Kim Delaney, 2nd Vice President, Retirement Solutions Business Service and Operational Excellence, The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, told Loyalty360 that Guardian Retirement Solutions has a simple, yet powerful goal: Building lasting customer relationships.
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).
“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,” Delaney explained. “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.”
Besides quarterly or annual surveys, Delaney said her company collects customer feedback daily and offers 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.”
Delaney believes Guardian Retirement Solutions offer a unique experience.
“One key feature is our ‘full circle’ process in which we close the loop with the customer regarding their feedback,” she said. “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.”
Too often, Delaney said, contact 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,” she explained. “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.”
Delaney explained that Guardian Life Insurance measures effectiveness through metrics such as customer retention, the customers’ increased investment in their existing product or addition of new products, brand advocacy, and referrals.
“To proactively manage the customer relationship, we measure as much as we can about the customer experience,” she said. “Some key metrics include Net Promoter (NPS), customer satisfaction, one contact resolution, willingness to help, and ease of doing business.”