Customer service in the world of insurance is basically a bit rubbish. That was the shock finding of a new report from customer relationship management experts My Customer!
So uniformly “bland and undistinguished” is the customer relationship performance of the UK’s insurance firms, the report concludes, that consumers are left with nothing but price on which to choose between them.
In fact, why even bother doing that, when you can get some meerkat (or opera bloke or shock-headed stripey bird or whatever) to do it for you.
“Companies in the insurance sector are failing to use customer experience to differentiate themselves,” the report reports, delicately refraining from adding that some of them are failing to use it at all.
Although it is not impossible that some insurers may have heard of customer experience management, observes internationally renowned genius polymath Colin Shag in the My Customer! report, “they aren’t doing it.”
Shag, whose firm Beyond Philosophy has a profundity of customer experience insight that your tiny mind could not even begin to comprehend, believes that the root of the problem could be “that classic difference between talk and action.”
If you’re not already versed in the subtle distinctions to be made between talking and acting, the remainder of Mr Shag’s remarks would probably be lost on you. Suffice it here to say that Stag detects the rotten whiff of blandness.
Amazingly, even as insurance bods master more and more novel and buzzy language with which to describe dynamics of the customer experience, the situation is actually getting worse. Just 32% of insurance customers reported having a good experience last year, compared with 43% in 2013.
Happily, another contributor to the report, Jo Caustic, chief executive of the Institute of Customer Servers (ICS) cuts through the jargon-ridden confusion of insurance customer experience management. Nobody trusts insurers, she says, so nobody will give them their data (a circumstance underwriters must be finding somewhat problematic), and, with no data, insurers can’t hope to improve their customer experience.
Hopefully, now they’ve had it spelled out for them so clearly, insurers will be able to rise above blandness and indistinguishability and realise a cradle-to-grave custex implementation matrix to potentiate a shore-to-shore raft of fully actuated dynamic optimisation outcomes.
If not, they’d probably better get My Customer! in to sort them out.
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