Guardian Retirement Solutions was recently recognized by the International Customer Management Institute for employing fresh tactics to improve both the customer and agent experience within the Annuity and 401(k) marketplace.
Guardian Retirement Solutions refers to the administrative support services, including participant recordkeeping as well as marketing, enrollment, and educational materials, provided by the Guardian Insurance & Annuity Company, Inc. (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America).
Kim Delaney, 2nd Vice President, Retirement Solutions Business Service and Operational Excellence, The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, participated in a fascinating interview with Loyalty360 to discuss the award, customer loyalty, metrics to measure it, and the role of technology.
How did this award-winning solution come to be and how does it work?
Delaney: The philosophy that drives the Guardian Retirement Solutions® Customer Experience Program is to build relationships with our customers, not just to provide a service by processing their request or directing them to self-service. To do this, we invest a lot of time in collecting information about our customers’ 
needs. Our program leverages the Six Sigma methodology to engineer a Customer Experience program that measures both Active (solicited customer feedback) and Passive (customer contacts & behavior) data, together known as “Voice of the Customer.” Our program then employs multivariate statistical analysis to analyze relationships between feedback, behavior, operational service metrics, and customer demographic data to shape how we interact with customers.
In addition to quarterly or annual surveys, we collect customer feedback daily and offer feedback mechanisms at every chance we get to ensure we have a constant pulse on our customers’ experience. This customer feedback, along with other customer data, is continually run through rigorous statistical analysis to produce daily, weekly, and monthly reports. This constant flow of information enables us to build a relationship with the customer by not only understanding their current needs, but more importantly by enabling us to proactively anticipate their needs and meet those needs before the customer even has to ask.
What’s unique for your customers?
Delaney: We believe we offer a unique experience to our customers via several different aspects of our program that highlight our genuine focus on the customers’ experience. One key feature is our “full circle” process in which we close the loop with the customer regarding their feedback. It is not uncommon in any industry for a customer to submit their feedback either on a website, via survey, or on the phone and never hear from the company again. In Guardian Retirement Solutions, we reach out to the customer to let them know we heard their feedback and we tell them what we are doing to make their experience better.
Another example of how we differentiate ourselves from many other businesses is in our approach to handling customer contact that comes in via our call center. Too frequently call centers focus on keeping calls within a certain time limit and lowering call volume by driving customers to interact with technology instead of an associate. Although we understand how valuable our clients’ time is and how customers value the “self–service” environment provided by the web, we also know that when it comes to something as critical as managing Retirement options, customers want the option to talk to a real person. In 
response to this need, we have streamlined our interactive voice response (IVR) to make it easy for our clients to reach a representative directly. We also realize that some customers may want a quick answer, while others may want someone to take time and explain things at a slower pace. As a result, our representatives are never measured on speed of call. Instead, they are measured on their ability to meet the customer’s needs as defined directly by our customers in their satisfaction surveys and on their ability to do so in one call.
What does this award mean for your company?
Delaney: Achieving the BEST QA/Customer Experience Program Award from the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) for employing fresh tactics to improve customer experience is a significant accomplishment! As a mutual company, Guardian answers to our customers, not stockholders, and we take great pride in deepening our customer and consumer understanding through multi-channel interactions. Any time an organization like the ICMI, recognizes our efforts it is a positive reinforcement that our customer experience program is leading edge, and we are realizing our vision.
How do you define loyalty, what does it mean to your organization, and how has it changed in recent years?
Delaney: To Guardian Retirement Solutions, customer loyalty is something we believe we need to earn. It means developing a relationship with our customers that survives competitive, economic, and environmental challenges. From a business viewpoint we measure the obvious benefits of achieving customer loyalty–retention, brand advocacy, referrals, and price insensitivity. However, we know that a good customer experience leads to achieving loyalty, so we measure, analyze, and react to the Voice of the Customer throughout customer life cycle with Guardian to ensure a quality customer experience. Therefore, our Customer Experience and Loyalty programs go hand-in-hand.
What is the scope and investment?
Delaney: Guardian Retirement Solutions provides our customers with many channels of communication, all of which we analyze to see a full picture of the 
customer experience. The scope of our program also includes translating the data into actionable steps, implementing new or revising existing products or services in response to feedback, and monitoring customer feedback to ensure the actions met the customer need. This requires a baseline of meaningful metrics that you can tie to the bottom line such as retention, increased investment, and cross sell.
In order for this program to work well, we have invested in tools to capture and analyze customer feedback, the appropriate resources to guide and interpret the results, and the tools/resources to react to the results via process/technology or service improvements.
What group runs it within your organization? Who does it report to?
Delaney: In Guardian Retirement Solutions, the program is run by our Customer Experience and Quality Department, which reports in to the Vice President of Operational Excellence, with a direct line to the Senior Leadership Team.
How has the strategy and focus changed in recent years?
Delaney: We formally started a Voice of the Customer program in 2009 when we introduced Six Sigma as a process improvement methodology. We started by expanding our surveys to solicit feedback at each customer contact and formally started analyzing our passive customer behaviors. In 2010, we introduced a multivariate statistical analysis process to identify causal relationships and organize customer data to facilitate more robust analysis. In 2011, we engaged J.D. Power with the intention of having this internationally-known consumer rating agency audit our service by surveying our customers directly and by assessing our internal procedures, measures, and associates. We were excited to incorporate their ideas into our service model but were unexpectedly thrilled to achieve the coveted recognition of being a J.D. Power Certified Call Center delivering an “Outstanding Customer Experience” for three consecutive years. As a result, we have incorporated J.D. Power certification requirements into our strategic plan to ensure we always have the objective feedback of our customers and the insight of the most advanced customer satisfaction research available today. Over the past three years we have expanded our program to include analysis of the customers’ experience over the life cycle, customer perception, assets at risk, word of mouth impact, and employee vs. customer engagement, but we are not done yet! We see this program as a continually evolving and improving.
What are the best opportunities you see in the next two years?
Delaney: We are currently working toward enhancements of our program in a few of our channels. In the call center, we are working toward voice analytics to add an independent, un-bias assessment of the quality of the customer call experience based on the tone and commentary of the customer. Our goal is to use the results to alleviate potential survey fatigue and add more dimensions to our analysis.
On the web, we are working toward expanding our ability to recreate the customer’s experience on our site to provide faster and easier solutions to web-based problems.
We are also exploring the impacts of social media on customer experience and see this as an opportunity to find the right balance of using these applications in a meaningful way for our customers.
How do you measure effectiveness? What metrics are used?
Delaney: We measure effectiveness through metrics such as customer retention, the customers’ increased investment in their existing product or addition of new products, brand advocacy, and referrals. In order to proactively manage the customer relationship, we measure as much as we can about the customer experience. Some key metrics include Net Promoter (NPS), Customer Satisfaction, One Contact Resolution, Willingness to Help, Ease of Doing Business, and many more.
How do you keep up with trends, technologies, and direction?
Delaney: As we have done with J.D. Power and the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), Guardian Retirement Solutions will continue to seek the insights and guidance of customer experts to ensure we are maintaining an objective focus on our customer’s needs. We also ensure that key staff in our Customer Experience Department attends relevant training and industry events. For example, we participated in a pilot of J.D. Power’s new Contact Center Certification to better understand the required integration across the different customer channels, and this past year associates completed Net Promoter Training and Certification with SatMetrix.