CXO INSIGHT
Can you give me a brief overview of Zurich and the services it offers?
Zurich is a global insurer, and we insure both individuals and companies around the world. We serve 75 million individual customers and 320 businesses. We insure most of the big brands and companies in the world, and we have a broad portfolio of insurance products.
How have customer expectations changed within the insurance industry?
I think there was a time where you could say that your industry was special, but that doesn’ t exist any longer. No matter what industry you’ re in, you’ re being disrupted by customer expectations going up. The customers are used to dealing with companies like Netflix and Amazon and companies which can react very quickly on their demands and queries, and the rest of us in other industries, we just have to live up to that.
Have you noticed that change quickly?
I think the industry has been a little bit sleepy for many years. The banks were faster to cotton on that they needed to change. But the financial industry has been a bit slower in changing. I’ ve been in the industry now for a little bit more than five years, and I’ ve seen radical change in expectations in those five years. Every insurance company around the world is going through this process of upgrading systems, tools and processes, because we have a lot of legacy systems in the industry that we need to replace with newer systems. And that’ s a journey that takes maybe 10 years, and some industries have been on that journey far earlier than us.
How is Zurich transforming the customer journey? the customer officer in 2019 and since then, we have been really transforming everything from the customer value proposition: Who are we? Why are we here? What is our purpose in life to the visual identity and the tone of voice? How do we speak with our customers? How do we look in communication?
Insurance used to be formal and not really relevant to customers of today. We’ re working through different elements in order to make the brand more relevant for customers. It’ s not just the standards, it’ s also how we digitalise the experience and how we train our people to serve our customers in the right way. We do a lot of capability building, empathy training, so we move away from selling what we have on the shelf to understanding customer needs.
Can you tell me more about how Zurich is embedding customer focus into every level of the organisation?
We do it with capability building. We also do it with implementing processes that help people act their way into a new way of working. You can’ t just tell an organisation,‘ Now you need to be customer-focused’, and then everybody understands what that looks like. They really don’ t.
And that’ s why we defined an ambition for what our customer experience should be, which is about building meaningful relationships. It’ s not about interactions. It’ s about every time you have a contact with a customer, you need to use that opportunity to get to know them better, service them better, understand them better.
We also look into how we how we segment our customers and address them in the selling and engagement process, depending on what kind of needs they have and what kind of segments they belong to.
In our corporate strategy, we have three priorities; customer focus is one, simplification is the second and innovation is the third. Transforming a company that’ s been around for 150 years, and it’ s a bit of a supertanker into more of a speed boat, that is arranged to serve customers rather than to sell products is a big journey. The strategy was done in 2016 and then I joined and created
We also have it in our customer KPIs. People are getting rewarded based on how well our customer KPIs are performing. The Transactional Net Promoter Score has gone up seven points from 2022 to 2024 and we will soon be clear what happened in 2024 as well. So you can see that if we measure satisfaction and we take actions based on what customers are saying to us, we not only improve the experience, we also improve the score.
The other thing we measure is brand consideration, which is all about measuring whether the Zurich brand is relevant for our customers when they look to buy insurance. We want to be up in that top five set, so that we have been considered.
And finally, we’ ve been measuring net new customers. So how many new customers are we attracting? We’ re turning that into something called NRR, which is a financial measure of how well we are loyalising our customers.
How do you see customer experience evolving within your industry?
I think it’ s a key differentiator in the industry that the people who get this right will be the people who win in the future, because
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