In 2014, our focus extended from meeting the expectations of customers, partners and the community to anticipating their future needs and developing products and processes to meet these needs.
MEETING FUTURE NEEDS
We know it’s important to understand the needs of our customers and partners. We are investing in new ways to gather insights about our customers and find innovative ways to improve customer service and value. This involves understanding what our customers need from us rather than simply focusing on what we can sell to them.
To help us gather customer insights, we are adopting a Human-Centred Design (HCD) process to accelerate innovation and create better and more meaningful solutions for our customers. HCD is an approach that begins with understanding customer needs to generate insights and identify opportunities, and uses a “test and learn” approach to identify new and better ways to meet these. During the year, we used HCD to inform several product changes in our businesses, and influence some important re-design of how we interact with our customers and partners:
- Australia Direct launched phase one of its multi-channel programme to deliver a consistent experience to customers no matter which device, or channel, they use to contact us or when they choose to do it. For example, NRMA Insurance customers can lodge motor claims start-to-finish using a smart-phone application and complete the process at the scene of an incident; and
- CGU launched an application to allow customers to claim and record important details after an incident occurs. The application guides users through recording incident details which are then shared immediately with the CGU claims team. For customers travelling overseas, the application also makes CGU’s 24/7 emergency assistance contact numbers easily accessible.
IAG places great importance on understanding and responding to our partners’ needs. During the year we made several improvements to make it easier for our partners, such as increasing straight-through processing and enhancing our digital capability.
We recognise that customers need different products at different times in their lives. To cater for our customers’ varied lifestyles, Australia Direct partnered with Cover-More to release a travel insurance product and in its first four months issued 12,000 international travel policies. In New Zealand, we rolled out a flexible policy for students needing cover for the academic year.
Connecting with customers
Throughout the year, more than 500 of our people travelled to one of our call centres to work with frontline operators and connect with our customers by listening in on live calls. Participants rated the sessions at an average of nearly nine out of 10 with all saying they left with deeper customer knowledge. The ongoing sessions are part of our work to bring our customers to the centre of our organisation and to help every employee, regardless of their role, to link their job with the experience of our customers.
STRENGTHENING OUR SUPPLY CHAIN
Our network of repairers is critical to how we deliver great outcomes for customers. During the year, we moved to strengthen this network by reducing the number of repairers we work with. This enabled us to provide certainty of volume to these repairers which helped us in turn deliver higher quality repairs at more competitive costs.
AFFORDABILITY OF INSURANCE
Trends such as increased exposure to severe weather events, wealth inequality and an ageing population have seen insurance affordability become a community-wide concern. During 2014, we extended our efforts to collaborate with the broader community on solutions to this complex issue.
We identified the segments where affordability is creating the most pressure and found low income earners, ageing people and families in high-risk natural disaster areas are most vulnerable.
We partnered with like-minded organisations, such as Good Shepherd Microfinance, Brotherhood of St. Laurence, Consumer Action Law Centre, Legal Aid NSW and Footscray & Wyndham Community Legal Centres, to explore the issue of insurance affordability and accessibility. Building on these insights we developed insurance affordability solutions to pilot in the market. After market testing, our goal is to develop and launch these solutions as products.
We also partnered with organisations to improve financial literacy and insurance education. For example, we financed a refresh of the Salvation Army’s Moneycare programme and helped add a general insurance component and we partnered with the Queensland Government in its disaster preparedness Get Ready campaign.
We continued to focus on the link between resilience and affordability in 2014. In addition to our work in the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience & Safer Communities, in North Queensland CGU began a project with Strata Unit Underwriters to provide free building risk assessments to strata owners. The project will highlight opportunities to improve building resilience to severe weather and enable premium reductions for customers – an important step in addressing strata insurance affordability in the region.
Explaining Insurance Changes
In New Zealand IAG’s online "Need2know" campaign addressed the shift from unspecified replacement home insurance policies to maximum specified sum insured policies. To support the awareness campaign our people went into communities to explain the changes and answer questions in libraries, Rotary Clubs, senior citizens’ clubs, local halls and on the radio.
