insurance customer service case study

• Implementation
• Integration
• Optimization
• Wealth & Asset Management
• Banking and Credit Unions
• Consumer Goods and Retail
• Case Studies

A Customer Experience Case Study: Lemonade

RevOps , or revenue operations, is a strategy for businesses to align revenue-enhancing teams and activities while improving the customer journey. When discussing RevOps, the emphasis is usually on overcoming silos and having departments such as marketing, sales, and customer service working seamlessly. However, it's equally beneficial from the customer's point of view. The insurance company Lemonade is an instructive case study to illustrate best practices for optimizing the customer experience.

How Lemonade is Disrupting the Insurance Industry

Lemonade is an innovative insurance company, founded in 2015, that offers products such as homeowners, renters, life, and pet insurance. Lemonade has similar services as other insurance companies but has radically changed the customer experience. Here are some features that set Lemonade apart.

• • Strong branding. Lemonade has carved out a distinct niche for itself. Clearly targeted towards tech-savvy younger customers, it promises "Insurance built for the 21st century."
• • Personalized service. One of the qualities that distinguish Lemonade from other insurance companies is the level of personalized service. Maya, the company's chatbot, makes it easy for website visitors to get information and sign up. Maya takes visitors through a questionnaire that guides them to the most appropriate services and provides quick quotes. Another chatbot, named Jim, handles payouts.
• • Flat fee. Pricing is often confusing for insurance customers. Lemonade also  appeals to millennials  and other younger customers, who tend to have less experience with insurance policies. The company takes a flat fee of 20% from their customers' premiums, which is simple and straightforward. As they point out, their fee structure also eliminates a conflict of interest with customers. The flat rate, combined with their Giveback program (see below), means that Lemonade doesn't lose money by paying claims.
• • Giveback program. When customers sign up for insurance, they choose a nonprofit to support. At the end of the year, any unclaimed money from an account is donated to the nonprofit.   Lemonade Giveback   provides customers with the satisfaction that they're performing a social good, something that's extremely relevant to millennials. A  Deloitte Global Millennial Survey  revealed that 42% of millennials would start patronizing a business with a positive impact on society, while 38% would stop supporting a business with a negative impact.

A Data-Driven Approach

Source: Lemonade is disrupting insurance. The incumbents will have to respond Lemonade vs Traditional Insurance Companies: Customer Experience

Lemonade claims that it  collects 100x more data points per customer  compared to other companies. In a blog post, Lemonade describes how collecting and studying data are helping to  improve its loss ratio . This is the ratio of losses to premiums. As the article explains, a very high loss ratio isn't sustainable for an insurance company, while a very low one is profitable for the business but not good for customers. Lemonade's system of charging a flat rate and donating leftover funds to charity allows it to maintain a stable loss ratio.

One of Lemonade's taglines is to turn insurance "from a necessary evil to a social good." The Giveback program plays a big role in this. But what does this really mean for the average customer? Let's explore if (or how) the customer experience differs with Lemonade when compared to traditional insurance companies.

Do Everything Online

At a time when  73% of millennials prefer to shop online  using their phones (the figures are 2x higher for Zoomers, or Generation Z), Lemonade has perfectly tapped into this target market. The traditional process for getting insurance information requires the user to contact an agent, fill out a form, and wait for a quote. With Lemonade, the process is streamlined to be much faster and more convenient. The system's built-in AI (Maya the chatbot) provides personalized service without the user having to talk to a live agent.

What really sets Lemonade's customer service apart is the way it seamlessly transitions customers from one function to another. A new user is presented with information tailored to their buyer persona as they see comparisons of data so they can choose the best service. They can just as easily access claims processing when needed. All of this is automated, without the need to wait on hold or fill out complicated forms.

For a thorough review of the UX advantages of Lemonade's landing page, see  A UX Review of Lemonade Insurance in Less Than 5 Minutes .

Image Source: Lemonade

Fast Payments

Another distinctive customer experience feature of Lemonade is guaranteeing fast payments without any paperwork. As with the application process, customers can complete everything online. Claims are approved in seconds.

Easy to Switch

Lemonade targets customers who already have insurance as well as people buying it for the first time. Their "Check Prices and Switch" guides users through the process. As with other tasks on the site, Maya the chatbot guides users through a series of questions to highlight the advantages of switching to Lemonade.

Mobile Apps

Speed and convenience are supported by mobile apps that customers can download. Customers can set up and manage their policies on their mobile devices.

Active on Social Media

Another way Lemonade taps into its millennial customers is by providing news and policy information on social media. Their twitter account  is frequently updated. They're also active on Facebook and Instagram. Social posts aren't simply ads for insurance, but links to news items and timely blog posts.

Lemonade posts stories that are educational and helpful to its audience. For example,  a recent post addresses concerns that renters may have about eviction and suggests resources to help. This type of post isn't directly related to Lemonade's services, but it establishes them as a useful source of information.

What Lemonade Has Accomplished

Is Lemonade actually disrupting insurance and stealing customers from more established companies? The Motley Fool, in the article,  Can Lemonade Disrupt the Insurance Market?  shares some impressive facts.

• • While 50% of renters are under 30, only 37% get renter's insurance. Lemonade is targeting this largely untapped market.
• • Customers who signed up with Lemonade three years ago have increased their spending on renter's insurance by 56%.
• • Between 2017 and 2019, Lemonade increased the number of premiums sold from $9 million to $16 million.

While the article goes on to question whether Lemonade can succeed at converting older and more affluent customers, in our opinion this innovative model will prove to be a clear competitive advantage for Lemonade. 

Lessons From Lemonade

Here are some lessons that businesses in any sector can take from Lemonade.

• • Long-standing products and services can be marketed in a new and fresh way.
• • Target specific demographics (e.g. Lemonade targets millennials and renters).
• • Today's customers appreciate speed and efficiency.
• • Provide simple and personalized services. AI tools such as chatbots can help improve the customer experience.
• • Use automation tools to collect and analyze data.

Related Blog

Case Study: FinServ Company Increased Sales Effectiveness

A Customer Experience Case Study: Wealthsimple

Case Study: ShipHero Scales with Learners.ai

to receive more sales insights, analysis, and perspectives from Learners.ai

The growth engine: Superior customer experience in insurance

The difference between great and poor customer service has always been clear, and businesses on the wrong end of this spectrum usually pay a price. This is as true for insurance as it is for any other customer-facing business. Today, the consequences of subpar service are amplified by the speed and reach of social media. One poorly handled claim, one mistake captured on a smart phone, can escalate quickly into a brand-damaging crisis. This is just one reason firms across all industries should increase their focus on providing great customer experience.

Providing a strong customer experience is not just about reducing the risk of customer service mishaps. It is increasingly a way for companies in competitive markets to distinguish their brands. The airline industry is a good point of comparison with insurance. Both are highly regulated and highly competitive, and carriers in both industries find it increasingly difficult to differentiate their products without lowering prices. Airlines all use the same planes, serve similar food, and match prices. Personal lines insurance is becoming similarly transparent. Due to the Internet, aggregators, and social media, shoppers know more than ever about coverage, prices, and services.

China insurance: How insurers can improve customer experience where it matters

A number of airlines now see customer service as one of the few remaining ways to stand out from the crowd and are reaping the benefits. The three US airlines with the highest customer satisfaction ratings have profits that are way above the industry average. Another major carrier is raising prices—moderately—on the expectation that customers will pay more for great on-time stats and more reliable baggage-handling.

Can insurers follow this example and avoid competing on price until profits are shaved to zero? McKinsey’s global research across industries shows that improving the customer experience can do far more to drive profitable growth than raising advertising spending or lowering prices. Some executives may still see insurance as a low-engagement, disintermediated category, but analytics prove that in an industry where profits are highly concentrated, leading carriers are delivering customer experiences that inspire loyalty and attract new customers frustrated by their experiences with their current carriers.

For example, in the past five years, US auto insurance carriers that have provided customers with consistently best-in-class experiences have generated two to four times more growth in new business and about 30 percent higher profitability than firms with an inconsistent customer focus, in part because satisfied customers are 80 percent more likely to renew their policies than unsatisfied customers (Exhibit 1).

On the path to profitable growth

Delivering a superior customer experience takes more than developing a mobile app or adding call center staff. It requires significant investments, relentless improvements, and collaboration across customer channels and business functions, from distribution and underwriting to claims handling.

Many insurers look at each customer touchpoint, from visiting the website to calling an agent, as a discrete event. But customers see those events as steps in a single journey to meet an important need, such as protecting themselves and their families or recovering from an accident.

Improving customer satisfaction can be an engine of profitable growth, but it demands a common vision and new levels of coordination across historically strong organizational silos. Establishing cross-functional, multichannel customer experiences should be a CEO and board-level priority.

In this context, digital tools are unlocking new opportunities for insurers. For example, since more than 80 percent of shoppers now touch a digital channel at least once throughout their shopping journey, carriers can find new ways to engage customers efficiently and effectively with personalized messages, and improve speed, service, and consistency to raise satisfaction.

A number of commercial lines carriers are using digital tools to improve journeys. Many commercial insurance buyers value online interfaces with self-service features and the ability to track the status of interactions in real time instead of having to make inquiries by phone, email, or through their brokers.

Advances like these require coordinating multichannel interactions with an overarching view of business value. Quick, cosmetic fixes are likely to fall short, while costly changes do not always deliver strong returns. One carrier spent a significant sum upgrading its telephone system to reduce the average wait time from 40 to 20 seconds, but barely improved its customer feedback. Another touted its “superior service” in a national ad campaign—and saw an immediate decline in its customer satisfaction scores, perhaps because reality did not live up to higher expectations. Delivering a superior customer experience depends on the full range of pricing, products, and services.

Barriers to superior customer experience

The main reason so many companies fail to improve customer journeys is that understanding what customers value is not an easy task. Identifying what drives customer satisfaction and translating it into operational performance improvements requires deep customer insights, solid analytics, and modeling the most important customer journeys, with cross-functional ownership and multichannel, end-to-end management.

A typical insurance carrier today delivers customer experiences via separate functions (marketing, distribution, underwriting, claims), using a website, sales call center, service department, and so on, most managed by different executives with different goals and metrics. This structure may have its purposes, but it overlooks the fact that from the customer perspective, the experience is often a single journey. Customers are unlikely to draw a sharp distinction between an agent and a claims adjuster—both represent the insurer in the event of an accident.

Would you like to learn more about our Financial Services Practice ?

So how can insurers overcome these barriers and deliver exceptional customer experiences? The first step is to align on what type of experience they want to deliver. Experts disagree on some fundamental elements of this issue. Some believe that fewer customer touchpoints are better, 1 1. “The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty,” Rick Delisi, Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman; Penguin. while others say more interactions create more opportunities to add value and build loyalty.

Both can be correct, of course, depending on particular customer segments and the specific journeys they are on. Customers with more complex insurance needs might want a higher-touch approach during sales and onboarding, for example, while younger customers might prefer digital-only, self-driven experiences that include advice but remain non-intrusive and available on demand. Also, the more value there is at stake in a claim, the more time customers are willing to spend in live interactions during the first notice of loss. For example, many carriers overlook the fact that speed of resolution is as important as employees’ courtesy, empathy, knowledge, and professionalism. In McKinsey’s research into repairable auto claims in the US, five qualities were key to driving customer satisfaction:

employee courtesy

ease of communicating with the insurer

employee knowledge and professionalism

transparency and ease of the process

the speed of the claim settlement

In a finding that may surprise industry executives, settlement amount ranked only 12th, behind ease of tracking claim status and flexibility in scheduling the appraisal. In other words, most of the policyholders surveyed cared more about service than payment, especially when the claim size was relatively small.

Transforming the customer experience in insurance

Understanding what customers want is paramount in building a better customer experience. But real transformations are achieved when carriers take a comprehensive approach to customer journeys and how their organization works.

Only a holistic process can deliver tangible and sustained improvements. There are four core elements to a successful approach to excellence in customer experience: inspiration, insights, improvements, and institutionalization.

Inspiration: Create a comprehensive vision for a customer-centric business and operating model with clear targets.

Insights: Develop customer insights and link customer satisfaction to operational key performance indicators and business impact (such as churn and cross-selling).

Improvement: Radically redesign customer journeys from start to finish, using digital elements as the standard.

Institutionalization: Build customer-centricity into the organization, changing culture and processes from the front line to the C-suite.

Each element can yield a better experience, but the full impact is seen only when the four are pulled together. For example, making improvements without insights can mean allocating resources to features that customers deem unimportant. Vision without institutionalization may mean missing objectives, because change did not stick with the front line.

Inspiration

A customer-centric transformation begins with an overarching vision exemplified by senior leaders and modeled throughout the organization. CEOs listening in to live call center phone calls or serving coffee to their customers are nice, powerful touches. But the real value of a customer-centric culture is unlocked when employees rally behind a common purpose that drives them to go beyond their regular standard of work.

Customer-centric organizations go the extra mile, demonstrating that customer satisfaction is not just a metric on a dashboard but an inspiration. One global bank improved new product sales and cross-sell numbers and raised consumer and small business customer satisfaction scores, by rewarding branch employees for being friendly, valuing customers’ time, knowing the details of their business with the bank, and making sure customers’ needs were met before concluding transactions.

Measurements are important, of course, and each function may pursue different objectives (e.g., avoiding errors to reduce cancelations, maximizing ease of doing business for brokers and agents), yet each objective must be consistent with the brand promise and tangible across all functions.

Improvements in customer experience result from a clear understanding of customer needs and their implications from an operational standpoint. Most customer-centric processes also improve efficiency, but large investment decisions demand a clear articulation of costs and benefits, such as how much value an innovation adds from the customer’s point of view and how much of a competitive edge it provides. In other words, customer satisfaction initiatives should be grounded in facts, not gut feelings. Many companies typically rely on two tools to assess customer satisfaction, both with shortcomings:

Top-down metrics: All insurers periodically measure customer satisfaction. Many do so on a differentiated basis—by division, for example. Those may be good starting points, but they rarely provide clear indications as to where and how to make improvements. Customer satisfaction scores need to be linked to operational metrics and economic value to highlight how to address customer needs. Likewise, recommendation scores may not reflect true customer satisfaction. In some industries, improving the customer rating may barely increase the likelihood of renewing a subscription or buying a new product, while in insurance, a similar jump can be a differentiator.

Internal surveys: Surveying internal leaders is a good way to generate ideas for improvements, but these leaders tend to focus on technical shortcomings and may not rank other nuances in interactions the way customers do.

Increasing customer satisfaction goes hand-in-hand with operationally relevant customer intelligence. For example, market research needs to reveal not just customers’ satisfaction with individual touchpoints, but also the overall drivers of satisfaction, including brand, product, price, and service, and how they contribute to business success, including policy renewal and cross-selling.

Research should determine which operational drivers and expected service levels lead to satisfaction in each journey (Exhibit 3). This type of research helps carriers understand which journeys and drivers are truly important for customers but still unsatisfactory, and what service levels customers expect, making it possible to quantify acceptable waiting times in the call center, for example. This level of detail helps carriers avoid investing in areas that would not differentiate them from the competition.

Insurers can also gain valuable insights—and avoid trying to solve the wrong problems—by comparing how customers describe their experiences with actual company data. In other words, if customer complaints about long call-center wait times do not match reality, then the problem might have more to do with communication and not necessarily be solved by adding call center staff. Repeating this kind of research pragmatically but on a regular basis can shed light on changing customer expectations and point out opportunities to improve journeys.

Improvement

Insights from research help insurers decide where to invest, but effectively redesigning customer journeys also requires discipline. Journeys can be optimized according to a five step structure. An effective process usually requires a cross-functional team with members from sales, operations, IT, and other areas:

Step 1 —Break down the journey using customer perspective as a central focus.

Step 2 —Map the journey against current internal operations.

Step 3 —Call out the “wow moments” and pain points, such as unnecessary wait times or delays in communication.

Step 4 —Prioritize pain points based on what matters most to customers.

Step 5 — Radically redesign the journey to address the pain points and focus on customer needs.

The first step is often the most difficult—bringing customers into the room with the team to reveal what their real emotional journey looks like and rapidly testing ideas for improvement before taking them too far. Analogously, digital tools now support much faster prototyping cycles, which accelerate the time to market and improve the carrier’s ability to keep tailoring the customer experience. Embedding behavioral research can also reveal which types of interactions customers prefer and how best to influence behavior.

The key to growth in US life insurance

Improvements must be seen as a continuous process. Carriers should plan for successive rounds of innovation, especially in digital, where expectations rise rapidly. All changes should be tested quickly with real customers, and not every lever must be in place before testing begins: they can be piloted and implemented in stages, and many incremental improvements are possible without lengthy preparations or IT infrastructure overhauls.

Institutionalization

Sustained improvements in customer satisfaction are possible only if the entire company—from top executives to the front line—is aligned around the effort and the rollout is rapid. McKinsey has found that five best practices increase the chances of success:

strong executive ownership and a clear mandate for cross-functional journey owners to drive change across the organization

central measurement architecture that continuously reports customer intelligence to the relevant operational KPIs, allowing feedback and improvement

lean management practices with regular performance dialogues about customer satisfaction between top management and operational leaders

proactive change management with compelling “change stories,” recognition from top management, regular interaction with real customers to gather feedback, and new approaches to attracting customer-centric talent

training to give employees new skills, and “navigators” and “champions” to carry the change to individual departments and make it stick

Many companies do well by starting with one or two small, rapid pilots to demonstrate impact and generate knowledge. They then use the momentum to scale up the improvements across the company, rolling out three or four customer journey categories at a time, with organizational owners for each. A strong central team uses a standardized methodology and identifies synergies between customer journeys, such as in service and claims call centers, and identifies the skills required for success in individual areas. Every team has clear objectives in terms of customer satisfaction with regard to the best competitor. Recruiting profiles and human resources policies are aligned with the new way of working.

Taking action

Insurers need to invest human and financial resources in customer-centricity to build and maintain a competitive edge. Best-in-class players have already made some of these investments and are reaping cascading benefits.

For example, a large carrier aiming to redesign its auto claims processes set out to reduce call center waiting time. However, using a consistent journey methodology and insights from measurement, they found that waiting time was not a major pain point for the customer. Changing call center routing to ensure a single point of contact for the customer mattered much more, especially when severe accidents occurred. An agile, cross-functional team redesigned the claims journey and tested it quickly, demonstrating significant impact: customer satisfaction improved by 50 percent and call center inquiries (follow-ups) fell by over 80 percent—with no additional net cost.

Another large incumbent aimed to radically redesign its claims process from the customer perspective, relying heavily on digital to dramatically improve delivery. The company provided customers with an app to allow them to make self-service remote damage assessments. It also offered customers a digital connection to the repair network that included rules-based prioritization to guide customers to the shops closest to their work or office location. In addition to a positive impact on the customer experience, the efficiency gains yielded almost 30 percent savings, not to mention the potential improvement in loss ratio due to greater accuracy (Exhibit 4).

The opportunities for insurers to differentiate themselves through stronger customer experience are huge and growing. The fundamental challenge many companies face is getting the organization moving. There is no time to wait. In the digital era, consumer power is rising. Carriers that cling to product-, function-, or channel-centric views risk falling behind as market leaders build deeper relationships with customers and capture ever-larger shares of the market.

For carriers with the resolve to see their business through the eyes of the customer, each interaction becomes a way to live up to their brand promise; functions come together in new ways across customer journeys; and technology and digital become accelerators.

Transforming any large organization is difficult, of course, but the value at stake is significant. The adage is still valid: “You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day by day.”

Download the PDF of this report here (PDF–344KB).

For the European version of this report, see The growth engine: Superior customer experience in insurance (PDF–316KB).

Tanguy Catlin is a principal in McKinsey’s Boston office, Ewan Duncan is a director in the Seattle office, Harald Fanderl is a principal in the Munich office, and Johannes-Tobias Lorenz is a director in the Düsseldorf office.

The authors wish to thank Simone Gammeri, Sascha Lehmann, and Philipp Schaumburg for their contributions to this article.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

The key to growth in US life insurance: Focus on the customer

Small commercial insurance: A bright spot in the US property-casualty market

Transforming into an analytics-driven insurance carrier

Brought to you by:

Lemonade: Delighting Insurance Customers with AI and Behavioural Economics - A Disruptive InsurTech Business Model for Outstanding Customer Experience and Cost-Effective Service Excellence

By: Wolfgang Ulaga, Ziv Carmon, Laura Heely

This case explores InsurTech start-up Lemonade's disruptive new business model aimed at creating and delivering a 'shockingly great user experience' around a 'lovable brand' - in an industry plagued…

• Length: 12 page(s)
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2020
• Discipline: Marketing
• Product #: IN1673-PDF-ENG

What's included:

• Teaching Note
• Educator Copy

$4.95 per student

degree granting course

$8.95 per student

non-degree granting course

Get access to this material, plus much more with a free Educator Account:

• Access to world-famous HBS cases
• Up to 60% off materials for your students
• Resources for teaching online
• Tips and reviews from other Educators

Already registered? Sign in

• Student Registration
• Non-Academic Registration
• Included Materials

This case explores InsurTech start-up Lemonade's disruptive new business model aimed at creating and delivering a 'shockingly great user experience' around a 'lovable brand' - in an industry plagued by low customer satisfaction. The digital disruptor leverages principles of behavioural economics to address conflicts of interest and mistrust which prevail in the existing industry. It uses digital technologies to automate, accelerate and manage an impressive amount of work - with few employees - thereby reducings customer effort and , increasing customer satisfaction to achieve cost-effective service excellence. The effortless experience is aggressively priced and relies on a flexible subscription-based pricing model. Artificial intelligence (AI), data and machine learning are key in the race to achieving data parity with incumbents. The case culminates in Lemonade's filing for an initial public offering (IPO) and asks where growth should come from next: incremental improvements, further expansion across the United States, global expansion beyond Germany and the Netherlands, or from new types of property.

Learning Objectives

This versatile case allows students to explore how digital disruption is impacting the insurance industry and understand the digital transformation of the customer experience (CX). They deep dive into the key building blocks and performance metrics of Lemonade's innovative business model, with a special emphasis on AI, data and machine learning. It allows a discussion of how principles of behavioural economics come to life in an insurance setting and beyond, and demonstrates a hands-on approach to the design of the CX and customer-journey mapping in a digital context, such as job-to-be-done analyses, means-end laddering, and service blueprinting.

Jul 1, 2020 (Revised: Feb 27, 2023)

Discipline:

Industries:

Insurance industry

IN1673-PDF-ENG

We use cookies to understand how you use our site and to improve your experience, including personalizing content. Learn More . By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies and revised Privacy Policy .

5 Customer Service Best Practices in the Insurance Industry

Author: Simon Black | Date: 02/02/2024

While outstanding customer service is a key ingredient of success in any line of business, there are some industries where the stakes are especially high — and insurance is a prime example. 

In insurance, not only must customer support agents in the contact centre provide a professional, friendly, and timely service, they must also be proficient at dealing with the complexities of high-value claims processes, all while being aware of potentially fraudulent activities. 

The impact of customer service on success in the insurance industry cannot be understated, especially considering: 

• 96% of customers in a survey claimed that customer service was an important factor in their consumer decisions and brand loyalty.¹
• Satisfied customers are 80% more likely to renew their insurance policies.²

In this article, we’ll outline five insurance customer service best practices that can help you deliver outstanding support in your contact centre, ensuring that your customers stick around for the long term.

Ensure your agents care about high-quality service

While technology, tools, and processes all play a central role in delivering an outstanding service in the insurance sector, customer support is ultimately about people. Without the right customer service agents in place, you’ll struggle to deliver a service that meets your customers’ needs. 

Customer support agents are a key link between your customer base and your business. In your customers’ eyes, they are your business — and the service they receive will have a direct impact on their opinion of your company as a whole. Hiring the right contact centre agents is a critical first step in ensuring high-quality service for your insurance customers, leading to: 

• Improved customer satisfaction
• More loyal customers and higher retention rates
• A reputation as an insurance company that puts customers first

Effective recruitment often requires a good deal of time, resources, and money, but it’s a step you simply cannot afford to cut corners on. While this is true regardless of the industry you operate in, it is particularly important in an industry as complex and high-value as insurance.

Provide comprehensive training

If hiring the right agents is the first critical step, supporting them through comprehensive insurance training is the second. Without the latter, you’ll undo all your hard work in the former. 

With most insurance contact centres experiencing high levels of agent churn, onboarding and up-skilling new agents is a constant challenge. With complex and detailed insurance processes, training new agents to the point where they can confidently and accurately deal with customer interactions can take weeks or even months, leading to resource challenges and reduced performance across the contact centre.

Effective onboarding and training should equip insurance contact centre agents with the ability to: 

• Handle industry, policy, claims and company-specific queries, ensuring they have the knowledge to answer customer questions and solve issues
• Navigate the complexities of the insurance industry confidently
• Be able to navigate internal processes seamlessly even when handling challenging interactions
• Use various tech platforms and tools that work with the agent rather than against them

Without comprehensive training, agents easily become overwhelmed, resulting in poor service and dissatisfied customers. From the agents’ side, being ill-equipped for the job can be extremely stressful and demotivating, leading to higher turnover rates. 

Training shouldn’t be seen as a one-off event as part of the onboarding process. Systems and process training should be balanced with soft skills learning and career development sessions. Agents will feel more engaged if they receive ongoing guidance and support that is tailored to their needs, allowing them to close skills gaps and improve on areas for development. This is particularly important in an industry like insurance, where adhering to regulatory compliance and risk management is crucial, but being able to engage contact centre agents is also a key factor in the success of the business and the customer experience.

Technology can play a key role here — not only in delivering training activities but also in supporting agents during interactions with customers. Take scripting, for example — a technology that directs agents through the customer conversation, allowing them to focus on one topic at a time. 

Scripting not only allows agents to focus on delivering an outstanding service, it also minimises the need for formal training, acting instead as an in-work learning tool that guides them to become more proficient at their job.

Scripting can be tricky to get quite right. Here’s a blog on scripting best practices that could help give you that edge on your competitors.

Offer omnichannel support

With the need to balance adherence to complex process and regulatory requirements with delivering a memorable service, insurance companies that take a flexible, but efficient and technology driven customer-centric approach to customer services will gain an advantage over those that don’t. One example is offering omnichannel support. 

We live in a world of choice, where customers can contact a business in multiple different ways, including: 

• Over the phone.
• Live chat via a website.
• Social media and online community platforms.
• Self-help support via online forums, videos, etc.

Each mode of communication offers something different. Some customers feel comfortable using one mode but not another. In limiting your customer support to just one mode of communication, you force some customers to contact you in a way that is confusing, uncomfortable, or even impossible.

By taking an omnichannel approach to customer support in your insurance contact centre, you enable customers to choose what works for them, leading to: 

• A more personalised customer service experience.
• Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Increased agent productivity — live chat can be conducted with multiple customers at once.
• Reduced overheads — some channels allow customers to resolve issues without talking directly to an agent, i.e. community forums or chatbots.

Again, technology has a key role to play in making omnichannel support work. The right software allows businesses to integrate different channels and legacy systems, uniting cross-channel data without disrupting the agent or customer experience. 

Reveal the true voice of your customer – across 100% of interactions

See why industry leading Insurance firms are using speech analytics

Identify areas for improvement

Understanding performance, checking QA and identifying areas for improvement is critical to providing a consistently excellent standard of support. The insurance industry has to strike a balance between delivering a good experience, despite the difficult nature of the calls and aligning to QA expectations and guidance.

Insurance businesses operate in a highly regulated environment with constantly changing rules and guidance. Companies need to provide reassurance not just internally but also to customers and regulators that compliance is being monitored accurately and that immediate action can be taken where needed.

This means that many insurance QA teams spend the majority of their time analysing calls rather than being able to utilise their expertise to drive proactive improvements before they become large-scale issues. The good news is that modern technology is now making it easier than ever to assess QA, customer interactions and fine-tune performance.

With the right software, customer support managers and QA teams can ensure that 100% of customer-agent interactions are monitored and analysed, guiding better outcomes with the following functionality:

• Contact centre quality monitoring.
• Automatic alerts that flag when potential compliance breaches or fraud alerts are identified.
• Efficient dashboards that empower agents and leadership teams to make the right decisions.

Through industry-leading speech and voice analytics, insurance customer calls can be automatically transcribed and analysed to identify speech patterns, key words, and even the emotion and intent behind the language used. 

This provides customer support managers with powerful insights relating not only to customer sentiment and agent performance but also to the wellbeing and mood of call centre staff. Ultimately, this helps to pinpoint areas of improvement and provide the right support at the right time — for both customers and agents.

Worried about call centre agent turnover? Check out our guide on ways you can reduce that and improve job satisfaction among your employees.

Deploy cutting-edge software

Technology is the driving force behind almost all of the best practices we’ve discussed in this article, with the latest platforms providing all the functionality you need to strengthen your customer service. 

But in a market crowded with new technology and software, choosing the right platform can be a tricky decision. In an industry as complex and unique as insurance, it pays to choose a software provider that understands and caters to your specific needs. 

The right software will enhance the customer journey, simplify internal processes, and provide powerful insights, allowing your customer support team to understand their performance and identify areas for improvement. 

Beyond features, the right software provider will have provable experience helping customer support teams — and particularly those in the insurance industry — achieve better results. 

Since deploying our AI-driven platform, one of our insurance contact centre clients not only reported an improvement in the customer journey and a dramatic reduction in call handling times but also found the agent churn rate decreased too. They were able to up-skill agents 70% faster than standard training methods as processes are held within the Awaken platform rather than having to train the agent on individual processes. Agents are taking an active role in call handling within a few days as opposed to a few weeks.

Take the first step to enhancing insurance customer service

At Awaken, we have a proven track record of supporting high-performance insurance contact centres and customer support teams. With decades of contact centre experience among our ranks, we designed our software to be flexible, powerful, and cost-effective. 

Our AI-powered software streamlines support processes, provides unparalleled insights into performance, and helps you provide a superior experience for both customers and agents alike, with features like: 

• Real-Time Agent Assist
• Real-Time Agent Guidance
• Conversational Analytics

We also understand the unique challenges that agents in insurance companies face — everything from high-stakes calls about complex insurance products, to regulatory compliance and fraud detection. That’s why we’ve built a system packed with features that help insurance providers deliver exceptional support. 

If you’d like to see how Awaken could help enhance your customer service and simplify the insurance claims process, book a demo today.

• Why Customer Service is Important: 16 Data-Backed Facts to Know | HubSpot
• Analyzing Your Data to Improve Insurance Customer Experience | Aluance Digital Services

Customer Experience Strategy

Health Insurance from the Outside In

Through our Customer Experience Strategy Development Framework, we determined the most critical interactions, or “Moments of Truth,” customers have with their health insurance carrier. This new way of thinking informed us on how health plans fit into individual’s lives during stressful and emotional life changing events.

The end result was a Customer Experience Strategy that included tactical initiatives and a roadmap to deliver a simpler, more personalized customer experience.

This project has been so successful, people have gone, well, a little nutty. When our client was having a bad day, we left her a candy bar with a special note.

She said we made her day.   That made ours .

Executive Summary

Andrew Reise Consulting was engaged by a large health plan to develop a Customer Experience strategy and roadmap for the Retail Under 65 segment. With the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance landscape is quickly evolving and becoming much more consumer centric as there is a shift from group plans to direct purchase plans. National individual membership is projected to grow from 15% to 29% by the year 2017. Our client wanted to use Customer Experience as a differentiator to compete in the new consumer-centric marketplace.   The strategy was focused on first understanding the company brand promise and corporate strategy, and identifying customer needs and expectations through consumer research, data and voice of customer tools such as personas. We then determined the most critical interactions, or Moments of Truth, customers have with their health insurance carrier. The end result was a Customer Experience Strategy with recommendations, tactical initiatives, and a roadmap to deliver a simpler, more personalized customer experience resulting in happier customers, lower costs, and increased membership.

Business Challenge

The health insurance industry is rapidly transforming to sell to an individual market and will be more competitive than ever. Traditional models focused on group coverage will not work in this new landscape. Customer expectations are being set by other companies such as Amazon, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos, and health insurance is at the bottom of all industries in Customer Experience rankings. In addition, with federal, state and private exchanges coming online, plans will offer very similar benefit plans at the same price. More than ever, health plans must leverage their Brand and Customer Service focus to differentiate on this level playing field. Payers have a tremendous opportunity to not only make things better for their customers, but capture market share along the way. Designing the right experience can also lead to lower admin and medical costs. Transforming the enterprise to the consumer focus needed for success is a long, challenging journey, involving multiple partners in the ecosystem such as providers, brokers, and pharmacies. However, it is quickly becoming the new normal to compete in the new age of healthcare.

How Andrew Reise Helped

Andrew Reise was engaged to lead a cross functional team, in partnership with consumers at key points, to develop the strategy and roadmap. We focused on all aspects of the customer lifecycle, from the time consumers become aware of their insurance options and start shopping, through the time they make a purchase and start using their health insurance, to the time of possible departure. Andrew Reise used our Customer Experience Strategy Development Framework to facilitate the strategy development with the cross-functional team, looking outside in and putting the customer at center-stage.

Creating the Customer Experience Strategy

Andrew Reise worked with functional leaders across the enterprise, including representatives from Sales, Marketing, Web, Social, Customer Service, Operations and Market Research. Andrew Reise consultants facilitated multiple workshops and interviews with various subject matter experts and stakeholders. The work was broken down into the following areas.

1. North Star

It is our fundamental belief that the Customer Experience strategy must align with the corporate strategy and company’s brand promise. Executive interviews were conducted to understand the vision for the company, what is communicated internally to employees and what expectations are set with customers. A project mission statement was then developed to ensure alignment.

2. Customer Insights

In addition to analyzing existing industry and market research, we interviewed brokers, completed mystery shopping and conducted in-depth interviews with customers to better understand their needs, wants and expectations of a health insurance company. This provided consumer insights to guide our work and also highlighted the most critical customer touch points.

3. Customer Lifecycle Mapping (current state)

An end-to-end customer lifecycle (DISCOVER-SHOP-BUY-USE-DEPART) was developed to provide an outside-in perspective of current customer interactions with the company. This exercise identified existing pain points and opportunities including visiting the web site to get a quote, receiving an explanation of benefits and calling customer service about a claim. The result was a clear understanding of pain points and gaps in how they interact with customers today.

4. Moment of Truth

The next step was to identify which interactions were the most important to address first. The process of analyzing voice of customer data, talking to consumers, interviewing employees and documenting customer touch points allowed us to identify the most critical customer interactions, or Moments of Truth, that influence a customer’s decision to purchase, stay or leave. This allowed us to focus our attention in areas that will have the biggest impact from a customer and company perspective when making experience enhancements and recommendations.

5. Future State Ideation

We then had to come up with creative solutions to solve the pain points. A group of cross-industry experts, consumers and health plan SMEs were assembled to ideate new experience solutions for each Moment of Truth. Customer personas were used to look at each Moment of Truth from different consumer types and over 200 ideas were generated. Each participant voted on the best ideas, which were incorporated into the future experience design recommendations.

6. Strategic Themes

• Transform into a customer-centric organization
• Deliver at critical customer interaction points, or Moments of Truth
• Personalize and simplify the complex ecosystem
• Facilitate transition across channels

7. Strategic Initiatives

In order to make the customer experience strategy achievable, detailed tactical initiatives were identified, scored and prioritized based on benefit to company and customer. Some initiatives were quick hits, which could be implemented in less than 90 days, and others were longer term. Initiatives addressed foundational capabilities such as developing a customer-centric culture, establishing governance and creating a CX scorecard. Other initiatives focused heavily on delivering a seamless, simple experience for each Moment of Truth, and better understanding consumers in order to provide a more tailored, personalized approach across sales, marketing and service.

Read Our Latest Experience Insights

The Evolution of Contact Centers: Top Six Trends for 2024

Mastering Quality Management: Unlocking the Seven Domains of Excellence

Staffing and Operational Metrics: The Far-Reaching Impact of Quality Programs

Want to elevate your business' experiences.

Guide insurance customers to safety and well-being

Research report.

• Accenture's global Insurance Consumer Study provides a view of consumer preferences and trends in the insurance industry.
• We suggest a fresh look at how to meet the needs of generational segments, who have differing views on technology-enabled insurance services.
• Insurers can also offer usage- and behavior-based insurance to better personalize and target offerings, meeting consumer demand for better value.
• It's also time to re-evaluate the role of humans in insurers' digital ecosystems, to restore trust and better engage consumers.

The future of insurance

The future of insurance depends on exploring new models of doing business to ensure relevance. Business models that capitalize on the benefits technology can bring for insurers while meeting a changing set of consumer demands will help insurers not only to remain relevant, but to grow. A recent Accenture insurance survey of 47,810 respondents across 28 global markets points to three key areas where C-suite leaders can take action to address these insurance trends.

#1 Re-evaluate digital services with a generational lens

In our research, clear differences in generational appetites for digital offers emerged. Take a fresh look at your consumer digital strategy.

#2 Personalize consumer offers

Offer usage- and behavior-based insurance to better personalize and target offerings, meeting consumer demand for better value.

#3 Restore trust with digital and human interaction

The right human + machine mix restores consumer trust and better engages them.

Proactively rethinking their business helps insurers get closer to consumers as many show willingness to consider alternative distribution channels.

Addressing generational consumer differences

Technology is a lifeline to increasingly digital insurance consumer segments. COVID-19 accelerated the transition to digital in 2020 across all demographic groups. However, clear differences in generational appetites for digital offers emerged. Our research into insurance consumers revealed the following insights.

Millennial and younger consumers , age 18-34 express greater interest in digital offerings that help them make safer, healthier, and more sustainable choices. Insurers will need to work with ecosystem partners to create and participate in digital platform offerings that help them succeed with this segment. From fitness devices that track and encourage healthier habits, to companies that offer coaching in nutrition or stress reduction, insurers have a wealth of partners to choose from to help their customers. And with a growth of an additional $1.3 trillion in market value in global health and wellness by 2024, ecosystem investments are well worth it.

This same demographic (age 18-34) values sustainability. Insurers are already well positioned on this with 71% of Millennial and younger consumers saying they see their insurers delivering on ethical and sustainable business practices. More than two-thirds (67%) say they want digital experiences that encourage sustainable travel and shopping practices.

Consumers age 55+ are slowly becoming more comfortable with digital insurer interactions. They show increasing preference for digital claims, with 71% saying they would like the internet chat/video insurance claim process to replace the traditional in-office claim process—an increase of 3%.

Approximately 7 out of 10 (69%) consumers would share significant data on their health, exercise and driving habits in exchange for lower prices from their insurers, an increase of 19% from two years ago.

Offering personalized insurance per habits and usage

Consumers say they are more willing to offer personal data in exchange for more personalized pricing, offers, and discounts. They are increasingly demanding to be charged based on behavior and habits—and they’re willing to allow insurers to collect and use their data in exchange for that value. Consumers are being pragmatic and protective with their data, however. They say they will only share data for incentives; they show no increased willingness to share data without those incentives.

Approximately 7 out of 10 consumers (69%) would share significant data on their health, exercise and driving habits in exchange for lower prices from their insurers, an increase of 19% from two years ago. More consumers (66%) would also share significant data for personalized services to prevent injury and loss—up 54% from two years ago.

of consumers who can drive expect to drive less in the long-term than they did before the pandemic.

In the auto insurance space, consumers look for personalized offers in the form of usage-based or "pay-as-you-drive" auto insurance. Twenty-nine percent of consumers who can drive expect to drive less in the long-term than they did before the pandemic. They will expect their rates and plans to reflect their new habits.

Consumers are being pragmatic and protective with their data. They say they will share data for better value; they show no increased willingness to share data without an incentive.

Trust and engagement in a human + machine world

Achieving the right balance between digital and human interaction matters more than ever. For example, while consumers are interacting more and more in the digital realm, particularly during COVID-19, they still view human touchpoints as more trustworthy than digital touchpoints when they are in need. Almost half (49%) say they place a lot of trust in a human advisor in an office when making an insurance claim, while only 12% say the same of automated service over phone/web/email, and just 7% say the same of a chatbot.

Training and skilling an insurance workforce that works well with digital tools will be essential for success. Insurance can be an emotionally complex business for consumers—they need the freedom to choose methods of interaction most comfortable for them.

Of insurance consumers trust a human advisor when making a claim.

Of insurance consumers trust an automated phone/web/email service when making a claim.

Of insurance consumers trust a chatbot when making a claim.

Innovate for resilience and new insurance revenue

What matters to your insurance customer.

There’s no doubt that the effects of technology are disruptive. But insurers can harness that disruption to better connect with consumers for positive business impact.

New models of doing business that capitalize on how technology helps insurers meet changing consumer demands are essential. Consider with your team how those models may be applied based on your existing book of business and unique market positioning.

By focusing on the areas our research highlights as important for insurers’ growth and relevance, you can lead your team into the future of insurance now.

We're here to help.

SENIOR MANAGING DIRECTOR – GLOBAL INSURANCE LEAD

Managing Director – Insurance, Accenture Song

Todd Staehle is the Global Insurance Lead for Accenture Song. His role focuses on developing truly human customer experiences for insurance brands.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

Intelligent underwriting

Fuel the future of insurance through technology

Insurance Technology Vision

Related capabilities, life insurance services, p&c insurance services.

A Major Health Insurance Company Builds Unified, Cross-Functional Teams Across Sales and Customer Service to Support Major Customer Accounts

A major southeastern U.S. health insurance company is on a mission to improve the health and well-being of citizens in their state and to be the model for transforming the health system through an unwavering commitment to quality, affordability, and exceptional experience. To reach those goals, they must reach more customers, provide them excellent customer experiences and deepen their relationships with more services. 

• Build a unified cohesive “pod” – cross-functional teams that pull from sales, customer service and support functions to support major accounts
• Improve internal teamwork and collaboration
• Reduce silos and blame
• Improve internal and external service interactions

When the company reorganized part of its sales and customer service organizations into a new “pod” structure to support its largest, most strategic clients, the goals were to provide an excellent and cohesive customer experience, deepen internal and external partnerships, and boost sales. However, it was a challenge to get these cross-functional teams to work together as a cohesive, mutually supportive unit aligned behind shared objectives. People struggled to find their roles within the pods and to understand and support the roles of others. Team members continued to operate within silos when the organization needed them working shoulder-to-shoulder to advance excellent client engagements and mutually beneficial wins.

After experiencing an Integrity Service® workshop firsthand, a buying committee member recommended the program to help assist the teams in overcoming their challenges so they could realize the original goals of the reorganization. She built enthusiasm and buy-in for the solution through meetings and one-on-one discussions, gaining the support to pilot the program with two of the pods.

The change effort kicked off with pre-work for the teams followed by a half-day Integrity Service workshop facilitated by an Integrity Solutions master trainer. Over the next 7 weeks, the teams met with their managers and an Integrity Solutions facilitator in small groups for an hour to discuss the practical application of the Integrity Service skills and the impact those skills were having internally and externally. Each of these Zoom meetings focused on a particular subset of the skills, with prep work sent in advance. As opposed to the typical “role play” exercises found in other programs, these “real play” exercises allowed participants to work through actual issues and get immediate, tangible value from the experience.

The pod leaders and organizational development partners report that the Integrity Service implementation has already created value for the organization, including improving teamwork, collaboration and morale as well as enhancing sales success. 

The project leaders highlight the phased learning and “real play” approach as key to the initiative’s impact. The weekly calls saw high engagement from participants and managers alike, and all found these calls to be extremely valuable.

Now that the Integrity Service skills are integral to the way the company does business, their teams are aligned behind a shared mindset that has bridged service and selling and is enabling them to deliver greater value to their customers. They attribute a number of positive results since the implementation to the new skills and attitudes developed through this initiative, including:

• increased customer retention
• expanded lines of coverage with existing accounts
• increased new business as a result of greater collaboration and creativity
• improved internal and external relationships

The company is in process of expanding Integrity Service to the other major accounts teams. 

TESTIMONIALS

“Our customer service team has gone from siloed to unstoppable! Our people are excited to use the skills and tools from the program which have breathed new life into the team. Integrity Service has become an integral part of how we do business” – Client Success Lead

“We’re already seeing an impact in terms of building our business. It’s amazing and speaks volumes for the power of Integrity Service. We’re retaining customers more effectively and adding additional lines of coverage. This will help our business and I’m very excited about it.”

“Improvement have been seen both internally and externally. Their customers feel it, the same band is producing the sound. This process has sparked some creatively in the way that they are thinking about customers and presenting to them. They actually pull out the GVALHI card and walk through each step and describe how they used it to pitch different ideas to their clients.  They ended up winning an important case, that was otherwise dead to us, because of that.”

“It’s a powerful process that generates results you can see right away. As the weeks went on, people applied the skills more and more, individual confidence improved and overall interactions became more productive and collegial. ”

Share This Post:

For more information about this Success Story Contact:

Patty Gaddis

Vice President, Client Development

• Case Studies

Insurance Client Managed Services – Case Study

The client is a large insurance provider of valuable insurance coverages and services to home and auto owners, as well as business owners.

Company Description

The client is a large insurance provider of valuable insurance coverages and services to home and auto owners, as well as business owners. Leveraging a large-scale internal and partially external-facing web application, they serve their customers daily with extensive functionality. To achieve other internal processes, they keep numerous background programs that shift data where it can be further harnessed and analyzed. This sophisticated infrastructure enables the client not only to efficiently manage policy issuance, claims processing, and customer interactions but also to extract valuable insights from the data generated. The integration of these background programs ensures a seamless flow of information, contributing to the client’s ability to make informed decisions, enhance operational efficiency, and ultimately provide top-notch services to their diverse customer base.

The client needed to revitalize their core application for their customers and employees to increase productivity. This required an additional effort from experts to learn their systems and maintain their current operations so they could execute this initiative separately.

Our challenge was to absorb as much knowledge of their architecture as possible to transform our team into mirrors of themselves. With so many applications, all with different purposes, grasping and orchestrating the workflows as naturally as the client was paramount. Full-scope awareness was needed to ensure there was minimal effort while delivering on requirements. The sooner we became familiar with the territory, the quicker we would ramp up to clockwork.

Project Goals

• Learn client systems and applications.
• Improve functionality to increase maintainability.
• Document processes to add learned insight.
• Remediate existing issues.
• Append necessary functionality of the client’s current application.

Our strategy we employed was to build a team that the client could recognize as their own and have that team engage with the business stake holders often to keep in parallel with their goals. One unit of the team is determined to keep the intricacies of the day-to-day business in motion; the other unit is to enhance their applications and ensure evolution of business needs are met with equal development. Like incremental code changes to steadily progress these systems, we continuously, sprint after sprint, learned new facets of their business which only added to our tooling and reasoning when approaching tasks whether it be support or development.

Innovations

As mentioned above, one of our goals was to improve upon maintainability. When approaching a series of work items, our team sought to create additions to the client’s codebase that emphasized scalability and removal of limitations. One such improvement was to implement a way to migrate several stored procedures and surrounding code to utilize new extended columns that not only fixed an impassable truncation issue but did so in the least invasive way possible.

In using feature flags, new stored procedures in parallel with old, and new columns we corrected a boundary that as the system grew the values of essential fields were being truncated for one of their lines of business.

Another accomplishment that gave the client’s userbase a useful feature was our team’s implementation of stored payment methods. Putting this in place meant end users could keep their preferred selections of payment method, adding convenience to transactions with the client.

Core Technologies

To accomplish our goals, we leveraged several technologies.

• ASP.NET Core
• ASP.NET Framework
• Classic ASP
• Azure Function Apps

Their core application, due to several years of life cycles, required all these technologies to work together in unison. Some portions such as the client-side were written in VB.NET and Classic ASP while the server-side portions consisted of C#, VB.NET which retrieved data through services referencing their DB2 mainframe and MS SQL databases.

Many times, solutioning a work item called upon a combination of these technologies, where modifications, such as updating a stored procedure, meant also adjusting the .NET code to accommodate the change and ensuring regressive testing was successful. This integrated approach ensured that changes in one aspect of the system were seamlessly reflected throughout, maintaining the overall integrity and functionality of the application. Collaborative problem-solving became a cornerstone of our workflow, as we adeptly navigated the intricate interdependencies between technologies, swiftly adapting to evolving project requirements. This holistic perspective not only streamlined our development process but also fortified the robustness of the entire system, contributing to the overall success of our projects.

Consisting of .NET full stack engineers, we all brought extensive experience to the equation. Though split into two units, each with its unique objectives, we seamlessly collaborated to provide a comprehensive and integrated solution, ensuring a wide coverage of value for the client. Our collective expertise in front-end and back-end development, database management, and system architecture allowed us to tackle diverse challenges efficiently. By fostering a culture of open communication and knowledge-sharing, we leveraged the strengths of each unit to create a cohesive and synergistic team. This collaborative approach not only enhanced our productivity but also enriched the final deliverables, demonstrating the effectiveness of a unified, multidisciplinary team in achieving client success.

Though important to keep in our purview, Primary Key Indicators (PKI) were metrics we assured through collaboration and improvisation. We applied Agile concepts and methodology to how we conducted our implementations. By always seeking ways to alleviate blockers and keep the team thriving, we kept the development momentum going and our metrics reflected this.

Our client saw a drastic reduction in ticket counts and corrections to issues that had long caused problems. No matter how small the incident was our team determined the root cause to eliminate future tickets. The more we resolved the more our service snowballed into streamlined support for their business which ultimately resulted not only in an unhindered effort towards their roadmap but also an ever-increasing, stabilizing set of applications left better than before.

In conclusion, this case study highlights the successful collaboration between our team and the insurance client, showcasing our commitment to delivering innovative solutions and exceptional service. Through a dedicated effort to absorb the intricacies of the client’s architecture, our team has effectively mirrored the client’s expertise, ensuring seamless delivery of services and support. This partnership demonstrates our ability to tackle complex challenges and deliver tangible results, reinforcing our position as a leader in providing top-tier managed services. We look forward to continuing our relationship with the client, driving further advancements, and contributing to their ongoing success in the dynamic insurance sector.

Get In Touch With Us

Would you like to discuss how Xorbix Technologies, Inc. can help with your enterprise IT needs.

Sora by OpenAI: Transforming Text into Video

OpenAI has introduced Sora, a tool that transforms text prompts into video content, much like its predecessor DALL-E but for moving images instead of static ones.

Informatica Migration for Big Data Workflows

Informatica, a leading data integration platform, has been a cornerstone for our client’s big data workflows.

OpenAI API Integration: A Complete Guide

OpenAI and ChatGPT have become widely recognized terms, captivating audiences globally with their applications in Artificial Intelligence.

One Inc ClaimsPay Integration

One Inc’s ClaimsPay integration is our major Midwest headquartered Insurance provider client’s ambitious electronic payment integration project.

Insurance Case Studies: The Ultimate Guide

How do you show your prospects exactly what your company can do for them? With a case study. Insurance case studies provide buyers with the solid facts, figures and performance examples they need to make a purchasing decision.

What Is a Case Study?

A case study is a powerful marketing tool that is often used in the middle or bottom of the sales funnel, to help buyers develop a preference for your offering. Case studies increase buying confidence and validate the buying decision. They prove that your product or service performs as promised.

Case studies change the conversation from telling to showing. Instead of just telling prospects how great your brand is, you can show prospects exactly what your brand is capable of achieving. This gives prospects a more concrete understanding of what to expect and enables them to step into the shoes of a satisfied customer.

The Elements of a Case Study

An effective case study contains key elements that align with the buyer’s journey:

• Who is the customer? If you don’t have permission to name the customer, describe the customer by industry, size and other relevant details.
• What problem were they trying to solve? When B2B buyers are shopping for a product, they’re trying to solve a specific problem. Identify this problem so other prospects with similar problems can relate. Sometimes, there’s more than one problem.
• What other solutions did they consider? B2B buyers usually consider multiple options before deciding. This is a key part of the process, and including the details can help emphasize why your company stood out.
• Why did they choose your solution? State exactly what your company offered that other competitors couldn’t.
• What was the implementation process like? Switching B2B vendors can be a major undertaking. Describe the process so your prospects will know what to expect. Of course, you want to put your company in a positive light and focus on the positives, but you can include hiccups that occurred in the process and how you handled them. Prospects know that things don’t always go perfectly according to plan, and this shows that you’re competent and able to overcome any barriers that arise.
• How has the company benefited? In the beginning of the case study, you described the client’s problem. Now touch back on this and show how the problem has been solved. Include specific information about how the company has benefited from your product or service. For example, how much time or money has the client saved? How are they better prepared? How have you helped increase their revenues?
• What are the key takeaways for others in a similar situation? Convince prospects that they should follow the client’s example and partner with your company. Summarize your argument with key takeaways from the case study.

Case Study Dos and Don’ts

To squeeze the most value from your case study, you need to follow some best practices.

• Don’t just list bulleted facts. You might be able to pull a list of bulleted facts from your case study to use in other types of content, such as social media posts, but your actual case study should be at least two pages long to tell the story in a meaningful way.
• Do use names. Your case study will carry a lot more weight if the featured customer is named. You can also use anonymous case studies, but they are not quite as credible.
• Do appeal to emotions. Think of your case study as a story. You’re showing your prospects what it’s like to work with your company, so you need to build a narrative. This is also a good place to build an emotional argument by showing how your company can help clients deal with pain points and reduce problems.
• Don’t make your case study longer than it needs to be. Your prospects are busy, and they probably won’t have time to read an overly verbose document. Provide enough information to create a compelling story, but don’t get bogged down with unnecessary details. An effective case study will often be around two pages.
• Do include quotes. You can say that your company is great, but it sounds more convincing if one of your customers says it. The featured customer may be willing to provide you with quotes and their logo to include in your case study. As a bonus, this is also free publicity for them.
• Do get permission. If you’re naming a customer, you will need to secure their permission and allow them the opportunity to review and approve the final piece before it is used. Be sure to save their written approval in case questions arise in the future.

Case Studies Should Be Part of Your Content Library

Creating a case study can take some time and effort, but they are worth it.

According to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer , 63% of people worry business leaders are trying to mislead people with false or exaggerated statements. If you just say that your company can help people solve their problems, your prospects might not believe you. You need to build credibility, and a case study that provides concrete examples can help.

A case study is also a fantastic way to differentiate yourself from your competition. As mentioned earlier, case studies are often used in more advanced stages of the customer journey, when prospects are already familiar with your company and need information that’s going to guide their purchasing decision. You want to create preference for your company so you can close the sale, and a case study can help you do that.

Your Case Study Can Convert Leads for Years

Some content has a short life, but not case studies. Although creating a case study will require some effort, once you have it, you can use it for as long as you continue to offer the featured products and services, and the featured company is still a customer.

• Feature your case study on your website. You can create a landing page for your case study or case studies so prospects can find them easily. They can be offered as instant downloads or you can generate leads by gating them with a form.
• Promote your case study in social media posts. Spread the word about your case study on social media. You can always just write a post and link to the case study, but also consider designing graphics for the case study. A LinkedIn carousel post is another great way to highlight your case study on social media.
• Encourage prospects to download the study as a call to action in your blog posts . This is a practical way to encourage your audience to learn more about your company.
• Link to case studies in email nurturing campaigns . If you’re nurturing a prospect that has downloaded other content, a case study link can entice additional engagement.
• Build case studies into your sales processes . Sales professionals love using case studies as handouts as they provide a great springboard for meaningful conversations.
• Use content to develop webinars or videos . You can even use case study content as the foundation for very powerful webinars or videos.

Need Case Studies but Don’t Know Where to Start?

Inbound Insurance Marketing can help your company develop powerful, effective case studies. Learn more. Or, if you’re ready to get started, schedule 30 minutes to discuss your project.

Share this Article:

Konnect Insights - A unified customer experience management platform

Home / Case Studies

The health insurance company that values its customer service the most.

An Indian multinational corporation began operations in 2006 as India’s first independent health insurance company. The business offers health, personal accident, and international travel insurance services.

It offers products to meet the needs of every customer, whether they are single people, families, or businesses, and it operates both directly and through a variety of channels like agents, brokers, the internet, etc. It has a long-standing partnership with numerous banks and is associated with Bancassurance.

The company has underwritten a gross written premium of over Rs.6.8k Crore during the FY 2019-20 and has built up a promising path with an appreciable net worth of Rs.2k Crore as of March 31st, 2020.

Currently, it has 12800+ employees and 635+ branch offices all over India.

As the largest private health insurance provider in India, they provide unique and specialized products that are in line with the demands of the Indian market. The quality of their customer service has also been raised thanks to their dedicated claims assistance and round-the-clock multilingual call center support.

A wide range of health insurance and specialty products to cater to every segment and Pan India presence with 640+ branch offices with cashless treatment at 12,000+ hospitals across India.

Its main goal is to provide exceptional customer service. It achieves this by being prompt in its responses to online customer inquiries. Being a significant provider of health insurance in the nation, the company must keep track of what consumers are saying about their products online, particularly on social media platforms, and promptly respond to those comments.

The brand, which provides insurance solutions to more than a thousand customers in a variety of categories, faced a significant challenge that needed to be resolved in order to improve its online response management and customer support.

The company was manually tracking and responding to online inquiries, which proved to be laborious given the volume of conversations about the brand they had to sift through and address. This process needed to be digitally transformed in order to enhance the customer experience, as their response time was influenced by this.

Why Konnect Insights?

For assistance with managing their online customer response, the company chose Konnect Insights as a partner. We are an omnichannel customer experience management platform offering social listening, social analytics, and social CRM, giving the brand the ability to track queries/complaints from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., and respond to them in a timely and efficient manner using a single platform.

Managing large volumes of queries became simpler with Konnect Insights. Agents could view the complete history of the query with features like a ticket-wise view. Customer service requests can be easily resolved by the customer support team. The product assists the brand in tracking the timelines of escalations and workflow in full transparency by using powerful dashboards and reports.

The company uses Konnect Insights for extensive social listening and analytics in addition to response management. It monitors all brand-related online conversations and mines the gathered data for useful and beneficial information.

With the aid of personalized dashboards and integrated BI tools, the brand performs a thorough analysis using the tool’s assortment of charts. The volume of conversations, sentiment analysis, classification reports, and engagement by media-type analysis are just a few of the analytics and reports that can be generated by the tool.

The insurance company uses Konnect Insights to monitor the effectiveness of its competitors’ social media profiles in addition to measuring the performance of its own social media accounts. It keeps track of a variety of reports that aid in the brand’s marketing initiatives, including fan/follower growth, daily engagement comparison, engagement by platform post type, follower demographics, etc.

“Konnect Insights has been used by the us for more than three years. The platform has been easy to use and it’s utilized internally by our service team member. It also allowed us to reduce its agency costs while also significantly improve response times and efficacy to provide customer service.” – The Health Insurance Company Team 

Recent Case Studies

Indira Gandhi (Delhi) International Airport Taking CX To Greater Heights

Motilal Oswal Excels In Helping Customers Attain Their Personal Goals

Blinkit An Instant Delivery Service Provider Enhancing CX

Ather Energy, An Indian EV Company, Leveraging Consumers’ Insights

Wirality Media Marketing Agency Paving Efficient Creativity With Meaningful Data

Recent white papers.

Enhancing Online Reputation Management Strategies: A Comprehensive Whitepaper

Harnessing The Power Of Social Analytics: A Comprehensive Study On Extracting Actionable Insights From Social Media Data

Unlocking Actionable Insights: A Comprehensive Guide To Social Listening For Effective Decision-Making

Social Listening for Schools

Social Listening For Crisis Management

Recent post.

• Automate Your Way to Happier Customer Experiences
• Personalized Marketing Through Content Mapping
• Why Are Marketing Automations Important For CRM?
• Market Research: Why Do Brands Need It?
• Providing Better Customer Service – A Top Priority For Brands
• Automation , CRM Automation , Customer Analytics , Customer Care , Customer Experience , Customer Experience Management , Customer Sentiment , Customer Service , Customer Support , Health Insurance , Healthcare Plans , Insurance , Insurance Plan , Medical Care , Medical Insurance , Mediclaim , Online Reputation , Online Reputation Management

Get ‘One View of the Customer’ across all touchpoints

Unify your customer experience on social (X, Facebook, Instagram and many more), emails, calls, chats. Connect with your CRMs and Marketing Automations

• Privacy Overview
• Strictly Necessary Cookies

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.

Lemonade: Delighting Insurance Customers with AI and Behavioural Economics - A Disruptive InsurTech Business Model for Outstanding Customer Experience and Cost-Effective Service Excellence

Prizes & Awards

Winner of The Case Centre Awards and Competitions 2023 in the Category 'Marketing'

• Related Case Material
• Restricted Material for Instructors

This case explores InsurTech start-up Lemonade’s disruptive new business model aimed at creating and delivering a ‘shockingly great user experience’ around a ‘lovable brand’ – in an industry plagued by low customer satisfaction. The digital disruptor leverages principles of behavioural economics to address conflicts of interest and mistrust which prevail in the existing industry. It uses digital technologies to automate, accelerate and manage an impressive amount of work – with few employees – thereby reducings customer effort and , increasing customer satisfaction to achieve cost-effective service excellence. The effortless experience is aggressively priced and relies on a flexible subscription-based pricing model. Artificial intelligence (AI), data and machine learning are key in the race to achieving data parity with incumbents. The case culminates in Lemonade’s filing for an initial public offering (IPO) and asks where growth should come from next: incremental improvements, further expansion across the United States, global expansion beyond Germany and the Netherlands, or from new types of property.

This versatile case allows students to explore how digital disruption is impacting the insurance industry and understand the digital transformation of the customer experience (CX). They deep dive into the key building blocks and performance metrics of Lemonade’s innovative business model, with a special emphasis on AI, data and machine learning. It allows a discussion of how principles of behavioural economics come to life in an insurance setting and beyond, and demonstrates a hands-on approach to the design of the CX and customer-journey mapping in a digital context, such as job-to-be-done analyses, means-end laddering, and service blueprinting.

• Digital Disruption
• Digital Transformation
• Insurance Industry
• Digital Customer Experience
• Behavioural Economics
• Service Business Model Innovation
• Customer Effort
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Service Blueprinting
• Service Innovation
• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning
• Cost-Effective Service Excellence

Lemonade: Delighting Insurance Customers with AI and Behavioural Economics - A Disruptive InsurTech Business Model for Outstanding Customer Experience and Cost-Effective Service Excellence (Spanish)

By   Wolfgang Ulaga ,  Ziv Carmon ,  Laura Heely

Lemonade: Delighting Insurance Customers with AI and Behavioural Economics - A Disruptive InsurTech Business Model for Outstanding Customer Experience and Cost-Effective Service Excellence (Russian)

Lemonade: Delighting Insurance Customers with AI and Behavioural Economics - A Disruptive InsurTech Business Model for Outstanding Customer Experience and Cost-Effective Service Excellence (Portuguese)

By   Laura Heely ,  Wolfgang Ulaga ,  Ziv Carmon

Laura Heely

Ziv Carmon

Wolfgang Ulaga

Recommended cases.

WeWork - Service Excellence through Business Model Innovation: Creating Outstanding Customer Experiences by Leveraging Data, Analytics and Digital Technologies

Reference 6488

Published 02 May 2019

Length 15 page(s)

Topic Marketing

Region Global

How Insurance Works: A Window into the World of Property and Casualty Insurance in 2019

Reference 6605

Published 03 Dec 2020

Length 14 page(s)

Topic Strategy

Industry Insurance

To Catch a Thief: Explainable AI in Insurance Fraud Detection

Reference 6752

Published 23 Jan 2023

Length 11 page(s)

Topic Operations

Region Europe

Industry Security and Investigations

Recently Viewed

Board Process Simulation (A)

By   Stanislav Shekshnia

Birkenstock: Exit the Family. Enter a Professional CEO

By   Morten Bennedsen ,  Mark Stabile ,  Brian Henry

Rasurel: Reviving an Ageing Brand

By   Amitava Chattopadhyay ,  Séverine de Wulf

Deliberately Digital pp 255–264 Cite as

Case Study 4: The Digital Transformation of Insurance

• Hubert Tardieu 6 ,
• David Daly 7 ,
• José Esteban-Lauzán 8 ,
• John Hall 9 &
• George Miller 10  
• First Online: 06 February 2020

1542 Accesses

1 Citations

Part of the book series: Future of Business and Finance ((FBF))

Digital is providing great opportunities for insurance firms. The ability to collect and analyze ever-increasing quantities of data makes it possible to provide insurance that is highly personalised, and AI is enabling claims to be processed faster and more accurately than ever before. However, there are also threats for market incumbents, including the rise of aggregation platforms which can seize control of the customer relationship and relegate insurance providers to mere commodity suppliers. In this case study, we explore these trends, challenges, and opportunities, before finally covering how existing firms can leverage platform-based industry ecosystems.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Digital start-ups specialized in the Insurance market (FinTech is used for those specialized in banking).

Earnings Before Interest Tax Depreciation and Amortisation.

A discipline that merges telecommunication engineering and computer science to gather and manage information that enables the tracking and controlling of remote objects.

Electronic devices—usually capable of some data gathering, storage and/or processing capability—which can be worn in clothes or as accessories.

Information Commissioner’s Office. (2019). Intention to fine British Airways £183.39m under GDPR for data breach. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2019/07/ico-announces-intention-to-fine-british-airways/ . Accessed October 26, 2019.

Insurance Journal. (2019, October). Blockchain Initiative, B3i, Deploys Cat Excess of Loss Product for January Renewals. https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2019/10/15/545507.htm . Accessed October 26, 2019.

International Fraud Bureau. (2018, February). IFB supports IFED’s warning about ghost broking scams. https://insurancefraudbureau.org/media-centre/news/2018/ifb-supports-ifed-s-warning-about-ghost-broking-scams/ . Accessed October 26, 2019.

International Fraud Bureau: Crash for cash. https://insurancefraudbureau.org/insurance-fraud/crash-for-cash/ . Accessed October 26, 2019.

Krebson Security. (2019, May). First American Financial Corp. Leaked hundreds of millions of title insurance records. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/first-american-financial-corp-leaked-hundreds-of-millions-of-title-insurance-records/comment-page-1/ . Accessed October 26, 2019.

Lemonade blog. (2017, January). Lemonade sets a new world record. https://www.lemonade.com/blog/lemonade-sets-new-world-record/ . Accessed October 26, 2019.

McKinsey. (2018, December). Friends or foes: The rise of European aggregators and their impact on traditional insurers. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financial%20Services/Our%20Insights/Friends%20or%20foes%20The%20rise%20of%20European%20aggregators%20and%20their%20impact%20on%20traditional%20insurers/Friends-or-foes-The-rise-of-European-aggregators.ashx . Accessed October 26, 2019.

McKinsey. (2019, May). A new industry model for insurtech. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/insurance-blog/a-new-industry-model-for-insurtech . Accessed October 26, 2019.

The Actuary. (2017, December). Strength in numbers. https://www.theactuary.com/opinion/2017/12/strength-in-numbers/ . Accessed October 26, 2019.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Paris, France

Hubert Tardieu

Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, UK

Madrid, Spain

José Esteban-Lauzán

Warrington, Cheshire, UK

West Wittering, West Sussex, UK

George Miller

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hubert Tardieu .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter.

Tardieu, H., Daly, D., Esteban-Lauzán, J., Hall, J., Miller, G. (2020). Case Study 4: The Digital Transformation of Insurance. In: Deliberately Digital. Future of Business and Finance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37955-1_25

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37955-1_25

Published : 06 February 2020

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-37954-4

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-37955-1

eBook Packages : Business and Management Business and Management (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Customer Service Case Studies: Real-Life Examples Of Service Scenarios.

Are you looking for real-life examples of customer service scenarios that can help you improve your own customer service skills? Look no further!

In this article, we will explore a series of case studies that highlight different aspects of effective customer service. These case studies will provide you with valuable insights into how to handle challenging situations, resolve issues, and create positive experiences for your customers.

Customer service plays a crucial role in the success of any business. It is not just about answering phone calls or responding to emails; it is about building relationships and exceeding customer expectations. By studying real-life examples, you can gain a deeper understanding of the importance of effective customer service and learn strategies to enhance your own skills.

In each case study, we will delve into different scenarios and examine how businesses successfully handled them. From resolving product quality issues to dealing with difficult customers, these case studies will showcase various approaches and solutions that you can apply in your own work.

Get ready to dive into these insightful stories that demonstrate the power of exceptional customer service!

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

• Effective customer service is crucial for the success of a business.
• Empathy and proactive customer service are essential aspects of providing excellent customer service.
• Prompt resolution of product quality issues, with notification and compensation for affected customers, helps maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Handling difficult customers with a calm and empathetic approach, offering alternatives, and empowering them to make choices can build trust and loyalty.

The Importance of Effective Customer Service

You can’t underestimate the impact of great customer service – it’s like a warm cup of coffee on a chilly morning, instantly making you feel valued and appreciated.

In today’s competitive business landscape, providing effective customer service is more important than ever. Customers have numerous options at their fingertips, and one bad experience can send them running to your competitors. That’s why empathy plays a crucial role in customer service.

When customers feel understood and cared for, they’re more likely to become loyal advocates for your brand. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. In customer service, this means putting yourself in the shoes of your customers and genuinely listening to their concerns.

By showing empathy, you demonstrate that you value their emotions and are committed to finding a solution that meets their needs. This not only helps resolve issues effectively but also builds trust and strengthens the relationship with your customers.

Proactive customer service is another essential aspect of providing exceptional support. Instead of waiting for customers to come to you with problems or complaints, proactive customer service involves anticipating their needs and addressing any potential issues before they arise.

This approach shows that you’re dedicated to delivering an outstanding experience from start to finish. By taking the initiative, you can prevent problems from escalating and create positive interactions that leave a lasting impression on your customers.

The importance of effective customer service cannot be overstated. Empathy allows you to connect with your customers on a deeper level by understanding their emotions and concerns. Proactive customer service demonstrates your commitment to going above and beyond expectations by anticipating needs before they become problems.

By prioritizing these aspects in your approach to customer service, you can foster loyalty, build strong relationships with customers, and ultimately drive success for your business.

Case Study 1: Resolving a Product Quality Issue

Resolving a product quality issue can be challenging, but did you know that 86% of customers are more likely to repurchase from a company that resolves their complaint? When faced with a product quality issue, it’s important for companies to take immediate action and address the problem effectively.

One notable case study involves a product recall due to safety concerns. The company promptly notified customers about the recall through multiple channels such as email, social media, and website announcements. This proactive approach not only ensured customer safety but also demonstrated the company’s commitment to resolving the issue.

To further enhance customer satisfaction during this challenging time, the company offered compensation to affected customers. The compensation included a full refund for the recalled product as well as additional discounts on future purchases. By going above and beyond in compensating their customers, the company not only mitigated any potential negative feelings but also showed genuine concern for their customers’ wellbeing.

In addition to addressing individual complaints, the company took steps towards preventing similar issues in the future. They implemented stricter quality control measures throughout their production process and conducted thorough inspections before releasing any products into the market. This proactive approach reassured customers that their concerns were taken seriously and instilled confidence in the brand’s commitment to delivering high-quality products.

By resolving a product quality issue promptly and ensuring customer satisfaction through compensation and preventive measures, companies can not only retain existing customers but also build trust with new ones. It’s crucial for businesses to recognize that effective customer service goes beyond simply resolving complaints; it requires taking responsibility for failures, implementing meaningful solutions, and continuously improving processes to prevent similar issues from arising again in the future.

Case Study 2: Handling a Difficult Customer

Navigating through challenging interactions with clients can be a test of your company’s ability to handle difficult situations. Dealing with angry customers requires a delicate balance of empathy, patience, and problem-solving skills.

One real-life example of a company successfully managing a difficult situation involved an irate customer who had received a damaged product.

In this case, the customer contacted the company’s customer service department immediately after receiving the damaged product. The representative on the phone remained calm and empathetic throughout the conversation, acknowledging the customer’s frustration. They apologized sincerely for any inconvenience caused and assured the customer that they would resolve the issue promptly.

The representative then offered several options to address the problem, including sending a replacement or providing a refund. By presenting these alternatives, they empowered the customer to choose what solution best suited their needs. This approach helped defuse tension and created an atmosphere of collaboration rather than confrontation.

Ultimately, by effectively managing this difficult situation and prioritizing customer satisfaction, the company not only resolved the issue but also built trust and loyalty with their client base.

Case Study 3: Going Above and Beyond for a Customer

Exceeding expectations and leaving a lasting impression, one company went the extra mile to ensure a memorable experience for a dissatisfied client. The customer, let’s call her Sarah, had purchased a high-end laptop from this company but encountered numerous technical issues soon after receiving it. Frustrated with the product’s performance and the lack of support she received initially, Sarah reached out to the company’s customer service department for assistance.

To address Sarah’s concerns promptly, the customer service representative assigned to her case took immediate action. Recognizing that resolving her technical issues alone would not suffice in restoring Sarah’s trust and satisfaction, they decided to go above and beyond what was expected. The representative personally followed up with Sarah daily to provide updates on their progress in fixing her laptop. They also offered additional compensation for the inconvenience caused by sending her a complimentary accessory package.

In addition to their exceptional level of communication, this company created a personalized experience for Sarah through small gestures that left an indelible mark on her overall perception of their brand. One example was when they surprised her by upgrading her laptop’s warranty without any additional cost. This unexpected act not only demonstrated their commitment to providing quality products but also highlighted their dedication towards ensuring customer satisfaction.

By going above and beyond in addressing Sarah’s concerns and surpassing her expectations at every turn, this company exemplified outstanding customer service. Their proactive approach not only resolved technical issues efficiently but also left a lasting impression on Sarah concerning how much they valued her as a loyal customer. Through personalized attention, generous compensation, and unexpected upgrades, they not only ensured Sarah’s satisfaction but also fostered a long-term relationship based on trust and loyalty. This case study serves as a powerful reminder that going the extra mile can make all the difference in customer satisfaction and retention.

Case Study 4: Turning a Negative Review into a Positive Experience

If your business has ever received negative feedback, it’s important to know how to turn that experience into a positive one.

In this case study, we will explore how a business addressed a customer’s concerns and transformed their perception from negative to positive.

By taking the necessary steps and going above and beyond, the business not only resolved the issue but also improved their reputation in the process.

The negative feedback received by the business

Despite your best efforts, your business was bombarded with a barrage of scathing feedback that left you reeling. Customers expressed their dissatisfaction with the quality of your products and the poor customer service they received.

These negative reviews not only affected customer retention but also posed a threat to your brand reputation. The negative feedback highlighted areas where improvements were needed. It pointed out flaws in your product design, manufacturing processes, and communication channels.

While it may be disheartening to receive such criticism, it presents an opportunity for you to address these issues and enhance the overall customer experience. By acknowledging the shortcomings and taking immediate action to rectify them, you can regain customers’ trust and loyalty while rebuilding your brand’s reputation.

The steps taken to address the customer’s concerns

After receiving the negative feedback, we quickly took action to address the customer’s concerns and improve our products and services. We understand that addressing customer complaints is essential for maintaining a positive reputation and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Our first step was to reach out to the customer directly, expressing our apologies for any inconvenience caused and assuring them that their concerns were being taken seriously.

To resolve the customer’s issues, we implemented a thorough investigation into the matter. This involved examining the specific details of their complaint, evaluating our internal processes, and identifying any areas where improvements could be made. By conducting this analysis, we were able to pinpoint the root cause of the problem and develop an effective solution.

Once we identified areas for improvement, we promptly made necessary changes to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. This included updating our training programs for staff members involved in customer service interactions and enhancing quality control measures throughout our production process. We also communicated these updates transparently with all relevant stakeholders to ensure everyone understood our commitment to resolving customer issues.

Addressing customer complaints is not just about solving individual problems; it is about continuously improving our overall products and services. By taking immediate action upon receiving negative feedback, we demonstrate our dedication to providing exceptional experiences for every customer.

We remain committed to resolving any issues promptly while striving to exceed expectations in delivering high-quality products and top-notch service.

The transformation of the customer’s perception and improved reputation

Now that the steps have been taken to address the customer’s concerns, let’s discuss the transformation of their perception and the improved reputation of your business.

By promptly addressing the customer’s issues and providing a satisfactory resolution, you’ve demonstrated your commitment to customer satisfaction. This level of responsiveness not only resolves the immediate problem but also leaves a lasting impression on the customer.

As a result, their perception of your brand is likely to improve significantly. They’ll appreciate your willingness to listen, understand, and take action to rectify any issues they may have faced. This positive experience can lead to increased brand loyalty as customers recognize that you value their feedback and are committed to delivering exceptional service.

To further enhance customer satisfaction and foster brand loyalty, consider implementing these strategies:

• Personalized follow-up: Reach out to customers after resolving their concerns with personalized messages or phone calls. This gesture shows that you genuinely care about their experience and want to ensure their ongoing satisfaction.
• Proactive communication: Keep customers informed about any changes or improvements related to the issue they encountered. Sharing updates showcases transparency and builds trust in your ability to continuously improve.
• Loyalty rewards program: Offer incentives or exclusive benefits for loyal customers who continue choosing your brand despite any initial challenges they may have faced. Rewarding their loyalty encourages repeat business and strengthens long-term relationships.

By investing in improving customer satisfaction and building brand loyalty, you can create a positive reputation for your business while fostering long-term success in an increasingly competitive market.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key elements of effective customer service.

Effective customer service requires several key elements.

One interesting statistic is that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. This highlights the importance of providing exceptional service.

Effective communication plays a crucial role in customer service as it allows you to understand the needs and concerns of your customers, while also conveying information clearly and concisely.

Empathy and understanding are equally important, as they enable you to connect with customers on an emotional level, showing them that their satisfaction is your top priority.

By incorporating these elements into your customer service approach, you can create positive experiences that leave a lasting impression on your customers.

How can companies measure the success of their customer service efforts?

To measure the success of your customer service efforts, you can utilize various customer satisfaction metrics and conduct thorough customer feedback analysis.

Customer satisfaction metrics, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Effort Score (CES), provide valuable insights into how satisfied your customers are with the service they received. These metrics allow you to quantify customer sentiment and identify areas for improvement.

Additionally, analyzing customer feedback through surveys or social media monitoring enables you to understand specific pain points and address them proactively.

By consistently measuring these indicators and taking action based on the results, you can continuously enhance your customer service performance and ensure a positive experience for your customers.

What are some common challenges faced by customer service representatives?

Handling difficult customers and managing high call volumes can be incredibly challenging for customer service representatives. Dealing with irate customers can feel like trying to calm a hurricane with a feather, as their frustrations can reach astronomical levels. It requires an extraordinary level of patience and empathy to navigate through their anger and find a resolution that satisfies both parties.

Additionally, managing high call volumes can feel like juggling flaming swords while walking on a tightrope. The constant influx of calls puts immense pressure on representatives to provide quick and efficient assistance without compromising the quality of service.

However, despite these Herculean tasks, customer service representatives rise above the challenges by employing exceptional communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and an unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction.

How can companies improve their customer service skills and knowledge?

To improve their customer service skills and knowledge, companies should invest in comprehensive training programs that provide employees with the necessary tools and techniques to handle different scenarios. These programs can include modules on effective communication, problem-solving, and empathy to ensure that representatives are equipped to handle any customer interactions.

Additionally, implementing feedback systems that allow customers to provide their input and suggestions can also be beneficial. This feedback can help identify areas for improvement and enable companies to make necessary adjustments in their processes or training programs.

By prioritizing ongoing training initiatives and actively seeking customer feedback, companies can continually enhance their customer service skills and knowledge, leading to improved overall customer satisfaction levels.

What are some best practices for handling customer complaints and resolving issues?

When it comes to handling customer complaints and resolving issues, think of yourself as a skilled navigator guiding a ship through stormy waters. Customer feedback is like the wind, sometimes gentle and other times fierce, but always pushing you towards improvement.

Conflict resolution is your compass, helping you find the right path to address concerns and turn unhappy customers into satisfied ones. Actively listen to their grievances, empathize with their frustrations, and offer swift solutions that demonstrate your commitment to their satisfaction.

By taking ownership of the problem and going above and beyond to resolve it, you can transform a dissatisfied customer into a loyal advocate for your brand.

In conclusion, effective customer service is crucial for businesses to thrive in today’s competitive market. As demonstrated by the case studies discussed, handling product quality issues, difficult customers, and negative reviews with empathy and proactive solutions can turn potentially negative experiences into positive ones.

One interesting statistic that highlights the impact of great customer service is that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience (Source: PwC). This statistic evokes an emotional response as it emphasizes the value customers place on exceptional service. By investing in providing top-notch customer service, businesses not only create loyal customers but also have the potential to increase their revenue.

To ensure success in customer service scenarios, it is essential for businesses to empower their employees with proper training and resources. By equipping them with problem-solving skills, effective communication techniques, and a genuine desire to help customers, companies can build strong relationships and foster trust. Additionally, embracing technology solutions such as AI-powered chatbots or self-service options can streamline processes and provide faster resolutions.

In summary, delivering exceptional customer service requires a proactive approach that focuses on resolving issues promptly while exceeding expectations. By prioritizing the needs of customers and going above and beyond to provide personalized solutions, businesses can create memorable experiences that result in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Remember, investing in superior customer service is not just about satisfying your current customers; it’s about attracting new ones who’re willing to pay more for an outstanding experience.

The eSoft Editorial Team, a blend of experienced professionals, leaders, and academics, specializes in soft skills, leadership, management, and personal and professional development. Committed to delivering thoroughly researched, high-quality, and reliable content, they abide by strict editorial guidelines ensuring accuracy and currency. Each article crafted is not merely informative but serves as a catalyst for growth, empowering individuals and organizations. As enablers, their trusted insights shape the leaders and organizations of tomorrow.

View all posts

Similar Posts

How to Become a Healthcare Compliance Officer?

If you want to become a healthcare compliance officer, here are some tips and steps to help you achieve your goal in the healthcare industry.

What Does Research Consistently Demonstrate About Nonverbal Communication?

Discover what research consistently shows about nonverbal communication and how it impacts our interactions. Gain valuable insights into the power of body language and facial expressions.

Measuring Corporate Training Effectiveness: Tools and Strategies

You want to ensure that your corporate training programs are effective. But how can you measure their impact? In this article, we will explore the tools and strategies that can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your training initiatives. By utilizing surveys, feedback, and data analysis, you can gain valuable insights into the success of…

Emotional Intelligence in Crisis Management and Recovery

In the realm of crisis management and recovery, the role of emotional intelligence cannot be understated. As organizations and individuals navigate through challenging and unpredictable circumstances, the ability to understand and manage emotions, both within oneself and in others, becomes a crucial skill. This goes beyond the traditional focus on technical expertise and rational decision-making,…

How Can You Overcome Communication Barriers?

Overcoming communication barriers can be challenging, but it is essential for effective communication. Here are some tips to help you overcome communication barriers and improve your communication skills.

Customer Service Management: Leading And Organizing Service Teams

Are you looking to improve your customer service team management skills? Leading and organizing service teams can be a challenging task, but with the right strategies in place, you can create a high-performing team that consistently delivers exceptional customer experiences. In this article, we will explore key principles and best practices for effective customer service…

Fill in the form below so we can explore ways to reach your goals or call us at 1800 577 346 .

Leave your details below and we'll be in touch.

Case Study: Terrible Customer Experience With My Insurer (+ Recommendations)

I was unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of some storm damage a couple of months ago, during which time I had to engage my home insurer to help me undergo the necessary repairs.

Water had seeped into my entire townhouse resulting in damage to carpet, floorboards, a mattress, several electrical devices and walls and parquetry, all of which would have to be replaced or repaired.

What followed was an inside look into what was perhaps a case study in what not to do when it comes to customer experience and why the door is wide open for insurance startups looking to disrupt the space by offering significantly better customer service.

So without further adieu I bring to you all of the pain points on my journey from first call along with recommendations of how to fix it (yes, free customer experience consulting for insurers reading this).

I was very tempted to include the insurer’s name in this article but I’m sure they (and my very smart audience) can work it out.

1 - No Update on Wait Time / Place in Queue / Call Back Service

The first few times I called it was on the back of a recent storm so understandably wait times were long. However, I was given no indication as to just how long or how far I had progressed in the queue. Unlike other companies with more progressed customer service, there was no offer of a call back either.

I had to hear the same "thank you for waiting, your call has progressed in the queue and we'll be with you as soon as possible" in between ads every 30 seconds.

FYI, the longest I waited was 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Recommendations:

• Let people know what the approximate wait time is
• Let people know what position they’re in in the queue
• Offer a ‘wait in silence’ service
• Offer a call back service

2 - No “Sorry For The Wait”

While a long wait time can be excused, given increased demands on staff post a natural disaster, insult was added to injury on several occasions when not as much as a simple “sorry for the wait” was offered. Often I was greeted by an assistant asking for my claim number in a cold, robotic voice.

On one occasion, I mentioned that I thought it was pretty poor that even the long wait time when I finally got through was not even acknowledged and still got nothing but silence in response.

• Add some humanity to calls
• Acknowledge the other person’s time has been wasted and extend a simple apology on behalf of the company. People will understand as long as it’s coming from a genuine place.
• Say "sorry for the wait"!

3 - Trying to Upsell Customers While Having a Bad Experience

To further add insult to injury while waiting for more than one hour on several occasions to speak to a consultant, the entire time ads are spun trying to upsell customers different types of insurance. The last thing I was thinking about whilst trying to get through to a human being was buying more insurance services. There’s a right way and wrong way to upsell customers insurance services.

• Provide the option to turn of music/ads while on hold, particularly when the wait time is long

4 - Poor Social Media Engagement

Initially they responded to my tweets on Twitter with generic robotic responses which didn’t actually answer my question or concerns. They have since deleted their responses which actually looks worse.

• Don’t have a social presence if you’re not going to use it
• Don’t respond with generic answers that don’t acknowledge the human being behind the Twitter handle or address the person’s questions or concerns

5 - Expectations Set But Not Met

When I first called my insurer I was told that somebody would be at the property within hours to check and seal the roof to prevent additional damage and to salvage the carpet from ruin by removing the water it had absorbed.

I was assured that “we want to prevent further damage”.

Nobody visited for three days by which point  the carpet was absolutely ruined and required replacement.

On one other occasion, I was told that I would receive a call back within two days but had to follow up several days later due to a lack of said call back.

• Don’t set expectations that can’t be met
• Set realistic expectations and add a contingency buffer to that

ADVERTISEMENT

6 - Untargeted Communication

In between ads and being told that I’m an important customer during my 100 minute wait, I was also sold the online ‘claim lodging app’, despite the fact that I was sitting in the existing claims queue.

• Align communication with the queue the caller is in
• How about an online app to check on the status of your existing claim and leave comments/questions for review?

7 - Excess taken out of settlement without prior notice

After sleeping on my couch for five weeks due to a ruined, wet mattress, I was finally given the all clear to have funds forwarded to me to pick up a new mattress. The value of funds? $800. However, rather than advise me up front, the excess of $500 was deducted from this amount before being deposited into my account, leaving me with $300 to spend on replacing an $800 matress.

This was after I had been told that an invoice would be sent to be so that I could pay the excess within a given timeframe.

Of course the excess would have to be paid, but making expectations known again is critically important, particularly when it comes to planning and managing one’s cash-flow.

• Don’t just remove an excess from an insurance payment without previously advising the customer
• Don’t blindly point to the insurance policy as a form of defense for this path of action
• Invoice customers for the excess instead of take it out of payments which have been made for a purpose
• If you have to remove excess from a payment, advise the customer beforehand so that they can better plan and manage their cashflow

8 - Contractors too busy to engage during busy periods

Customers have paid premiums to their insurance company in order to get support in times of need. Post a storm or disaster of some kind it’s to be expected that an insurance company's preferred vendors and sub-contractors will be busy. But customers have paid premiums to get repairs carried out.

• In the event that preferred vendors are not available, customers should be permitted to engage their own independent contractors or buy replacement goods up to a certain pre-defined value, especially where time is of the essence and goods stand to perish if not tended to immediately, as was the case with the degeneration of my carpeting.

9 - Communication poor between my insurer and their subcontractor resulting in numerous call backs and follow-ups

• The insurer’s sub-contractor had advised me to call the insurer on a Saturday to speak to a client manager. I then waited 30 minutes to get through to the insurer on this occasion and was informed that client managers don’t work on weekends.
• I was told to call the insurer by a representative to speak to a client manager at 8am on a weekday. Upon calling, I was informed that client managers don’t start their day until 8:30am upon calling.
• On one occasion I was told by an insurance advisor that “we were under the impression that it had all been fixed” despite no work having been performed.
• Improve communication between the insurer and sub-contractors (a shared dashboard perhaps?)
• Ensure all employees of both parties understand when people are available in order to avoid unnecessary customer wait time and further frustration

10 - No Accountability, Ownership or Monitoring

Rather than have one point of contact, I found myself being told by insurance advisors to call a client manager or the sub-contractor and by the sub-contractor to call the insurer, oftentimes getting through to the person I was told to speak to only to be told that I should speak to somebody else. At one stage I felt like a pinball being ricocheted between parts of this minefield that is the progression

Furthermore, there appeared to be no monitoring or follow up in place by the insurer to check in on the status of repairs, leaving it all to me. On one occasion contractors did not turn up on the day I was told they would carry out repairs and I had to follow up...again.

• One point of contact
• Monitoring in place (single dashboard between the insurer and its subcontractors perhaps?)
• Clear communication lines. If being transferred or told to spend time calling other parties, ensure I am being referred to the right people.

We’re living in an age where experiences like this simply aren’t sustainable.

Customers are in charge, they expect more and they will vote with their feet and they'll tell the world about it via social media.

Optimising customer experience can be the difference between success (eg. UBER) and failure (eg. taxis).

How many of these customer experience mistakes is your company making?

Workflow Podcast

The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.

100 DOS AND DON'TS FOR CORPORATE INNOVATION

To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.

What to read next

View all >>

STEP INTO THE METAVERSE

Unlock new opportunities and markets by taking your brand into the brave new world., steve glaveski.

Steve Glaveski is the co-founder of Collective Campus , author of Time Rich , Employee to Entrepreneur and host of the Future Squared podcast. He’s a chronic autodidact, and he’s into everything from 80s metal and high-intensity workouts to attempting to surf and do standup comedy.

THE WEB3 VALUE CHAIN: 50 WEB3 USE CASES FOR ORGANIZATIONS OLD AND NEW

The Role Of UX in Improving Your Customer Journey

Elevate Your Customer Experience Game: 36 Must-Follow Dos and Don'ts for Skyrocketing Satisfaction and Loyalty

Web3’s Customer Support Problem

6 Mistakes Your Law Firm is Making with Client Experience

The Future of Open Innovation

How Design Thinking Works

10 Innovation Labs to visit in Singapore

4 Examples of Companies Leading the Way in Customer Experience

Corporate Ideation: Why Ideas Die and How to Revive Them

6 Innovation Fails Learnt from a ‘Men Only’ Co-Working Space

Get the latest content first.

Receive thought leadership in the form of blogs, ebooks, innovation resources, videos, invitations to exclusive events as well as the latest episodes of Future², our iTunes chart-topping podcast all about corporate innovation and entrepreneurship.

• Join our team
• Become an affiliate
• San Francisco
• Los Angeles

6 Interesting Customer Service Case Studies to Inspire You

July 18, 2023

Share This Article:

An 11-year-old boy’s experience with LEGO customer service changed the company’s brand perception. It’s not only brought in more customers but also justified their lead position in the market. Here, we will discuss a few more interesting customer service case studies.

One good service can not just help one customer but also influence future customers. Reading others’ stories will help you understand ways to overcome new challenges.

I will start with some popular ones.

Popular customer experience case studies

Customer service is not just limited to providing product-related support anymore. We have passed the line way back. As the market gets more critical, everyone is running a few extra miles. Even the top companies in the field are not compromising anything. 

Let’s start with JetBlue’s customer service case study.

JetBlue sets an example of how you can use social media to provide excellent customer service. They have multiple teams at different levels that are active on Twitter. And there are many examples of it.

Here is one: Paul once tweeted that he couldn’t find Starbucks at the gate while boarding the flight. JetBlue immediately responded with an alternative, which was free for him.

Another challenge that JetBlue faced was the winter storm in early January of 2017 . They had to cancel a lot of flights at that time. And because of this, thousands of people were impacted.

The challenge here is that JetBlue cannot change the weather or ensure a safe flight during a storm. But they can provide up-to-date information.

So, they started to tweet updates about the storm and the flight schedule the whole time. As a result, even though the passengers were frustrated, they were happy with JetBlue’s service.

Zappos has a good reputation for providing the best customer support. And it has a lot of interesting customer service case studies. One particular service case created a lot of buzz in the market.

Zappos’s service agent talked with a customer for 10 hours in one call. And, surprisingly, Zappos took it in a positive way. The call wasn’t even about any service. 

This long call started with where and how that customer lives. Then, eventually, it turns into clothing and fashion-related conversation. Finally, the customer ended the call with the purchase of a pair of UGG boots.

It breaks all the records and wins a long-running battle. Which one is better, automated calls or live agents? And without a doubt, it’s the personal touch that steals the crown every time.

This customer service case study is a bit more heartwarming. 11-year-old James Groccia has Asperger’s syndrome. He was looking at an expensive LEGO set for his birthday. It’s the exclusive Emerald Night Train set.

James saved money for two years. The money came from his birthday gifts and his participation in research. But he was heartbroken when he found out that it was unavailable.

His mother looked everywhere possible. On Amazon, eBay, or any other platform, it was either out of stock or too expensive. Eventually, with the help of a social worker, James wrote to LEGO.

It was a huge surprise to James that LEGO wrote back. And not just that, they surprised him with the exclusive Emerald Night Train set just before his 11th birthday.

It wasn’t easy for LEGO as well. It was a discontinued set and a collectible. They had to track it down for him. This extra mile not only made that customer happy but also established a brand perception that cares about its customers.

WPManageNinja’s customer service case study

While we were looking for customer experience stories, we talked with our Support team head, Mr. Kamrul Islam , here at the WPManageNinja office. He shared a few interesting case studies with us.

“I made a full website using your table builder plugin.”

Our support team faces and solves a lot of interesting cases every day. So, from a lot of stories, we have chosen three interesting stories to share with you in this blog. And, we are not going to be technical here at all.

So keep reading.

Story #1: Fluent Form

Let’s start with a simple one. One of our clients creates a ticket with an issue through our Fluent Support helpdesk system . 

Ticket created from customer’s end

I am a Fluent Form user. And I want to create a booking form using your form builder.

Thanks a lot for contacting us. Let us get into it and see what we can do for you. We will get back to you ASAP.

Booking system plugins are typically used for appointment booking. However, our support team needs to find a way to use our form builder plugin to accomplish this task.

But instead of saying, “This is not possible,” to our client, they get to work. Started figuring out a workaround for this. For obvious reasons, a form builder cannot provide a booking system facility, but the team finds a way to use it as a basic date booking system.

Our support team used two date-picker blocks from our Fluent Form builder and used different blocks to pick the starting and ending dates. Our team got in touch with the customer and gave him the solution.

But the customer knocked again.

Ticket continue

I am happy with the solution, but I’m facing an issue. I picked one date from the “Start from” calendar drop-down, but I can still see the previous dates are active in the “End at” drop-down. I want it disabled.

Here is a screenshot.

We can certainly help you out with this. We will get back to you shortly with a solution. We really appreciate your patience, and thanks a lot for being with us.

As our support specialist stated, they provided a solid solution. They had to write some custom code to implement a new feature in the client’s system.

That customer not only gave us a 5-star rating for our service but also became one of our loyal customers.

Story #2: Ninja Table and Fluent Form:

Speaking of adding custom features, it’s one of the regular jobs for our support team. Support agents, from time to time, write custom codes to fulfill customer requests.

Once, we got another ticket about a dynamic integration between two of our products. And the request came in multiple layers.

Hi, I am ruining a multi-user-based site, and recently I purchased the Ninja table for my site. I bought this to list my users information in a single table. But after a few tries, I failed to do it. Can you help me?

Thanks a lot for connecting us. We can help you with your issue. We will get back to you ASAP with a solution. Thanks a lot for being with us.

Our support agent needed to create a table from the site’s SQL data that contained user information.

It was an easy fix. Ninja Table has that feature built-in. Our expert agent wrote a few lines of script to pull users’ information. It created a table from SQL data.

The tickets continue.

Now I can see all the users’ information in a single table. But now I want to display only logged-in user information in the table. The rest of the user’s information should be hidden for that user.

Sure, we can do that for you.

So, the support agent created a custom shortcode to embed the table on the display page. That custom shortcode restricted other users’ information to the logged-in user.  

But the client came to our support team again.

Hi, I’m very happy with the output. But now I need one more thing from you. I need another column in the table with a form link in it. If a customer clicks on it, it will open a new page with the form on it. And I need it to be prefilled with the information from the table. I don’t want my customer to fill out the form again.

We can certainly help you with this. Our engineers will get into it and get back to you soon with a solution.

Our support team has two challenges in solving this ticket.

• A table created using SQL data has a limitation. You cannot add a new column to the table without touching the SQL data. Altering SQL data is not a good idea at all. So, adding a new column in the table with a form link is difficult.
• Pull the data from the table to prefill a form with logged-in users data. And then make the prefilled input box uneditable.

Our team starts with the first challenge. We cannot create a new column without altering the SQL data. But then they figured out a way to replace particular data with the desired data. And in this case, the desired data is the form page link.

So, they used a column from the SQL data set that did not have important information. Using the custom scripting, they replaced the SQL-pushed data with the form page link. Part one is solved.

For the second challenge, our team used Fluent Form. They integrate the Fluent form with the Ninja table. With the help of some custom scripting, they were able to pull the data from the table into the form’s input box.

The client was really happy with the outcome. Just because of this service, the client bought all of our products. And there is no need to mention that the client became one of our advocates.

Story #3: Ninja Table

Customers can show you totally different use cases for your product. This particular story is the best example of this statement.

Hi, I am using your Ninja Table plugin on my site. I need to link a Google Sheet with the plugin. Is it possible?

Thanks a lot for connecting us. We have a built-in integration facility for Google Sheets in the table settings.

At this point, the WP Manage Ninja team sent a step-by-step video tutorial to show how to do the integration. and the client was happy with this.

But shortly after that, clients connected with our support team again with multiple queries.

I need your help to customize the table. I want to make it look different from a regular table. Specifically, I want to hide the header and border and resize the columns and rows. I also want to know if I can apply custom styling to the data from the Google Sheet and if an image inserted in the Google Sheet will appear in the table. So somehow, I don’t want it to look like a table.

Thanks again for connecting with us. All of your requests are possible. However, it would be helpful if we could have access to the site table on your site. This would allow us to provide you with a better suggestion.

The client shared a link to the site with the support team. The whole team was a bit confused.

Hi again. Thanks a lot for sharing the site link with us. But we may need a little more information about the site. And please specify where you want to put the final table. Also, can you please give us a link to the actual table?

I gave you the link to the table.

We are very sorry; you just gave us a site link. We cannot see any tables here.

That is the table.

May you please elaborate? What do you mean by that?

I made a full website using your table builder plugin.

After some inspection of the site, our agent realized our client had made a fully functional website using our table builder plugin. We were just amazed by this type of use case.

The client also linked the table with a Google Sheet, which we helped them with previously. This means that they do not need to log in to the WordPress dashboard to change any data.

The client can simply make changes to the Google Sheet from their phone, and our table plugin will automatically update the data on the site.  

This is so far one of the most unique and clever use cases we have seen for any of our products.

Takeaways customer service case studies

Up until now, we have shared six different customer service case studies. But these are not just stories. These case studies tell us what excellent service is. It teaches us how we can go the extra mile and how it can impact our customers.

Essential qualities of the best customer service reps

So, here are a few takeaways from these case studies:

• Be responsive. Respond to the customer, even if it’s a tweet. Be quick and efficient.
• Be helpful. Go above and beyond to help customers. This could mean tracking down a discontinued product, giving a refund, or even just sending a handwritten note. Personalization matters in customer relations. A good gesture could be to send customers gratitude notes that have been carefully crafted to suit their tastes. You can design cards , for instance, which gives you ample room for creativity and personal touch. Even when they don’t know it’s not required. This could mean offering advice, making recommendations, or just listening.
• Be transparent. Be honest with customers, even when it’s not good news. Customers always appreciate a direct response, even when they are angry.
• Be personal. Take the time to get to know the customer’s individual needs. This will help you provide more personalized service. Which will make them feel special.
• Be human. Don’t hold your personality back; let your human side shine through. Show that you care about the customer and their experience. This could mean using humor, being empathetic, or just being yourself. The personal level of connection is effortless. This will make your service seamless.
• Go the extra mile. Go above and beyond to help customers. This could mean tracking down a discontinued product, giving a refund, or even just sending a handwritten note. Whether you need to write custom code, provide training, or even just be a sounding board, let it be.
• Be creative. If you can’t find a solution, that’s fine. Go out of the box and come up with a new one.
• Be patient. Sometimes, it takes time to find the right solution that works. Be patient with customers and stay with them until they’re happy with it.
• Be open-minded. Customers may use your product in ways that you never intended. Be open to new ideas.
• Be impressed. Be amazed by the imagination and creativity of your clients. When you see customers using your product in a unique way, make sure to let them know how impressed you are.

Final thoughts

Being a tech support specialist or service agent is a challenging job, no doubt. A customer can come up with any type of issue. Hance, the service providers have to be sound enough to deal with any surprises.

The service-dependent industries are constantly facing a variety of cases every day. That’s why customer service case studies are a must-read for support and service providers. And, on the other hand, these stories can bring in new customers.

Start off with a powerful ticketing system that delivers smooth collaboration right out of the box.

Md. Ariful Basher

Hi, this is Abir, a web designer and full-time content writer passionate about psycho-thrillers and sci-fi. I focus on creating captivating content and visually stunning websites, ensuring a top-notch customer experience. Also, a food enthusiast!

Related Articles

Fluent Support 1.7.8: MemberPress Integration, Ticket search and more

GCP VS AWS: The Best Cloud Development Platform

Use WordPress Slider Plugin to Make Your Website Captivating

Customer Service Automation – How to Save Time & Delight Customers

WordPress Admin Dashboard: A Complete Walkthrough

Disney Four Keys Of Successful Customer Service You Should Adopt

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Service impacted in Haiti due to civil unrest ...More
• Ocean Service impacted on US East Coast ...More
• Service impacted for all international air freight from India ...More
• Service Disruption in the Red Sea and Suez Canal ...More
• Service impacted in Israel and surrounding region ...More
• Service Alert due to Situation in Ukraine ...More

UPS Mail Innovations ®

Looking for mail solutions that require less prep time, provide consistent transit times, reliable delivery and better postal rates? We're a mailing services provider that can pick up, process and provide interim transportation of all your mail and parcels to both domestic and international locations.

A Different Way to Do Mail

Arts™ login.

ARTS reporting repository for existing customers.

Mail Piece Tracking

Track your domestic mail shipments here, up to 25 at one time.

Get a Quote

Get a free mailing analysis and quote for your business.

Mail Innovations Services

We have the infrastructure, systems and reach to transport mail and parcels through the entire mailing cycle. Whether you're mailing across the country or the world, we integrate with postal systems for final mile delivery. We can provide cost and performance improvements, too.

• Domestics Mail Services
• International Mail Services
• Returns Mail Services

Consistently achieve transit times comparable to First Class Mail ® plus one day, utilizing the extensive UPS Mail Innovations network, and our unique working relationship with the U.S. Postal Service ® . We handle functions—such as labeling and sorting qualified mail —normally done by USPS and pass the savings to you. Through our national network of processing facilities, proprietary software and technology, we can process and transport domestic mail to its point of induction within 24-48 hours of pickup.

We can help reduce the complexity of doing business globally with easier, more affordable international mail solutions. We handle both priority and economy class qualified mail, from processing to transportation, so you can save money and improve delivery times. We handle shipments to postal authorities in more than 200 countries, with international options that can be customized to your specific mailing needs.

Need a more efficient, economical returns solution? Try UPS Mail Innovations ® Returns. Leveraging the USPS ® for “first-mile" package retrieval, we can pick up, sort, transport and deliver a prepaid return package right back to the shipper. With easy-to-use labels, multiple drop-off points—including residential mailboxes, postal collection boxes, local post offices, authorized postal service outlets or a scheduled pickup through usps.com—consistent transit times and tracking through ups.com, returns are a breeze.

Innovative Mailing Ideas for Your Business

Improved process efficiency optimized operational flow and expedited transportation for just about any mailer.

We help you comply with the stringent regulations and guidelines governing induction of financial mailings into the postal system. Qualified mail* includes enrollment packets; forms; information kits; membership packets; prospectuses; proxy notices, and welcome kits.

Accountability matters. We can provide increased accuracy and acceptance rates by the USPS, plus CASS certification for automated flats. Qualified mail* includes enrollment packets; forms; insurance benefits; provider listings; questionnaires; outreach programs, and more.

When cost-control matters, you can efficiently mail lightweight products (under 1 lb.) to achieve desired margins and delivery time. Qualified mail* includes advertisements; circulars and direct marketing; apparel and cosmetics; catalogs; CDs; DVDs; invitations; product samples; video games, etc.

Our growing network of 22 mail processing facilities helps direct mail, advertising, accounting and other services cost-effectively mail even large, non-standard-size pieces or other complex projects. Qualified mail* includes: brochures; CDs; media guides; news releases/kits; newsletters; surveys, etc.

In a rapidly changing business, cost efficiency means profitability. We can help you save up to 25% on mailing costs while ensuring First-Class ® comparable service. Qualified mail* includes calendars; information packets; flyers; marketing materials; photographs; promotional items; travel brochures, and more.

We provide enhanced security for sensitive government mailings, and all our key people have U.S. Postal Services Mail Quality Control (MQC) certification. We offer bonded drivers, vehicles and containers that can be sealed, and security tagged, state-of-the-art surveillance and monitoring equipment. Qualified mail* includes announcements; booklets; environmental notices; forms; legal documents; manuals; questionnaires; surveys, etc.

Whether it's sending time-sensitive material to large groups or bulky educational supplies, mailings can be complicated and costly. All our key people have U.S. Postal Services Mail Quality Control (MQC) certification and are fully trained to assist with qualified mail* including: admission packets; course schedule booklets; new student orientation booklets; surveys; newsletters; CDs; catalogs, and more.

See the Scope of Our Network

More than 2 million square feet of processing space in 22 US locations.

Get the eBrochure Open the link in a new window

Got Questions?

From key terms to frequently asked questions to support links, click the icons for more information.

Glossary of Terms

Key mailing terms to help with your transition process and invoicing.

UPS Ready ® Program Support

Get help integrating UPS service functionality into your company's software.

UPS Worldship ® Printer Support

Get the most out of your Worldship system.

Worldship Installation/ Integration Support

All the resources to install, upgrade and support your UPS Worldship system.

Worldship Updates

Ask an expert.

Questions? We’ll connect you to people with answers.

Need assistance with small package questions?

Domestic Mailing FAQs

Mailing in the U.S. Your questions answered.**

UPS Mail Innovations inducts your mail piece into the U.S. Postal Service within 24-48 hours of processing. The U.S. Postal Service will then deliver the mail piece within one to five days.

UPS Mail Innovations works with the U.S. Postal Service, providing the pick-up, processing and interim transportation of mail. Then, final delivery of your package is made by domestic and international postal services.

You can use the package ID, tracking number, or U.S. Postal Service IMPB. Track your package here.

Please submit your contact information here and our team will help you set up an account.

No, a signature is not required or offered for items delivered through UPS Mail Innovations.

Only the USPS, through a valid change-of-address order, can redirect the mail to its new address. Typically, the package will only be forwarded if the company that shipped it has requested to have the mail forwarded.

UPS Mail Innovations does not offer insurance, however insurance may be available through the original shipping company.

Once a package enters the USPS system, tracking updates are only available for those mail pieces utilizing a USPS Delivery Confirmation service.

Yes. UPS Mail Innovations delivers to P.O. boxes, Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. Territories, APO (Army Post Office), FPO (Fleet Post Office) and the DPO (Diplomatic Post Office). Please note that APO, FPO and DPO shipments may require a CN22 customs form.

Check back later to see additional details. If a prolonged period of time passes, please reach out to the company that shipped the package. Weather and other service-impacting factors may cause delays with some mail-piece delivery.

International Mailing FAQs

Mailing around the world. Your questions answered.**

Effective July 1, 2021, the European Commission has updated some of the rules for VAT e-commerce, launching an “import one stop shop” (IOSS) for online retailers to declare and pay duties and getting rid of the low-value consignment relief policy that previously exempted packages valued at under €22 from VAT.

For more information about the new rules and what they mean for your business, visit https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/vat-e-commerce_en or contact your UPS representative.

It depends on the service level chosen. Average time-in-transit for Priority Service is 4-8 business days from when mail is exported from a Mail Innovations facility. Standard Service averages 7-14 business days from when mail is exported from a Mail Innovations facility.

The in-country postal authority will leave notification if a VAT/GST or duty will need to be paid. The recipient will need to refer to the alternative tracking number as the reference number when contacting their local postal authority.

An alternative tracking number is a secondary tracking number used as a Customs identification number and, in some cases, can be used to track with the destination postal authority. It can be found at UPS.com.

Delivery Duties Unpaid. This indicates that the recipient of the mail piece is responsible for paying any VAT/GST or duties assessed on the mail piece.

No, UPS Mail Innovations does not contact Customs to clear, pay or return a package.

The postal authority in the country of destination will deliver the international mail piece.

Delivery Duties Paid. This type of service allows for prepayment of VAT/GST or duties. Currently, UPS Mail Innovations only has this option to Canada.

This enables the U.S. sender, rather than the Canadian recipient, to pay any duties and taxes assessed by the Canadian Customs authority.

For international country codes, consult our guide .

*It is the customer's responsibility to ensure that mail pieces constitute qualified mail under the USPS Domestic Manual then in effect. For definitions of qualified mail, check Qualified Domestic Mail or Qualified International Mail

**If you don't see the answer to your question below, please reach out to the company that shipped your package through Mail Innovations for additional details. UPS Mail Innovations uses an index-based surcharge that is adjusted monthly. View our Service Terms and Conditions to access detailed information on this process.