Today’s interview is with Conny Kalcher, Group Chief Customer Officer at Zurich Insurance. Conny joins me today to talk about her ambitions for Zurich to become the “Apple of Insurance”, her guiding philosophy around customer retention and revenue, how they are building customer loyalty and a human connection in an increasingly competitive landscape and some of the big trends and technologies that will drive and shape the future of customer experience.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – If it matters for your customer, it’s important – Interview with Tara DeZao, Simon Thorpe and James Dodkins of Pega – and is number 516 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Here are the highlights of my chat with Conny:
- Conny has an ambition for Zurich to become the “Apple of insurance”.
- I believe that the insurance industry has undersold itself. Zurich has been around for 150 years and has been through wars, world wars and economic crises. So we clearly have found out how to adapt to customers over time.
- According to Zurich’s own internal financial calculation a 1% increase in customer retention equals a 0.5% revenue increase.
- Conny and Zurich are focused on Fred Reicheld’s Earned Growth Rate (ERR) ratio/number.
- We are able, together with our colleagues in finance, to link our gross written premiums to our customer base and their behaviors. So we can now measure across our countries the value our loyalization strategy is driving.
- When starting a new job, the first thing you should do is go and either speak to customers or speak to people that deal with customers. Do that on an hourly, daily basis. That’s the first thing that you do in the first hour of the first day of a new job.
- The second thing that you should do is go and hang out with finance, andf find out what’s on their radar, what’s important to them and what are the things that they’re looking for.
- Remember to do the same with IT.
- Bad feedback is a gift and you should celebrate the bad feedback because that’s really where you learn. That’s where you need to take the clues from.
- Conny recalls a presentation from Lego ambassadors to the whole top team of Lego about what they thought they should do differently. It was an amazing PowerPoint presentation and it was all very polite and very nice. Then, Lego’s CEO at the time said ….okay, let’s put the PowerPoint away and then tell us what you really, really don’t like. Because that’s what we’re here to hear. And then they were saying, well, what we really, really don’t like is the fact that the colors on the bricks are not always the same. Various production batches will have a different color. So when I build a big wall, it’s not the same red. That is gold. That is a golden nugget of an insight. And it really changed how we were doing the coloring and how we were checking and color matching.
- That’s the strength of a good company, a strong brand, one that is really curious enough to ask for the really, really bad things that we need to fix.
- How are you balancing technology and the human touch? It is tricky and that’s where the customer officer needs to play a keen role.
- We work on building and emotional connection and then we work on creating seamless experiences.
- Connected with that, one of the things that we are doing is a lot of empathy training for people that interact with customers. After the training, alot of which is done with actors and via role play and simulations, our NPS scores go up 10, sometimes 20, points. In addition, we also see improvements in how colleagues work together.
- We have very strong values in Zurich and the more we bring those values out to the customers, the better we will be.
- Insurance companies can tend to talk in very complicated language. So, we set out some principles for how to communicate in a simpler, clearer way. That became our tone of voice strategy and we’re rolling that out across the group.
- Given that every country has thousands of documents that they need to change, we have created and introduced a new AI-powered tool, based on these tone of voice principles, that helps take a testing text and translates it into a text based on these principles. The tool is currently in six languages. The translated text is then checked by a human being for quality.
- We just discussed whether we should allow our own people to use AI to do advertising. We decided against it. We come at it from a perspective of we’re doing a risk assessment,
- Conny’s best advice: Three things – Deep understanding, great data and act with urgency.
- Conny’s Punk XL brand: Amazon, Zappos, the Adele concert that Conny recently attended in Munich.
About Conny
Conny Kalcher is a customer-centric leader with over 30 years of experience across multiple industries, identifying how best to put customers at the heart of a successful business.
She joined Zurich in July 2019 as Group Chief Customer Officer, where she heads the Customer Office and has the responsibility for leading customer loyalty and advocacy within Zurich’s global brand and marketing teams. Since her start, she has developed customer strategy for Commercial Insurance and Retail, while also being the main driver behind other initiatives such as the successful launch of the Zurich customer portal and transformative customer initiatives across sales, distribution, and marketing.
Conny is a founding partner of the NPS and Loyalty Forum and known for her ability to drive customer-focused change, build high-performing teams, and create innovative solutions that deliver long-term business growth. Her expertise includes brand development, customer experience design, customer insights, customer relationship management, and digital transformation. As a thought leader in the CX space, Conny has been profiled by top tier media internationally, including Fortune.
After a long career at LEGO Group, where she led Customer Marketing projects and divisions, she joined Mindfolio in 2018 as partner. Mindfolio is an analytics and innovation consultancy with offices in London and Chicago.
Find out more at Zurich Insurance, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @Zurich and feel free to connect with Conny on LinkedIn here.
Credit: Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
