“You will never have amazing CX if your EX is lacking.” We cannot applaud that topic enough!

Jordan Mullins, sat down with Lori Pon to talk about the importance of starting from within when it comes to customer-centricity. A huge focus in the shared services industry is our customers – and that includes both internal customers and external customers. In many instances, we tend to focus on the external customer, and overlook the rest. 

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE

Lori is Director of Claims Strategy & Innovation at AAA Auto Club Group and leads the technology innovation area in claims. She heads a team of business technology consultants: “From project implementation, or ideation, through implementation, our team drives innovation initiatives. We manage organizational change management, and I have oversight of our claim technology roadmaps. I work with senior leaders in our organization prioritizing initiatives and really enunciating what emerging tech we should be looking at, and writing those cost-benefit analyses to get projects funded.”

How customer-centricity has influenced the way technology partners are chosen

Keeping the customer informed of what to expect is paramount, whether it is an insurance claim, an order of takeout, or a case of you needing a medical test. “Keep the customer informed throughout their journey, and make sure that they're not reaching back out to you. You need to be pushing updates; the customer is not trying to pull those updates. And there's less effort involved that way,” says Lori.

An example of an effort Lori's team is prioritizing is texting via a vendor. “We're seeing great sentiment – in fact, when we digitally pay you and when we text with you, our NPS is 1000 basis points higher,” Lori says.

Customer-centric metrics for measurement

How do you potentially measure the success of functions that may not even have a front office direct impact on the customer, we asked Lori. For AAA, their back office team is critical. “There are a lot of processes involved if we need to void or reverse a payment. The back office team supports many of the payment functions. We're looking at RPA [robotic process automation] and how we can take away very transactional activities so that the group is focused on processes and tasks that require human talent to move the claim along, while our back office team connects with partners across the ecosystem.

So, if we're trying to confirm whether or not your insurance company will accept liability for loss, we're leveraging back office, because we're automating very transactional components of our process. And then, on the other end, we just recently completed a business process mining proof of value. That really helped us identify choke points and identify dissimilarities in the myriad of processes that we were supporting”

The benefits of design thinking 

Lori shines a spotlight on the fact that there's a lot of great innovation that transcends industry, and transcends one particular use case. Their approach to innovation comes from a place of design thinking and an agile framework. “I always put my hand up, I'm never too busy to think about and ideate with partners because it's a great learning experience on both sides of the equation. I get to influence a product roadmap, and our company gets a voice at the table as this product is scaling. So we have the partner development team, basically design thinking directly with our adjusting team (within our innovation team). To my mind that is a way that we can get to quick wins,” says Lori.

Three key areas that Lori advises companies to focus on as it relates to customer-centricity

• Include both your internal customers and your external customers as part of your planning. In many instances, companies focus a lot on the external customer and completely forget employees.
• Create clear career paths for your employees. Are you painting that vision for your team that is clear? Are they on board with it and excited?
• Pick the right partners to help you ideate and reimagine your processes. Co-creating solutions with your partners drives innovation and customer satisfaction both internally and externally.

If you like the audio medium, you’ll find the full conversation with deep insights from Lori Pon and Jordan Mullins here.