The biggest sin insurers can make, according to a marketing and communications pro: assuming what your clients want, and treating them with a one-size-fits-all approach.
“I would say insurers make assumptions about what their clients need and the insurance-buying experience. Finding out what they really need and how they really feel is tremendously important to long-term engagement and really satisfying them,” says Paul Mlodzik, vice president of marketing and communications at The Co-operators.
It’s a mistake the insurance company has been looking to rectify with their new customer personas and journey mapping strategy. The approach compiles roughly 80% of their client base into five personas – ranging from millennials and working moms to retirees – which are then utilized at every step in the marketing plan, a method Mlodzik says creates a greater sense of empathy for the customer.
“They really create a compelling picture in the minds of people in the organization as to who they serve and what they want,” he says. “You have a much better sense of who you’re trying to deal with when you’re not looking at a big homogeneous mass of clients. You put a name to the face, and we actually use their names inside the organization. We talk about Jacobs and Marias and Davids, and we talk about them when we’re designing products or thinking about what words we use in communications, or even what images we use when we do direct marketing.”
He adds that return on the personas approach – which has been fully launched for nine months – has been tremendous, and has provided the company with incredibly valuable data.
To create the personas, The Cooperators partnered with Foresters Research to analyze existing client data, merging their own proprietary information with a massive database of Canadian consumers in the insurance and financial services segments.
“One of the things we really wanted to make sure was that we understood what clients wanted from us in those different channels and how they wanted to interact with us,” Mlodzik says, adding that it’s always surprising to watch the journey mapping research in action.
“You take a bunch of people who match those personas physically into a room and ask them to go through a process or journey that is common in your company,” he says.
“We do the same process twice - once with our internal project subject matter experts, and then we do it with the clients and you look at where the disconnects are. Frankly, we were shocked at how the customers were viewing certain parts of the experience.”
He says that so far, the new approach has catapulted the Cooperators to the top in terms of customer satisfaction.
“We’re not noted as an industry that has fantastic client satisfaction ratings, and we’ve been really happy to watch our ratings extend to the top of our industry by addressing these issues,” he says.
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