Customer experience review improves agent communications for mutual insurance company

Client background

The client is a mutual insurance company with approximately $300 million in written premiums, focused on protecting families and businesses against the financial challenges resulting from death, disability or retirement. They have about 400 employees.

The business challenge

The client was looking to improve their customers’ overall experience and chose to start with one of the key customer groups, their agents. However, they did not have a deeper level understanding or documentation of the end-to-end agent experience. The client team was missing critical knowledge sharing given their limited understanding of the agent experience and related processes. The client needed more direct contact with their agents, increased collaboration and a better understanding of workflows in order to achieve faster and more reliable service for their agents.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly conducted a customer experience review to understand and document key areas of the agent experience. Several agent journeys were selected for documentation including the application and customer service processes. Once the journeys were reviewed and documented, recommendations were made for improvements. Viewing agents as a key customer group was an important part of the process, as steps evaluated in the agent journeys and process flows helped to determine opportunities for improvement to the overall agent experience.

The results of the review included:

• Four intricate, multi-step agent journey maps
• Communication development process map, to help determine where collaboration could be increased and approval processes could be streamlined
• Identified the need for:
  - A sales capability assessment to identify additional technology, resources and processes to further advance sales capabilities
  - A dedicated agent training platform
  - Conducting product innovation workshops with agents
  - A chat function to reduce strain on call center and serve agent needs faster

Overall, the client found significant value in reviewing the detailed agent journey maps. Through this examination, they were able to better understand the agents' efforts, experiences and effectively identify existing pain points. Agent interactions, engagement and overall journey sentiment are important factors in the client's growth, and the implementation of these process improvements should help continue that growth in the future.