A customer-centric culture is something that every company strives for, but some stand above the rest in terms of keeping the consumer in mind with every business decision. The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America proved itself as one such company by earning Platinum honors in the Most Customer-centric Culture category at the Loyalty360 CX Awards, presented as part of the 2015 Engagement and Experience Expo.
Kimberly Delaney, 2nd VP of Operations, Business Services, and Retirement Solutions at Guardian, presented for the company at the “Meet the Finalists” session prior to the awards ceremony.
To create a customer-centric culture, Guardian makes use of both active and passive VoC. Active feedback comes via traditional surveying channels, while passive insight is based on more subtle customer behavior.
“We do try to monitor all customer behavior,” Delaney said. “We look at what their preferences are, why they’re calling us, and why they’re visiting our website, among other things. We incorporate that into our process as well so that we can understand what they’re experiencing.”
Even with the CX measures Guardian has put in place over the past several years, Delaney said that the company still found itself coming up short.
“Even with all the time we spent on things like VoC, personas, and journey mapping, we felt like something was still missing,” Delaney explained. “We weren’t making the personal connection that we wanted. We needed to stop thinking of the customer as ‘the customer,’ and start thinking of them as ourselves.”
The company went so far as to hand out mirrors to employees, instructing them to look in the mirror whenever they faced a decision that affected the customer and ask, “How would I feel about this change as the customer?”
What’s more, Delaney said the call center had been focused on production metrics, which now have been elevated to performance objectives.
“You can get lost in the data, but we have to listen to the customers,” Delaney said.
The exercise, Delaney said, went a long way in changing how the company approached CX. Where the customers may have once been viewed as data points on a graph, employees were now viewing them for the stories they had to share and the needs that Guardian could fill. This is the core of Guardian’s commitment to customer-centricity, and is a big reason why the company was recognized as the Loyalty360 CX Award Platinum winner.