Conflicting KPIs threaten customer-first initiatives: Google

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Insurers must align KPIs (key performance indicators) and eliminate competing interests between departments if customer-centricity initiatives are to succeed, said Cameron Haynes, Senior Industry Analyst at Google.

“Aligning everyone across the business to profitability, revenue, or whatever your business’s objective is, is crucial if you’re going to have a truly customer centric organisation,” Haynes said.

Speaking at FST’s Future of Insurance conference, Haynes urged insurers to reduce conflicting incentive schemes that fuel unnecessary rivalries between customer service terms.

He was particularly critical of the competing interests – often impelled by upper management – that see online service teams and contact centre staff targeting one another’s customer share, ultimately to the detriment of the customer interaction.

“We’ve seen digital teams … [that] make their phone number hard to find on the website so they can maximise online start quotes, because they don’t want the call centre taking all those valuable quotes away from then,” Haynes said.

Contact centre teams can be similarly tempted to poach customer quotes from online service teams.

For example, customers – merely seeking assistance from a customer service representative – will often be compelled by service staff to scrap incomplete quotes obtained online and then repeat the process anew over the phone, Haynes said.

“When [a customer] gives the quote number of the quote [they] started online, the customer service representative [will often say] ‘don’t worry about that, let’s start a new one,’ because that customer service representative is KPI’d on the start quote,” he said.

According to Haynes, this process not only negatively impacts the customer journey, whilst cannibalising the same customer share, but also reduces the number of completed quotes attributable to each service channel, thereby skewing customer interaction data.