In Part I of Loyalty360’s Mark Johnson’s interview with Generali Global Assistance’s Paige Schaffer, CEO of Global Identity and Cyber Protection, Schaffer spoke about disruptions in areas of fraud and an introduction to Generali Global Assistance and the Europ Assistance Group.
In Part II, Schaffer discusses how Generali Global Assistance is looking at technology, what is next on its roadmap, and the one question she would ask another competitor or brand about customer loyalty.
What technologies do you offer to address clients’ needs in these disruptive times?
A big part of our focus is giving our clients’ customers tools that empower them to have more control over their identity. One example of that is our Identity Theft Alert, which tracks inappropriate use of customers’ personal information via our ID Wallet. We also use multiple security vendors to help track this information and then alert the user of any discovered inappropriate activity. We have multi-channel notification; we currently allow users to receive notifications via SMS and e-mail and are going to extend it out further to channels like IoT devices in the coming months.
Most recently, we launched a new service called Email Health Check, which allows the user to see if their email address(es) have been compromised in a data breach. Customers can also use the tool at their leisure and whenever it makes sense for them. It’s powerful to suddenly see if your email address has been compromised, as well as the exposed passwords associated with the email address. We recognize that it’s good for consumers to have tools like that.
I mentioned that education is critical, so we have a Breach Catalog. This tool allows users to review current breaches as well as tag companies or industries they wish to track and be informed on.
Something we’re very excited about is ID Score, which allows users to evaluate their current ID threat level. It evaluates customers’ identity risk level against known best practices and compares them against others in our database. Users are provided with best practices and regular communications to allow the user the opportunity to improve their ID Score. This feature is all about increasing positive customer engagement touchpoints, which we know is critical to our partners.
One of the Top 4 Trends/Topics Brand Members have asked Loyalty360 to focus on in 2020 is personalization, segmentation, and cadence management. How are you looking at personalization, segmentation, and cadence management?
We’re seeking to be an aggregator and evaluator for security vendors and data. We take multiple sources of data, compare it for the customers, and then serve this information to them. Most companies in the identity protection industry tend to deliver what they find out on the internet or the web – it’s merely a passthrough to the customer. Our goal is to take all of that data and match it against our users’ needs and concerns, serve this information, and try to explain it in a way that makes sense for them to bring real personal value.
Because we’re a B2B2C provider, we’re often the face of our clients’ brand, and as such, we must ensure we’re supplying the highest level of service and positively impacting their brand reputation. More often than not these days, high-quality service has to include personalization, segmentation, and cadence management. That must be considered in all that we do, from determining the most appropriate message, frequency, and content, to including language in every communication the importance customers have in speaking to the same Resolution Specialist, so they don’t need to repeatedly explain the details of their identity theft case to a different person.
Is it a better experience to get six or seven alerts over two days related to the same activities that would cause panic for the customer, or to receive one communication that makes an intelligent analysis of those alerts, and, perhaps, asks if the customer is in the process of buying a home based on the types of alerts they’re receiving?
How can your offering/expertise help brands in this area?
It boils down to how we engage the customer in our communications, as well as giving them the ability to receive personalized assistance and intelligent analytics based on how they use the site and what’s important to them. It’s a little bit different in that we represent our clients and are typically the face of their brand. We don’t want to harm that and we want only to bring good. We can do that by offering a valuable suite of products, but also by educating our clients on how their consumers are behaving in a non-threatening, non-privacy evading way. We’re getting deeper into data analytics and trying to personalize the experience for each customer, asking them questions that are relevant to them to try to craft a threat score that applies to them, not just a formula applicable to everyone that uses the portal. It’s the finetuning and intelligence that sits behind the technical tools that enables us to craft a story for each of our customers – and that bodes well on the brand and retention side of it too.
What is next on your roadmap and timeline?
We’ve got some cool proprietary product innovations in the works, but we don’t want to give away the store just yet. However, I will share we are all about customer engagement and supplying meaningful value to the end-user. As mentioned, we’re doing a lot of in-depth work on data analytics for our clients so they can learn more about their customer base and what’s important to them identity and cyber protection wise, allowing them to help their customers in a more meaningful and valuable way.
As I mentioned earlier, our services are proactively protective in a world where identity and cyber fraud is topical. Our data intelligence, consumer engagement initiatives, and 24/7 touchpoints with our customers promote trust and care. We’re a highly specialized expert where identity and cyber protection are concerned, and the core DNA of our global group of businesses is all about helping people, giving us a real
care mentality. We keep that with us in everything we do, not only with the customer, but for the clients that service them as well.
If you could ask a competitor or brand one question about customer loyalty, what would it be?
As consumer choice and access increase, it can almost feel like consumers have little reason to remain loyal to any one brand, so my question would be, how do you address that? It comes down to making sure you’re offering things that genuinely represent valuable solutions to your customers, that you recognize and are solving real problems better than any of your competitors. Other brands can easily replicate incentives like points and free giveaways, but they often won’t make the customer feel any more loyal if the actual service being supplied is not useful or is managed poorly. Customers, in my mind, should feel better about doing business with you, and that, more than anything else, will likely ensure that they return.