Creating a memorable customer experience has been a crucial part of Safelite AutoGlass’s mission since 2008 – but in 2013, the nation’s leading provider of vehicle glass repair and replacement services launched a strategy that intensified its promise to always place customer front and center.
This keen strategy, called People Powered, Customer Driven, is why Safelite AutoGlass earned four awards on Monday during the inaugural Loyalty360 CX Awards ceremony as part of the 4th annual Loyalty360 Engagement & Experience Expo.
The Loyalty360 CX Award is given to brands that excel in several award categories. Safelite earned gold medals for creating a customer-centric customer experience, captivating brand messaging, and use of customer insights to create customer loyalty.
“Around 2008 we focused on putting our people first so that they could deliver customer delight, but we felt there was something still missing,” Renee Cacchillo, vice president of customer and brand strategies for Safelite, explained to Loyalty360. “We realized we needed to design strategies based on listening to our customers and the insights they provide – and that would make us truly customer driven.”
Safelite’s customer driven strategy aims to achieve extraordinary results by looking at its business through the eyes of the customer. The strategy is reinforced by four key goals: Listen and seek to understand customer pain points and learn through their experiences; focus and deploy resources where they deliver the greatest mutual business value; create and implement solutions for customers that differentiate them from their competitors; and delight to create loyal customers that will become brand advocates and super promoters.
Cacchillo said customer insight is the first element of Safelite’s customer driven strategy. The company aims to seek and understand customers’ pain points and learn through their experiences. Through predictive data modeling, text analytics, and pulse surveys, Safelite has embarked on several initiatives to create a superior customer experience.
For example, an interactive website was critical to reinforce Safelite’s promise to provide a streamlined experience for their customer. When it set out to rework the website, Cacchillo explained that the focus was on functionality. Safelite held focus groups and closely examined the former website to “see where customers fall out of the funnel and where they spend their time,” Cacchillo said.
The end result was a visually stunning – but also a simple website that takes the customer through every step of the process. “We wanted to bring the customer brand experience to life,” said Cacchillo. “We asked ourselves, ‘How do we communicate the brand and then how do we support the experience with video and pictures to help customers through the process?’”
By listening to Safelite employees, particularly their CSRs and technicians, Cacchillo explained how the company was able to create directives on the website and videos, to streamline Safelite’s process for customers, who today can complete a claim on the Safelite website in just three clicks
“Since the site went live, now we can look at what we want to change in a future,” Cacchillo said. “Evolution doesn’t really stop.”
Safelite’s approach has captured nationwide attention and it is regularly recognized for is People Powered, Customer Driven strategies in the form of national awards honoring outstanding customer service as well as workplace culture.
In recent years, Safelite’s employee engagement scores have been above average. Industry experts consider “best-in-class” to be 75% and Safelite reached 78% in 2013. And since 2007, Safelite sales have grown a whopping 85%.
Safelite’s goal is to be the natural choice for auto glass repair and replacement services in the U.S. and it plans to reach that goal by reinforcing its People Powered and Customer Driven culture.
“The idea is simple,” Cacchillo said. “Happy, engaged, and talented people create happy customers.”