S1: E8 | Mr Eric Lennartz from ERGO: How ERGO uses customer feedback at every stage of product and service development

[Music] Hi, Ray Pointe here with another Potentiate Powering Human Experience Podcast. Today I'm delighted to be speaking with Eric Lenerts from Ergo, who is joining us from Dusseldorf in Germany. Hi, Eric. Hi, Ray. Greetings back to all of our listeners. I'm really looking forward to talk to you today and to tell you a bit about how we deal with customer feedback and how we at Ergo tried to put our customers into the center of our actions. And just, if it's okay, let me briefly introduce myself. I'm head of market intelligence at Ergo Group. And in this role, I'm responsible for all market research and especially consumer insights that we deal with at Ergo. My main goal is to translate these into those actions that we actually have to take. Gras great. So, for our listeners from outside of Europe, can you tell us a little bit about Ergo? Yeah, of course I can. Ergo is one of the leading insurance companies that they're in Europe. And we also active in some cool markets in Asia. We have around 20 billion Euro turnover, so we are quite big. And we have more than 40,000 employees that actually are there to work for our customers. And with our insurance solutions, we try to actually guide our customers from the beginning to the end. So we offer the full range program from health insurance, over live insurance to property and casuality insurance. And so the customer may come to us in any situations of their lives. We can offer them appropriate solutions and support. And so that's what makes us unique at Ergo, the customers really in the center of all our actions. And that also reflects our philosophy, which is we want to manage all the risks of the customers that do they do not have to care for any risk, any concerns and can just live their lives and create their worlds. My role in this process is I'm the one that brings that customer feedback to life. Together with my colleague, I'm the one that gathers all these insights, links it to all the other data and derives the correct conclusions for Ergo so that we actually can support our customers in all the last situations. And let me give you a more last background for Ergo, wherever very strong mother in the back that supports us, which is the mini Greek group, which is the world largest we ensure. Thanks. And can you outline the role of insights in Ergo and your role in the process? Yes, I already outlined that Ergo, we try to put the customer in center of all our actions. And that's where customer insights and our collaboration with you guys with potential is come into play. Because customer insights provide us with the necessary guidance at any topics. Hence together with you, we created a community among our customers. We have almost 6000 customers that support us here. And to our knowledge, that's the largest community of any insurance company in Europe. And this customer provides us with insights mostly among quantitative, but also qualitative surveys. And which is important, they do so deliberately without large financial incentives. They actually want to provide up with insights and want to shape the insurance of tomorrow. And the community is extremely active, that's something we are very proud of. In 2020, we had 24 studies that we actually did with our community. 280 days in the fields and a very high response rate of 26%. So let me put that in context. Now we see like two to 3% in online surveys that we did. But another thing which is pretty nice about that community is that it's very agile. We can be as fast as 3 days to come from developing the questionnaire to having the results that actually makes it possible to develop a solution. This of course is much faster than working with an external market research provider. And we can go as well, much more into detail, more in depth. This makes us faster than other companies that do not have such a community. And our role in this process is that we are the ones that actually translate that feedback into solutions. We gather the custom feedback, analyze it, and provide our departments with the right conclusions from these insights. So while the community gives the insights, we translate it and our departments can actually work with these insights. And thereby we enable our departments to put the customer into the center, center of directions, the solutions. And all together we have a very, very broad range of topics that's there. Let me give you two example that that's fun with you. One example is product development, product development, of course, consumers and I play a very important role. So what happened a day ago, we saw at our motor service that we were losing customers for some quite some time. A lot of tourists lose customers and motor insurance, but we were losing them as well. So we started about what could be a solution and became a clone that that cheaper prices may not be the only solution. But that actually we need to understand the customer, then their needs to get to a product that actually puts the customer center. So in a very continuous approach, we actually develop a new product at every stage of this part development from the very early beginning, where we just ask about customer needs to the first ideas that we had to the very final prototype that we had. And then we started to enter our community and tested it. We tested all these ideas, all these prototypes. That enable us to adjust it so that the answer that is product that is very successful. My role this product was actually that we were the ones that develop the service. And the ones that conducted the service at every stage, we analyzed the insights and the data and gave our product, develop the concrete feedback on which points they actually have to go in, have to adjust. And of course, we could rely on your good collaboration from our for a key count can cast in that support that's all the way through. And that's shows that this is my approach because we are very successful for two years now in a row. We want the few insurers that actually gains customers in motor insurance, second year in a row in a market that total trades. And our main competitors lose customers, but we are very, very successful with our products. One example product development, let me give you some total different example what we actually do as well. We also work with innovative ideas and with our innovations and sales teams. So one example that we've seen throughout digitization, you all know that there's voices systems like Alexa or Siri. We are used to them and they play a very increasingly important role. So we wanted to know what the actual potential of these voice assistance or insurance company. And especially for our goal. So we asked our community in different steps again, what could be the potential and came along some voice skills that actually enable our customers to order insurance via voice assistance. So just let me give you some from travel insurance. If you're at the airport nowadays, you can use your Siri forever and can actually order an insurance from arrow just on demand moment you are already at the airport. And again, we as market intelligence were there to look at the consumer insights and just laid them into those conclusions that we actually need. We see this topics of very difference, but both show how worse through consumer insights and customer feedback is for us at ago. So, COVID 2020 made life very difficult and beginning of 2021. How have insights and your insight community helped during this difficult period. That's actually a question we thought through a lot as COVID is all over there. We thought through how we have to deal with customer feedback and these. You know, our community consists of customers that deliberately give us their feedback. So there were two questions that were not thinking. First question was will our customer actually still provide us with feedback, especially after they may have sit at home. Some day in home office in front of the computers, do they actually really want to respond to another survey and actually how will our response rates change. First question. The second one was how much COVID or Corona are they actually capable of. Maybe they are. annoyed and do not want to answer that topic at all. So for the first question, we were actually quite lacking. We could see, response rate is sank a bit, but only a few bit. There's still a 26% and if you put that again into the contested 2 to 3% that we have if we go externally, very high rates. So we're very positive about that. But the second question is more difficult. We decided not to put COVID as the first topic on our agenda. But we thought about that in most topics, we did not include it, but in other very selective topics where we think there is a large impact, we actually included it. Let me give you one of these examples of web-y data. That is when we looked at customer interaction, especially customer interaction between our customers and their agents. As most insurance companies, especially the traditional ones, we have customers that normally go to the agent and communicate with the agent in their personal matter. If they want a new insurance, they go there, talk it through with their agent and they will get the product, get a time that the contract can go back home. With a moment of COVID coming in and all these lockdowns, that was not possible anymore. Lockdowns restricted us to a minimum of personal contact. What they had to start is they had to communicate in digit ways, by a telephone, via Skype, via FaceTime and all these matters. So we asked ourselves, is that change actually a change? That's just there for the moment. Or will it be permanent? Because you can imagine if that's permanent effect, it has a large impact. Much larger than just the communication, the SIT systems that are there, the total way of context change. And of course, it might have very high cost implications. So we asked our customers, do you actually want to stay in these digital ways? And in which context do you want to stay in these digital ways? We could find out that for some products, customers said, no, I want to have my personal agent back. Who are the other products? They were quite willing to say, yes, I actually want to stay in a digital way. So now we can plan for the post-COVID time and I can actually see how do we prepare digital communication channels for these products. I think it's a very good benefit. Great. So moving away from these COVID times to the future, the global trend in size is to become more customer-centric, something you've already mentioned. And to focus on people rather than on products and services, how has this impacted what you do a day ago? Of course, that impacts us. But for us, there is no contradiction in focusing on people and focusing on services or products. Because as I said, at Argo, the customers in the center of all our actions, no matter whether I develop products for services. So when developing services or products, we do so from the customer perspective. Our community that we build up with you guys of potential is the key in that process. In every stage of the product or service development, we have the chance to include our customers and their people. And we do so in a systematic way. So before already in the start, we conduct very basic studies where we first try to find out which products and services do we have to look at, which do we have to adapt at all. Second step, we try to sketch some ideas. And we ask the customers about these ideas and ask them about their needs. And the needs are those topics that we could into the design of a specific product or service. Some would give it the might look at which are mandatory and which are just nice to have components of code. And finally, we can of course test prototype like in the motor turret, where we then actually pass the product and do the final adjustments just needed to bring it to the market. And personally, I am always very excited to have combined these insights, which are like them to a product and services, and then see that product or service action use. And so we put it together, focusing people, focusing on products and services. So looking to the future, which we hope is going to be much better, what are your hopes in terms of insights and your customers for the coming year? First of all, I hope that all our customers stay safe and healthy in these COVID times. But despite that, I think we are looking forward to very interesting times. The normal of tomorrow will definitely be a different normal than today. That terms customer needs will also change. I'm looking forward to link these new customers and translate them into solutions, solutions that shape this new normal. I mean, we see that customers for insurance products change totally. I'm actually keen to have provide insights on how to do these products and how these products might look. And finally, what new tools, approaches and ideas are you most interested in exploring in 2021? Topic wise, I expect digitalization to stay the hot topic 2021. As said before, we already developed several skills to take out insurance via voice assistance. That's something 10 years ago no one would have expected to do. And so I think turns in digitalization builds day mask. They will go on. And here I'm very interested in the new ways that the futures might bring. Which new digital measures will come and how can we get consumer insights? Most important though, our community will stay the key of these insights. And also in 2021, my interest will stay on how to involve our community members, especially in a more digital post-coded world. Only if they provide us with insights, I can bring customer feedback to life and to play video solutions. Only in that way we at Aagle can put our customers into the sink. Thank you, Erick. That was fantastic. I'm sure that all of the people listening to this podcast are going to enjoy it. And also find it really useful. So thank you for your time today. Thank you, Ray. It was pleasure talking to you and it was a pleasure to work in with you guys.