more structure around the way they approach things. Instead of just being reactive to your customers and just focusing on being polite, it’s really helped them focus on being proactive and putting together action plans for the year so that they understand specifically what steps and processes they and their staff are going to follow when they’re interacting with their customers.
Bob Thompson:
Do you ever have the reaction from an agent that says, “Look, these are all great ideas and I certainly like getting bonuses, but show me how changing my behavior is going to actually drive more commission revenue from improving sales”?
Matt Inman:
What we’ve done is the analysis on the back end, showing agents who score higher what is their sales rate, what are their retention rates, compared to the agents who score lower and their satisfaction. Then we also try to show if an average agent were to move their customers from a certain point on the scale up to another point on the scale, what that means to them and their bottom line at the end of the day. It doesn’t take much of a movement to show a really, really big return for the agents. Again, that speaks to them because if they’re going to invest the time, they want to know they’re going to get a return on that investment of their time.
Bob Thompson:
Have you found that the numbers and analytics motivate people or do you find other techniques, stories or examples? What do you find really connects with people?
Matt Inman:
It’s really a variety of things. I think part of it is what you said, different things motivate people. I think some of it is just attacking it holistically. Everything from the motivations with the rank charts, the gamification, to the incentives that go along with their bonus and their ability to go on specific trips.
Bob Thompson:
I’d like to wrap up and go back to the big picture. I really love the detailed work that you did at American Family Insurance to get down to the individual level and make it relevant. I think that’s really a best practice for any company. In the end, however, you want to drive business performance at your whole company, correct? By the time you aggregate all of these things that you’ve done, have you been able to see an overall increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty measurements more broadly across your customer base, and also an improvement in revenue?
Matt Inman:
We’ve seen it in a few ways. With the best practices, we’ve really pushed within the certification program. We’ve seen our agents go from kind of below the middle of the pack in the industry to generally one of the top rated groups of agents within the industry on a regular basis. In a lot of the industry benchmark studies, they’ve consistently come out on the top or been on the top with the best practices KPI’s within the industry. That’s been one way we’ve really seen the return on the behaviors that have gone with it. On the flipside, too, at the end of the day, people want to say it’s great that we look good in the ranking charts, but financially, is this going to have the return we’re looking for?
Bob Thompson:
I’m sure your boss has asked questions like that.
Matt Inman:
Yeah, repeatedly, and every time you talk to the officers, that’s what they want to know. We’ve done that in a couple of ways. We worked on something called a linkage model. It’s kind of like a regression model on steroids where we’ve taken the satisfaction results and driven that downstream to find out what did that do to our retention, what did that do to our cross sales, and how did that translate financially for us? When we’re starting to look at planning purposes, we can say, “Geez, if we raised our billing satisfaction up by this many points financially, how much does that translate in revenue for the company?” That allows us to identify is this a good investment of our money, if we think we can get this kind of a lift in the satisfaction? Are we going to get a financial return that makes the investment worth it? In most cases, it really helps us prioritize our efforts.
In a lot of cases, too, it helps illustrate to a lot of the people in the organization that might be concerned that satisfaction is really just spending money to make customers happy that the majority of the efforts you do really don’t cost any money at all. It’s just a matter of how do you do things differently through the change of process or the way that you try to engineer the experience for our customers. That’s been really important and successful in trying to get the buy-in from other areas of the organization because while some people look at a customer and understand what’s the right thing to do, people speak different languages, and for a lot of people, financial numbers are really what’s going to impact them.
Bob Thompson:
In a sense what you’ve done is you’ve answered the “What’s in it for me?” question for the agent, but also for business leaders, right?
Matt Inman:
Yes, and if you don’t have the support from the top, you’re really not going to be able to have the legs to run the programs the way you need to.
Bob Thompson:
Matt, thank you so much. It’s a great story, and my congratulations on your success. Ten years is certainly not an overnight success. It took a lot of hard work and it’s a great model for a lot of other companies. I appreciate you sharing it with us today.
Matt Inman:
Thank you, I enjoyed the interview.
