Dazzling customers through Proactive Servicing

Pro-active servicing in the UK

Innovation presentation

Through development and optimisation of existing technology, we’ve delivered an innovative initiative that’s enabled us to proactively contact our customers when we know that something has gone wrong with their service, before they even realise it themselves. As a result, we’ve significantly enhanced our customer experience, increased our brand loyalty and driven an impressive reduction in lapse rates, at minimal cost the business.

Vitality have a completely unique proposition that makes us ‘positively different’ from other insurers both in the UK and worldwide. With innovation embedded into our core, we continually inspire and challenge our leadership to bring new, exciting ideas to the table, to improve our customers’ satisfaction and our business as a whole. This initiative demonstrates how we took a business-wide collaborative approach to further set us apart from the market.

Enhancements to existing technology has enabled us to gain a holistic view of our customers’ journeys - understanding their experience in real time, proactively identifying potential difficulties and escalating issues rapidly so that our Operations can intervene quickly. The end result is a seamless service that dazzles our customers through innovation.

Proactive servicing has proven to be successful in fulfilling what we set out to achieve, so much so that we’re now embedding it into all new and existing processes across the business. We’re now contacting up to 3,000 customers each month to help them engage with Vitality. This has led to a notable increase in our customer retention rate, in turn significantly increasing our overall revenue.

Uniqueness of the project

Typically customer service is reactive. What’s unique about our proactive service recovery approach, is that not only does it allow us to prevent dissatisfaction, but it gives us an opportunity to further enhance relationships with our customers, build their trust and improve customer loyalty.

To identify existing customer ‘pain points’, we mapped our customers’ journeys through the Vitality Programme and pinpointed potential failure points. Using a collaborative approach with experts across the business, we were then able to create several new and bespoke solutions, turning potential ‘failure demand’ into an opportunity to dazzle our customers.

To give you an example of this in action, a key area that we’ve implemented proactive servicing for is within our cinema reward benefit - we know from our existing data, that the point at which the customer generates their cinema code is most often the same day they plan on going to the cinema. So if a code for the customer’s free ticket fails to generate, this can really impact their experience, especially for customers who may be letting their children down if the code hasn’t worked. As part of our initiative, we’ve now set up a process to capture failed cinema code generations with hourly reporting, so that we can proactively contact the customer in the event of an issue and provide them with the code that they need to go to the cinema, as they planned.

Furthermore, we’ve recently adapted this process to cover our new partner ‘Rakuten TV’, enabling members to be rewarded with movies in the safety of their own home, during the global Covid 19 pandemic, allowing a degree of normality for customer during these unprecedented times. An innovative solution delivered to our customers in the comfort and safety of their own homes.

This is just one example out of a total of 16 new bespoke implementations, keeping our customers at the heart of what we’re doing by recognising their requirements and modifying our approach accordingly. Added together, the outcome of these implementations delivers a powerful and unique customer experience.

Like everything we do at Vitality, the way that we proactively service our customers supports our shared service business model and proposition. Internal research has shown that when a Vitality customer experiences an issue where there is difficulty in utilising their rewards, in most cases it leads to them disengaging with our programme. By introducing proactive servicing, not only are we preventing member disengagement, but we are actively encouraging our members to work towards a healthier and happier lifestyle.

The Reason Behind

Our core purpose is to ‘make people healthier and to enhance and protect their lives’ – this has led to the delivery of our ‘shared service’ model, based on scientifically proven principles of behavioural economics. This model involves incentivising customers for healthy behaviour, which helps them to take a more active role in managing their wellbeing and develop healthy, long-term habits.

With the rate at which the health and fitness industry is evolving Vitality have to be fast-paced and innovative in what we do, to keep our proposition relevant for our customers.

In order to continually drive innovative thinking throughout the business, we regularly set our leaders with new challenges to stimulate their natural creativity. At our 2019 annual leadership conference ‘Inspiring Excellence’, a challenge was given to our senior leadership team to create a new, innovative way of dazzling our customers. The challenge was to be completed in small teams, and set with only two objectives; it had to improve customer satisfaction and it had to enhance the business.

Four leaders came together from various areas within our business and the concept of their initiative came from the shared view that they wanted to overcome the following challenges:

1) We wanted to ensure that all members who faced challenges with our products received the same great service - that nobody was left behind and that they didn’t have to contact us to get their issues resolved

2) Our Vitality Programme Servicing Team were consistently receiving the highest volume of demand from customers, often these interactions would relate to members facing issues with accessing the benefits available as part of their Vitality membership. With our entire proposition being centred on rewarding our members for their healthy activities; if these rewards are achieved but unavailable, naturally this can cause frustration for customers and disengagement with our programme

As such, their initiative would involve merging these two elements and creating a business process for proactive service recovery. The initiative was then presented to our Executive committee through the ‘Inspiring Excellence’ programme, where it went on to win and receive the full backing of the business.

It was at this stage that the initiative started to take form and we set our objectives - to improve customer experience and sentiment, consequently improving our lapse rates - we know that our customers that rate us an NPS of 1 to 5 are 7 times more likely to lapse than those that rate us a 9 or 10.

Results

We already had the tools, expertise and people in place to kick this initiative off which meant that other than project resource costs and Operational cost to service, there were no heavy financial implications to the business to really bring this winning idea to life.

Since the project launched we’ve consistently seen remarkable results – our overall customer satisfaction and loyalty has been demonstrated through better retention of customers and consequently, a significant increase in our overall revenue.

We’ve also tracking towards an annual FTE saving of £70k and have even made improvements in our ENPS, implying that our staff are happier because they’re now able to be proactive and give a better service to our customers.

In January of this year, we’re proud to share that we were awarded with first place overall for our servicing channels in the Top 50 Companies for Customer Service. In addition to this we received recognition across three categories in the UK Customer Experience Awards 2019, which included best customer-centric culture.