Customer orientation embedded throughout the organization

The starting point

It’s the same story every year: As autumn approaches, health insurance companies in Switzerland begin campaigning to win over new customers. This presents a significant challenge, even for the health insurance provider Sympany. Though several departments within the company are dedicated to addressing the needs of existing customers, there was no customer retention program in place. Preliminary analyses of their customer orientation signaled a need to act.

Our assignment

The “Customer Retention Initiative” was created in order to develop a customer loyalty and care concept. bruhnpartner was invited to manage the overall project as well as take the operative lead on several partial projects.

Our goals:

• Developing a better understanding of the customer - The company and especially individual departments know too little about customers, their needs, and what drives their actions.
• Reorganizing the customer interface - Process and system breakdowns prevent optimal customer care.
• Enhancing the emotional element of customer interaction - The customer interactions and customer perceptions are too impersonal.
• Culture change - The behavior of employees and managers lacked customer orientation.

Implementation

The project was structured into four subprojects, each with a project leader and interface partners to relevant departments.

Systematic structuring and institutional standardization of customer analyses

The goal of this subproject was to gain better understanding of customer behavior and needs in order to derive relevant insights and develop effective measures.

Measures taken: Comprehensive analysis of customer feedback and complaints, development of use case models delineating the drivers of customers likely to leave the provider, establishment of a new customer analytics department.

Qualitative improvements in customer service

The goal was to ensure better customer service quality overall by improving internal processes and organization.

Measures taken: Conducting customer journey workshops for critical customer events, revising the employee training concepts, and reorganizing customer service.

Increased emotionalization of brand value proposition and service promise

The goal was to define a clear brand value proposition and service promise – and to make these tangible and perceptible to the customer.

Measures taken: ​ Streamlining and emotionalizing the brand value proposition, redesigning the website and other important communications tools.

Embedding customer orientation in the company culture

The goal was to align the fundamental mindset of employees and managers with the company’s customer focus strategy.

Measures taken: Increased involvement and activation of employees through “Change Challenges”, increased communications on the topic across multiple internal channels and in various formats, for example: collaboratively created comics.