Key Takeaways:
- Understand how to practice outcome-driven innovation
- How to put the right structure in place for smart innovation using strategically aligned methods to deliver unique insurance solutions to your customers.
- How to identify your customer pain points and recognize opportunities for positive product enhancements yielding personalized and intuitive experiences that improve business outcomes.
Michael Shashoua (00:11):
Welcome everyone. I am Michael Shashoua, Senior Editor of Digital Insurance, and I am here with Jim McKeown, Vice President for Customer Experience and Mobility at Selective Insurance. And we will get right into it on the theme of where innovation and customer experience intersect. Jim, tell us about Selective approach to customer experience and how your team works to influence the customer journey.
Jim McKeown (00:37):
Sure, absolutely. So Select is been in business for about 97 years and we have always been a relationship based organization. We take pride in that with both our customers and our agents and our employees. And the thing that we try to do is understand the customer journey at every intersection. And what I mean by that is better understanding the journeys, trying to provide a unique experience for each and every customer. And they are all different. We will talk more about that, but being able to make sure that we understand those journeys, understand what the customer wants, understand the different segments, and at each turn try to provide a really good example of what we want our customers to go through. During covid, we went through a interesting example of that. We wear two hats and I am often excited to talk about the two hats. The first one is advocating for the customer.
(01:30)
I feel like, and for all the CX folks out there, the best part of our job is being able to say, let us do right by the customer, regardless of the other pressures we are under. But the second hat is very closely related, and that is more around understanding our business priorities and solving business challenges. How do those two meet? Well, during Covid we had an interesting situation in our business Selective as a property casualty organization that does business through the independent agent channel. Well, during Covid, our agents were not in the office. I am sure everybody went through something like this and we are sending our commercial lines paper to our agents to then distribute to our customers. That is the way our business model works. And we have agents calling me and saying, Jim, you are sending these boxes of paper, but there is nobody in the office. And what we found quickly was I got to put on both hats so the customer is not getting the paper, the agent is sending in temporary staff to either mail the paper out or shred the paper and we have an opportunity to turn it off and give the customers what they want, save money.
(02:33)
And so that is just a quick example of always trying to keep those two hats in balance and making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer, but also solving business challenges.
Michael Shashoua (02:42):
Great. From there, what is the innovation challenge at Selective? How did that fit into launching the Launch Innovation Lab?
Jim McKeown (02:50):
So Launch is the name of our innovation lab and it is a great innovative space. And I will start by saying, I personally get a little bit frustrated when organizations say they are innovating for the sake of innovating. And one of the things that I think drive success is understanding what your business priorities are, specifically what problems are you trying to solve and drive your innovation there. So to provide a great experience is one thing, and I know we are here to talk about the intersection, but to innovate. Sometimes we are jamming a square peg in a round hole. We want to make sure that we are aligning our business priorities. We talked about if you have a claims problem and you have five problems to solve there, if I am sitting down with my executive leadership from claims, there is there problems might be people, process or technology, and I often say, well, how do those impact the customer? It is times like that. We look at innovation, understand how we can help solve those issues, and then as well try to solve the customer satisfaction issue.
Michael Shashoua (03:52):
Okay. How does that play out then? How do you use various innovations to make those improvements in customer experience?
Jim McKeown (03:58):
So innovation, I started off by saying to better to identify our priorities, our business problems and challenges that we want to solve, but being very specific around the challenges that we want to solve, but specifically around how are we going to innovate. So there is two separate ways I look at this and I will bring it in short tech for a little bit. So when we look at two different types of problems, if it is proprietary to us something that is very specific to Selective and the stuff that we think provides a unique experience or innovation, we try to hold onto that. We try to differentiate ourselves in a marketplace and with our competition and our customers to be able to hold onto that and innovate. But often there is a time where we have to rely on Insurtech and understand our internal research function and our external research function to better understand how we innovate.
(04:52)
I find the difference between the two is typically speed. So if we are, again, in that first scenario we are trying to solve something proprietor to us and make a unique experience and solve a business challenge, often we will take a little longer to do that, to keep that close to the west. But if it is something that we need to get out, speed the market and solve a problem for our customers, we will look to partner with in Insurtech. But again, being very specific on that business challenge we are trying to solve for. Again, we talked about launch a moment ago, launch is the name of our lab. We hear all the time people have innovation garage is and Innovation Attics, but what are you doing there? What are you trying to solve for? So being very specific about that
Michael Shashoua (05:33):
Part of that, trying to figure out what to solve for, how do you anticipate customer needs?
Jim McKeown (05:40):
We spend a lot of time focusing on trends, understanding our trends, and I mentioned our research function. We spend a lot of time zeroing in on the trends that are impacting our customers and our business. we are here to drive a profitable organization, but often the trends that are sneaking up on us or things that we have to keep an eye on, we have an internal function inside selective that we rely on heavily to better point us in the right direction. But again, we use external sources and KPIs. We spend a lot of time looking at our voice of the customer program and there's a lot of different functions that we use to better understand where we should focus our time. Okay.
Michael Shashoua (06:20):
You mentioned being willing to look at in Insurtechs outside parties. How do you make that decision whether to do it internally or to go outside depending on the problem,
Jim McKeown (06:30):
It depends on the need. I mentioned speed is probably the biggest thing, but what are you trying to solve for? So if it is something that is specific to something that is very near and dear and core to our business, again, we try to keep that internal. If it is something that is, I will give you a great example during, for folks out here, I am a east coaster, I am from New Jersey, and we dealt with something called the Winter Storm Elliot recently. And for us that was one of the biggest cat events we had to deal with. And what it was was it was a polar vortex that hit the southern states in our region. So I think the Carolinas area and people were not prepared to deal with freezing temperatures, and I do not mean 31 degrees, I am minus 15 in the Charlotte area. And our customers reached out to us and said, we do not know how to deal with frozen pipes.
(07:18)
It was a shock for somebody that's from the northeast kind of hearing this. And one of the things that I personally felt terrible, I sat down with our executive team, like I said, it was one of the biggest losses we have ever had. And I said to them, I feel personally responsible that we did not do more. And I asked if we could get a group of leaders together and spend some time looking at things like weather trends, vehicle recalls, auto recalls, product recalls, anything that impacts the customer. And we spun this group up and we meet several times a week and we call it critical event monitoring. It is not the most, I know I am on the marketing side of the house, but it is not the best name. And we got together and we spent a lot of time better understanding of what was coming because in this case of Winter Storm Elliot, we were not prepared and it was something that we wanted to make sure we were more prepared going into next time.
(08:05)
So we meet and we go over weather patterns and things like that, and then we decide how we are going to communicate to our customers, whether it be social, digital emails, text messages, push notifications, all your traditional channels. The thing here is it was a great customer experience and our customers were pleased. They felt like that we had heard them and that we were communicating more. But where it intersected with innovation was specifically around the fact that it is not scalable. I mean, how often are you going to have seven to 10 leaders meeting a couple days a week to talk about weather? So we kicked it over to our innovation team and we said, this is working, but is it scalable? And we talked about it in Insurtech, we kicked this over to them. And sure enough, there is plenty of vendors and organizations out there that do exactly this. They monitor critical events and it is very timely and contextual and they can interact with my Selective mobile app to be able to tell people, if we know that Michael's in X zip code, anything that is going to impact you, you will now be communicated to. So that was a great example where we took, I started the conversation talking about real business problems and this was a significant problem for us and we solved it through experience and innovation working together.
Michael Shashoua (09:13):
How are you building on that, having come through that experience with the critical event group and what you are ready to do the next time something Happens?
Jim McKeown (09:20):
Well, I think it is, so the trends, right? We thought that we had a platform in place that would keep us alert and well configured to handle something like that. And we learned the harder way that we were not, for example, in a advance of that storm, we sent out winter prepared tips and they were not generic, but they were not specific, they were not contextual, they were not what to do if it is minus 15. It was not things like in some of our states in the south, they run pluming through the attic in the northeast, we run it through the basements, right? So it is insulated. We did not take the necessary steps to be able to inform them, and now we we are spending more time, and again, we are looking at Insurtech to help us do that. We can not be experts at everything all the time, so we are l leveraging them as well. Okay.
Michael Shashoua (10:05):
I think you have spoken about customer experience being part science, part art. Yes. So how does it come in that, what parts are science? What parts are in art? How do you square the two?
Jim McKeown (10:15):
Yeah, so I have, I often say customer experience is Art. And I have often said too before, I think it became an Art. I would say I was just talking to some people in the audience that it is voodoo to some people, you know, talk to organizations that are not on the customer experience bandwagon. They say, well, we hear about it and people talk about it, and I know it is good to do, but we don't know exactly why. The art part of it for me is being able to provide a unique experience to our customers and where they need it. Now, you can not provide a unique experience each and every time you get a bill reminder. How unique can it be? But I will give you a good example. If we have a small business customer that is, let us just say it is a plumber, commercial lines small business customer, and we know that they use my Selective mobile app.
(11:06)
We have a lot of data. we are data, we have heard it all through the conference that insurance is a data rich industry. I know that it is a plumber. I know that Michael is a plumber and he lives in this state and he loves to pay his bills online. I know this about him when he pays his bill online, I know he is a plumber. Maybe I should offer up the fact that we have instant COI. So Certificate Of Insurance. So now Michael knows that in that experience, he liked paying his bills easy. We talk more about that in a minute, but he knows that we know that he is a plumber and that one of the things that he uses often as a certificate of insurance. So why do not we present him with that so that if he did not know about it, now we knows that we know who he is and we are giving him the tools that make it easier to do his job.
(11:50)
That is the Art in it for me. So I challenge my staff and really the entire organization is how do we be more specific to our customers customers, they can spend their money and time any way they choose. And people have a debate often about which in my business, which carrier provides a better experience. I think it goes beyond that. It is not just inside your industry. Customers are going to spend time and money in any way they want, and if you can provide a great or an exceptional experience, they will spend more time with you. Okay.
Michael Shashoua (12:23):
Do you have some other ways that you have found to leverage what or what you learn about the customers?
Jim McKeown (12:29):
Yeah, I mean, I will go back to the voice of the customer. I think that is an important part is people ask me all the time, how do we set priorities in CX? And I often say, just ask your customers what they want. They will tell you, well, I think we are going through a transition right now where for too long we did not want to ask our customers. We really did not want to know, and was it really going to be the answers? We wanted to provide the solutions that we want to provide for the customers. So we have a robust voice of the customer program and we spend a lot of time focused there. And again, with our research functions to know specifically what they want. I also say, just ask. But then the second part of that is just listen, you know, have to take action based on the information you get, but it has changed the way that we prioritize it Selective. We look at, again, you could have goals in your department and you have to ask yourself, are they solving customer friction points or are they not? And they won't always, but that alignment is very important.
Michael Shashoua (13:30):
From what you know, learn. How does that change at all, how you set KPIs then for
Jim McKeown (13:36):
What you are looking? It changes. It changes everything. Meaning KPIs will stick with voice of the customer for just a moment because many KPIs, I will give you a good example. NPS, everybody is used to NPS and used it in this industry amongst many others. I personally find NPS to be a lagging indicator. I know it is not popular, but let us just say your organization's 57.5, that is a great score on a relationship survey or transactional survey. It does not matter and it drops by 0.1. What does that tell you? Is that a real KPI? And we have put in place other metrics to offset that. Things like customer effort score and net emotional value, CES and any we respectively. And what that allows us to do is now if I drop 0.1 or 0.2, let us go back to the plumber scenario.
(14:26)
I can ask him the rate in the mobile app and that pay the bill functionality that we are talking about. And if he says it on the emotional side, I scored very high. I was delighted with the functionality, but on the effort score, it was very low. It took me a ton of effort to be able to do that, but I loved the way it ended and it was a great process. Now I start to drill in on what specifically we need to work on back to the priorities and back to the business alignment. So it is this fear of influence that we try to continue to improve on. I other, I just listen and just ask. I say that a lot, but focus on your KPIs around things that you are tangible. Look at KPIs a lot by phone call volume, voice of the customer, statistics, many different things, but we use those as the backbone of the decisions we are going to make.
Michael Shashoua (15:14):
Okay. There is a lot of KPIs you are mentioning there are. How do you identify what makes sense to use or what to,
Jim McKeown (15:23):
I guess that depends on the scenario. Again, I was having a conversation with a gentleman in the audience and one of the things we were talking about is return on investment. Return on the investment, depending on what you are working on, is hard to go back four years and dig up. Some of the KPIs that I try to focus on customer experience are things that have immediate benefit and tangible benefit. Sometimes self-funded work. So you have to think about things like paperless initiatives or putting a new, pay your bill or file a claim functionality in your mobile app or your portal days after you release that, you can start to see call volume coming down and satisfaction going up. Read your voice of the customer data. So it really depends. Success metrics and KPIs are very important. I think those have to be predetermined before you set forth on your journey, because moving down a path without understanding what success looks like often leads to failure.
Michael Shashoua (16:19):
If you have done all that the way you want it to be done, then how does that fit an overall business strategy, the mission for what you are trying to do to serve a customer?
Jim McKeown (16:29):
That is a great question and it is probably the thing I am most passionate about. Speaking to folks like yourselves, and again guys, this Interac, if you have any questions, please, please raise your hand. But one of the things that is most important to me is driving business alignment in the organization. I mentioned CX being voodoo, it being Art, but one thing it has to be is aligned. You know, look across your organization, again, I will use ours for example, if there is a personal lines and commercial lines and safety management, there is all these different sub-organization, they all have goals. And the most important thing for me is to understand in each one of those business units, what are your customer goals? I could look at take claims organization for example, and look at, let us just use top five. Look at their top five goals. And they may be people and process and technology like I mentioned, but I need to sit down and have a conversation with the person from claims or personal lines and commercial lines and better understand how do your goals serve the customer and how do my goals help get you there to be profitable in or improve operational effectiveness.
(17:32)
Those that is the most important thing to me. And it is one of the things that we often, I think, get misaligned. You have in many organizations, you have CX or innovation tracks going down that path because they know it is the thing to do. And then you have our business or part portions of our organization, traditional business portions going ahead and servicing their goals. And often they are not talking. And when I see organizations that are really aligned, I see that they are definitely more successful. Okay.
Michael Shashoua (18:00):
Well, let us open it up a bit if anyone from the audience has a question. There we go.
Audience Member 1 (18:06):
You mentioned that innovation team, the membership of that, is that their dedicated role or do they serve another role in the Organization?
Jim McKeown (18:13):
That is a great question. We have evolved over time. So it it is been both. We do have a head of in innovation and we have an innovation team, but similar to CX, we have an innovation council that spends time better understanding what those goals are. And our focus more recently has been the answer to the last question, which was driving alignment. Again, without that alignment, we tend to innovate for the sake of it.
Audience Member 2 (18:39):
You mentioned the voice of customer over times. What mechanisms do you use to capture that feedback?
Jim McKeown (18:48):
Do you mean the specific platform? The vendor that we use or
Audience Member 2 (18:51):
Process? Okay. Surveying these guys.
Jim McKeown (18:52):
Yes. Outreach. So yeah, everything, all of the above. We do relationship surveys, we do transactional surveys. We look at our data. We do call recordings. We do a QA process with all of our CSRs. It is robust and we spend a lot of time integrating with vendors that help us make heads or tails of that data. One of the things that we are starting to look at more specifically, I know a lot of people have been doing this, is natural speech analytics. So we can data mine those conversations because again, I say just ask and just listen. The data is in those phone calls. If you can spend some time listening to real customer calls, you will get the answers. The other thing is, and I advocate for this across any organization, have your senior leaders listen to phone calls. It is the most priceless thing to have them sit down and listen to what your customers are saying about anything from paying a bill to coverage, and again, I am talking specifically insurance, but have them listen because that, it goes a long way.
Michael Shashoua (19:55):
Actually, what capability do you have for listening and how much time are you able to spend or your colleagues spend listening?
Jim McKeown (20:02):
I spend quite a bit listening. It depends. Do not be honest. We do not do it enough and I do not think most organizations do. My staff is required to listen to phone calls, get customer feedback. We spend a lot of time with our agent population and getting their feedback because in our case, our customers are end customers and our agents. So we spend a lot of time with our agents. And again, I mentioned we are a relationship based company. We want that direct feedback and they will give it again if you ask. Okay.
Michael Shashoua (20:31):
Do we have another question?
Audience Member 3 (20:35):
Hi, all organizations that we are talking to today are focused on personalization. How does that rate for your organization and if it is one of the highest priorities, what do you see as some of the greatest challenges?
Jim McKeown (20:52):
That is a great question. We have spent a lot of time recently in the last two or three years really driving a robust proactive communication plan. And part of that plan was personalization. Very specific about that, your question because there is personalization and then there is being personal, and I think there is two different things. I do not have my Starbucks with me, but if it did, it would have my name on it. And that is personalized, that is not personal. And there is a difference there. So the plumber scenario, we spent a lot of time with traditional communication channels, but also with our emails and text messages being very specific around the action, the call action that we want our customers to take. And as we continue to evolve and grow that it is been paying dividends, the challenge is making heads or tails of all the data we have and then turning it into insightful feedback that we can give or calls to action that we can give our customers and the technology investment as well to turn that data into communications.
Michael Shashoua (21:57):
Is there another question?
Audience Member 4 (21:59):
Yeah, I just have a related question. Thank you for sharing insights on how you are elevating CX. I just had a question around how you are able to quickly get information whether information, and it is very gratifying to hear a lot of insurance companies are been pretty much the same thing, but that extra touch of getting that information to them, this is happening in your area, you need to be a little more careful, goes a lot to let the customer know that you care about them and it helps you because claims are going to be less. How easy is it for you to gather that information and quickly turn around and send it to your customers?
Jim McKeown (22:42):
It is not easy. We struggle there and I think the industry struggles. There is so much data, but to your point, there is different use cases. I will give you a great use case. One of the things around weather is that you do not have a lot of time on it is hail. Hail is one the, it is a big problem for insurance carriers. It is something that happens fast. It can be high severity and loss. And when it does happen, you have about five or 10 minutes to be able to react to that. So we have not been able to crack that right now, but some of the short tech partners that we are looking at have solutions that are timely. They are that fast for us to answer your question, and when I talk about the critical event monitoring before we spun up a small dedicated group, very similar to an innovation function where we will prioritize that above all else. So it is just been something that had to get the alignment and the buy-in by our executive team to say, what if we know that again, a winter storm Elliot is coming and it is going to impact X amount of insureds? And is that important? We will push that to the top of our marketing channels and push that through. But again, I think the challenge is it is in the data and the manifesting it into something useful.
Michael Shashoua (23:57):
Oh, we have got another question.
Audience Member 5 (23:59):
So you mentioned how when Covid hit, you were forced to digitize and so obviously you had to quickly make changes. Were you able to apply some of those quick changes you made to other areas of the business?
Jim McKeown (24:13):
We were, that is a great question was to your point, we had a immediate need and we solved it. That was specifically around agency paperless. We have been focused on digitizing our experiences for many years, but when something like that happens, it causes us to act very quickly. We have applied that to other things and now we are starting to, we are here to talk about the intersection of CX and innovation, and that is really where that's born. And I often say the intersection is literally that customer delight and solving a business problem. So being able to do both of those quickly is getting easier because we charge our innovation function with doing small, but data rich pilots, we are now gotten so small, so specific. So to your point, if we are trying to solve a problem like that today, we will spin up a pilot pretty quickly and get some data around it to see if it is successful and then move forward.
Michael Shashoua (25:08):
Jim, were there other functions that the pandemic lockdown shifted or gave you a new path?
Jim McKeown (25:15):
Yeah, there were many. I think about our Premium Audit Function, our Safety Management Function, the way we handle claims. Again, we are a relationship company. Getting out there and spending time with our customers and agents that it all suffered, but I think everybody was in the same boat. We all were going through the same thing. I think there was a lot of empathy and compassion for both sides of the customer and the organization, whether it be insurance or not, to everybody was trying to go in the right direction, help each other.
Michael Shashoua (25:46):
We have got another question.
Audience Member 6 (25:48):
Yeah. I am curious, how does the culture of the organization affect your team's work and how do you address the impact? Insurance is not known as a sector that is very has fast on its feet with respect to innovation. So I am curious how you have taken on the culture.
Jim McKeown (26:07):
That is a great question. It is, it is timely that you asked that. We have gone through a initiative recently, which we just discussed today as a leadership team around cultural attributes and innovation. So I will answer your question two ways. So the cultural attributes at Selective in general, we have a big focus on what is important as a culture for our organization and what it means to our employees, and then downstream through to our customers. But specifically the culture of innovation is interesting because everybody wants to innovate and steering them in the right direction. When I was talking about what are you trying to solve, for example, and I use this, sometimes roof inspections are very costly to do, right? They are manual. If we are going to innovate somewhere, should we look at drones to do that? That is solving a business problem for something that we really want to do. But funneling the innovation into a culture that's successful for the organization takes everybody. And we spent a lot of time making, that is why we created Launch Our Innovation Lab, but we did not want to just have a great space for people to do innovating. We wanted to understand which problems we are trying to solve for and then drive that through the organization. So we spend a lot of time talking about innovation at Selective and making sure that everybody has a voice.
Michael Shashoua (27:26):
Are there some other dividends that have come out of the Launch Innovation Lab?
Jim McKeown (27:30):
Oh, absolutely. There is been several solutions that started in launch as a concept and that we were able to move forward to full blown solutions, some of our digital safety management offerings, being able to service our customers faster and get their feedback quicker. There is been several that have come out of there. Again, I know I am harping on this, but making sure that there is a very specific focus on what we are try trying to solve for. Great. And can quickly get away from you.
Michael Shashoua (27:57):
Yeah, I think we do have time for another question or two if there is. Yeah, just one, quick one, yeah.
Audience Member 7 (28:01):
You had mentioned that you are working across the board to make sure that innovation is kind of in everybody's top of mind, right? Yeah. Do you have champions in certain areas that bring innovation projects forward?
Jim McKeown (28:15):
We do. We have champions throughout the organization. We have innovation analysts, we have signal scanning. We have many people in the organization that are challenged with bringing us ideas so that we do not seem so siloed. I think where you are going is, yes, we have folks in claims and folks in personal. We have people that are challenged to understand how innovation can help them and bring things to us because we are often, I think it goes back to the culture question. We are often saying, help us innovate, but we can not be everywhere all the time. And heads are down often, right? Working, trying to solve problems in traditional ways and asking and getting that feedback both ways has been very helpful for us.
Michael Shashoua (28:56):
Any other questions? I guess as a closing question, what advice would you give our audience on how to combine innovation with the customer experience?
Jim McKeown (29:08):
It would be around driving alignment at the most senior level. Understanding what your business problems are, your business opportunities, your challenges look like. You know, look at 2024, what is on your roadmap? What are you trying to solve for as an organization? Have that honest conversation and then be transparent with your CX leaders and your innovation leaders and say, how can you help us do this? And if those goals are not aligned, you have to find some alignment. That is the biggest thing I see CX organizations and innovation organizations fail is they are just not aligned. They are innovating over and they are driving CX over there, and we are still heads down focusing on our core business problems. They have to be all aligned. And that transparency is not easy because CX innovation, although not new concepts, are still, I think, still struggle in organizations to be taken as a little bit in the driver's seat of these conversation. You have to stand up and be heard and ask the organization, do they really want to be CX forward? Do they really want to put customer at the head of the table and do they really want to innovate to solve business problems? And once you get that magic sauce, I think it goes a long way. Great. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Mike. Thanks everybody. Thanks everyone.