“It’s clear from a range of insight and experiences across the business that we need a more formal, rigorous and replicable approach for ensuring high-quality delivery of products and services to our customer and ongoing improvement. Whilst < client name redacted > has in its DNA a strong sense of customer service and empathy, perhaps it’s drifted a little down in priority given our heavy emphasis on growth in recent years” - CEO Report
Challenge
A review commissioned by the CEO concluded that while the organisation maintained a strong customer-focused culture, rapid growth had diluted the focus on service excellence and continuous improvement.
To address this, the organisation launched its 'Think Like the Customer' initiative, designed to establish a dedicated internal improvement capability and build momentum through the delivery of practical improvement projects.
Members of the Cinc team were engaged to help establish the organisation's new Quality Improvement Team, develop lean and process improvement capability, and support the delivery of pilot projects focused on improving customer outcomes.
Approach
The primary objective was capability building and knowledge transfer to the newly established Quality Improvement Team, while also introducing continuous improvement principles more broadly across the organisation.
This was delivered through a combination of formal training, coaching and hands-on participation in improvement projects.
A broad diagnostic was undertaken to identify the customer journeys and processes with the greatest potential impact on customer experience. Techniques included call demand analysis, call listening, complaints analysis, lapse analysis and Net Promoter Score (NPS) review.
Five pilot areas were selected:
Customer Onboarding and Early Lapse Management
Improving the experience of customers during their first six months and reducing avoidable policy lapses.
Manual Ancillary Claims Processing
Reducing processing delays, rework and operational effort.
Failure Demand Reduction
Identifying and eliminating root causes of high-volume avoidable contact within the contact centre.
Financial Month-End Close
Improving process efficiency and reducing effort within finance operations.
Policy Administration Processing
Removing waste and improving flow across policy administration activities.
The pilots were deliberately selected to deliver meaningful business outcomes while exposing the Quality Improvement Team to a broad range of operational environments, improvement challenges and Lean methodologies.
Feedback
“The training course was absolutely brilliant, one of the best I have attended in recent years. The course was well structured, relevant and extremely well presented with the use of slides to demonstrate world’s best practice, examples of our processes and opportunities for improvement”
Team members involved: Peter Campbell.
This engagement was delivered prior to the establishment of Cinc. The experience and results described reflect work personally delivered by the team members identified above.