were offering their customers. CEO Helge Leiro Baastad decided that customer orientation should be a main strategic focus and a key competitive advantage for the firm.
A major challenge was a structural one. Gjensidige was organized as a chain of activities from product development to sales, with expert staff working in silos. This industrial model made it difficult to orient the silos to work together to deliver a unified experience to customers. Because Baastad wanted the change to be driven from the heart of the business, he asked marketing director Hans Hanevold and brand director Kim Wikan Barth to leave their jobs for two years to run a company-wide change program called “Extreme Customer Orientation.” Both Hanevold and Barth had long track records with the company, enjoyed the respect of their colleagues, and knew how to engage the organization.
Hanevold and Barth began by identifying change agents in every business unit within the company. The underlying principle was that customer orientation should be grown from the inside out rather than being driven by outside consultants, and that the activities should be funded by the business units themselves. To support these activities, they created a company-wide training program, then set about identifying what ultimately amounted to 183 concrete actions to improve customer experience. For some projects, the business units required specialist expertise to fulfil their ambitions, and service designers were hired to help design a better service experience.
Gjensidige embraced service design as a way to help bridge the gaps across the silos and develop their services in more customer-oriented ways. Service design methods helped them create a complete and shared picture of what really provides value to the customer, as well as processes to join up the experiences.
As a lead-up to their change program, Gjensidige employed service designers to challenge their thinking about what the ideal insurance service would look like. The initial task was very broad—Gjensidige wanted to find out about people’s behaviors, motivations, and relationships to insurance. It was important, however, not only to understand the mindset of Gjensidige’s customers, but also of staff.
The actuaries—the mathematicians and financial wizards who come up with the complex “products” on which insurance is based—belonged to the Product Group. The name of this department was a clue to the shift that was required in the company’s internal culture. What the company is really selling is a service. Customers cannot hold insurance in their hands, and their experience of their insurance policy is made up of the service interactions they have with the company. When customers buy a physical product, they can inspect it for build quality, flaws, or damage. It is much harder to do that with services, especially ones that are essentially a contract based on the chance of a future event, such as insurance. Many people buying insurance do not really know what they are buying, and only find out what is covered at the worst possible moment—when disaster strikes. This is not the time to begin haggling over contract details.
Consumer Insights
The approach taken in the Gjensidige project is an example of classic service design—insights research, workshops, service blueprinting, service proposition development, concept sketches and presentations, experience prototyping, testing, and delivery. A fairly small sample of users was involved in the research, but the research went deep. The design team visited and spoke to three people working in Gjensidige’s call centers and offices, as well as six customers, to look at both the delivery side and the recipient side of the service. To people used to working with larger data samples, nine people might not sound like enough, but Gjensidige already had a great deal of quantitative information. This information didn’t have the detail of the qualitative research needed for an innovation project, however. Quantitative methods are good for creating knowledge and understanding the field, but they are not very useful for translating knowledge into action and helping organizations do something with it. Qualitative studies are very good at bridging this gap.
Five different areas were researched with the participants: insurance in general, social aspects, choices, contact, and tools for staff. What Gjensidige and the service design team discovered were some important differences between what people say and what they do. Some of the insights that were uncovered are described below. Many are questions and needs, and one can see how this kind of research immediately gets the problem-solving juices flowing.
Trust
Insurance is built on trust. When customers pay their premiums, they trust that they will get value for money—and that the insurance company will still exist when they need it. But trust is very fragile. It takes some time to build up and is quickly broken. All the small glitches in delivery—letters sent to the wrong address, billing errors, problems with communication, customers having to repeat details multiple times—damage people’s trust in an insurance company. They wonder whether similar chaos happens behind the scenes. Fixing the small glitches can have a big impact on the level of trust.
Comparison and Purchasing Criteria
People say they make insurance purchasing decisions based on quality, but they find it hard to do this in reality. It is very difficult to compare what is inside different insurance policies and make a rational choice. People feel that insurance is not very transparent, especially with regards to quality, so it is easier to compare on price, because money is a fixed variable. This means designers cannot simply trust what customers say they want, but have to work smartly around price and quality issues.
Of course there is room for quality in the market, but with online price-comparison engines, the quality aspect of insurance has completely dropped out of the conversation with customers and all that is left is price. For customers, quality means, “Am I covered? Do I get a rental car when my car is being repaired? Am I actually covered for the things I think should be covered?”
With most other services and products, customers can easily see the differences between the premium version and something cheaper, but not with insurance. Customers are really asking what quality means—that is, the difference between the premium and budget products. This raises many other questions, such as what is actually covered and when, how much are the out-of-pocket expenses, and so on. It soon becomes complicated.
As with much service design, the challenge is to make the invisible visible, or to make the right things visible and get rid of the noise in the rest of the offering. In the Gjensidige project, then, one of the key challenges was to develop a service proposition that eliminated price as the key deciding factor.
Expectations
People expect an insurance payout when something happens, and they expect help. This is another issue related to quality. Customers who buy a cheap insurance product get money but will not get much help, whereas Gjensidige has a very good system for taking care of people when something happens. For example, when customers have damage to a car, they just take it in for evaluation and Gjensidige issues a rental car and takes care of everything else. This fact needed to be made visible as part of the service proposition.
Employment and Public Benefits
Gjensidige believe they provide all the insurance people might need, but in Norway many people are also covered by some kind of insurance from their employer or union. It is very difficult for people to tell whether they are covered because there is no way for them to see all of this information in one view, all in one place. The challenge is to achieve this in a transparent and trustworthy way for customers.
Social and Cultural Interactions
Many invisible social touchpoints affect the entire service experience. The police, for example, might give insurance advice by saying, “Oh, your cell phone was stolen? Don’t even bother contacting your insurance company.” Customers who contact Gjensidige do in fact receive a new phone, but people tend to trust that the police