Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again by Lewis Carbone

Author:Lewis Carbone
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2010-03-30T14:00:00+00:00

Eye-Opening Discoveries

Be prepared for some surprises when assessing. Among other things, you may identify different potential customer targets than the ones you expected.

When Allstate began assessing experiential opportunities, for example, its going-in thinking was marketing-driven—in particular, ethnic marketing to improve preference and loyalty among Hispanics and Asians. But assessing surfaced the need for a very different primary target—Allstate's own sales and claims agents. Ray Celaya, Assistant Vice President of Emerging Markets, says that assessing the composition and nature of its ethnic experience delivery led to major learning that had implications for every customer. [5]

As a result of major restructuring to adjust to the deregulation of financial services (an industry-wide phenomenon), Allstate's agents had gone from employees of the company to independent contractors. In addition, the company's profile had broadened from a provider of insurance products alone to the larger arena of financial services. While assessing its own strengths and the key challenges to improving its customer experiences, Allstate began to recognize that its agents not only were wondering where they stood with the "new" company but were also struggling with the need for extensive training to acquire securities licenses so they could play a part in it. Regardless of their status or licensure aspects, agents were still the crucial experiential point of contact between the customer and the company. Building loyalty to Allstate still started as a link between customer and agent.

That drove home a simple reality: As the agent goes, so goes the customer. The experience of the customer was important, to be sure, but first the experience of Allstate's agents had to be addressed.

The need to manage the agent's experience better became a key contributing variable in managing the customer's experience. To be sure, in a crowded and highly competitive insurance marketplace, the customer's experience was still crucial to building long-term loyalty. But it turned out that the customer's loyalty reflected the agent's loyalty and actions. In recent years, Allstate has been redeploying resources and redefining programs accordingly.

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