BizCover has beaten the insurance industry NPS benchmark by 78 points in 2021, building on four straight years of growth in the customer loyalty measure.
The Australian insurtech achieved an NPS of +72 from more than 20,000 customer surveys for the year. Sales (+81) and Service (+76) were the two areas that performed the strongest, coinciding with strong customer retention rates and company growth.
This is far above the NPS industry benchmark which sits at -6 for the insurance sector in the last quarter of 2021, according to soon-to-be-released research from The Evolved Group.
The category of ‘broker services’ faired a little better (21.4) while ‘banking and financial services’ dropped nearly ten points (11.0) since the start of the pandemic [1].
“The consistently strong results we’ve experienced over the last 15 to 18 months has been a result of a sustained, holistic approach to our customer journey,” says Brad Hoyle, BizCover’s Manager of Operational Excellence.
“From getting our agents on that journey and building a customer culture to the various efficiencies gained through technology, we set our sights on being a cut above the rest, and we are achieving that.”
Taking the business world by storm in the early 2000s, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widely used customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement to indicate customer sentiment about a business.
A business’ NPS score is expressed in a number from -100 to 100; higher scores indicate that the company has a positive relationship with their customers while a negative score indicates the opposite.
“What we are seeing is our customers are loyal. And loyal customers remain customers for longer, cost less, purchase more and champion our brand through word of mouth,” says Hoyle.
While BizCover has consistently delivered better-than-average NPS results for several years, it has been the company’s planning towards its customer journey that has made it reach new heights.
“At BizCover, we want our team to be ‘customer fanatics’. Our goal is to make business insurance easy, so we were already doing slightly better than the rest of the insurance industry in terms of NPS results just because of our company ambitions. Still, we did have some problems to address,” says Hoyle.
Building a customer journey
To address these problems, BizCover’s leaders formulated a multi-pronged approach to improve across several areas.
We were pretty inefficient compared to where we are now,” says Holly Williams, BizCover’s Customer Care Manager who has been with the company for seven years.
“Our agents were busy, and some of our processes were suboptimal, which ultimately seeped down to our customers.”
The project began by analysing BizCover’s customer care agents. Williams says the journey had to start with agents because they are the face of the company.
“Happy agents leads to happy customers so we started off by utilising gamification as it made training and development fun and interesting. Our KPIs were also adjusted using this approach, which developed a customer-oriented culture that made us want to achieve our goals.”
Moving to an omnichannel system also vastly improved the team’s efficiency as it enabled cases to be more evenly distributed and prioritised among agents.
Holly says in about six months, the team went from around 400 outstanding cases and new support requests to about 50 at any given time.
“And because of those changes, our turnaround time was really fast with clients. Now, our feedback often consists of people saying ‘wow, that was so quick and easy’ because as soon as they are contacting us, they are getting a near real-time response.”
Removing manual processes
As a business that considers itself a fintech leader, BizCover had already implemented digital technologies such as automation into its platform.
So, when NPS results started to plateau, tech innovation was front of mind when looking to improve customer loyalty.
“We went through our systems to look at what our team does manually day-to-day. After that, we automated various manual processes that were a drain on productivity. That way, the team was accomplishing only the high-value complex work that only humans can do,” says Hoyle.
“We have also introduced Frankie, our AI chatbot that not only automates basic requests but captures consumer data that can personalise and deepen the customer experience.”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been another area that BizCover heavily invested in, implementing AI-powered speech analytics across customer calls.
“All of our sales calls are now QA’d via AI to ensure our customers receive the best possible experience and compliance is met. Implementing AI into our quality assurance processes added an additional layer of compliance whilst it also allows us to prioritise work items to our human QA team, massively boosting productivity,” says Hoyle.
More minor changes have also brought about a better experience for the platform’s customers.
“From email handlers to building our SMS capabilities, we focused on developing self-service. Now customers can make a payment or get their policy documents at 2 am if they want. We’ve made it really easy.”
What’s next
While the team at BizCover are happy with their sustained NPS results, this is by no means the end to BizCover’s quest for customer loyalty.
Brad says customer expectations have never been higher, so businesses must continually improve and find ways to ‘wow’ customers to stay ahead of the curve.
“What’s wowing customer’s today is going to be standard practice tomorrow, and customer loyalty is built over time,” he says. “While our early investments towards our customer journey are currently paying dividends, we must always keep our ear on the ground and look for future improvements.”
Brad says doubling down on BizCover’s current tech is the goal, as the company strives for deeper insights.
“The AI in our systems is constantly providing us with new ways of making our agents more efficient, and we are looking to employ more AI chatbots in different areas of the company,” he says.
“We are starting to do AI-driven customer sentiment analysis, running all of our NPS feedback through machine learning models to pull out insights we couldn’t see ourselves or identify trends that we as humans miss.”
While the insurance industry, struggling with pandemic uncertainty and a hardening market, has taken a hit in terms of customer loyalty, BizCover’s journey shows that it is possible to achieve customer loyalty in a tough sector.
“I think the underlying success of BizCover’s journey through some tough years stems from its fanatical approach to customer experience, advanced technological capabilities, and agility to implement meaningful change to the operational engine, often in reply to fast changing customer needs and economic events,” says Hoyle.
“As we move forward, we are primed to leverage these capabilities and take our customer experience to even loftier heights.”
