Negative feedback is a gift; it provides the “gems that make sure you improve what you're doing and take it to the next level”, says Zurich Insurance’s Conny Kalcher.

The chief customer officer of the more than 150-year-old company should know, having spent the last few years focusing on driving customer-centric business transformation at Zurich and, before that, at Lego, where she was instrumental in helping the brand to redefine its purpose, transforming it from a toy factory into a company that ‘tells stories’.

“It's important to embrace what customers are telling us, not try to explain it away or rationalise it, but really look it in the eye,” she says.

Customer expectations of the insurance industry have changed dramatically in recent years, partly because of the disruptive impact of insurtechs but also because of the impact of digital-first companies more generally.

“We could lean back and think we’re different, we’re insurance, but that’s a false truism because today it’s companies like Amazon and Netflix that set the standards,” says Kalcher. After all, if Amazon can deliver a parcel overnight why should you, as a customer of a legacy business, struggle to get your address changed or to get through to a human being on the phone?

For Kalcher, the solution to increasing customer expectations has been to help move Zurich away from being a transactional company to one that connects with customers on both a functional and emotional level.

This isn’t an easy ask for an insurance firm, which aren’t usually associated by consumers with being warm and fuzzy, but that’s part of the point for Kalcher, who claims that in this way the company is able to “surprise and delight, which is really the space we want to be in”.

And it’s a strategy that seems to be paying dividends. The company is growing faster than the market, product density is up (in other words people buy more products), and, perhaps most importantly, says Kalcher, customers are happier.

Credits:

Presenter: Claire Warren

Producer: Inga Marsden

Artwork: David Robinson

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