DPL INSURANCE
DPL Insurance used Customer Radar data to drive a great customer experience
When you’re selling through intermediaries, it’s hard to know how well your products are being delivered to customers – so how do you find out if customers are satisfied?
Simple – you ask them.
That’s exactly what DPL Insurance started doing back in 2019, when they decided just guessing what their customers thought wasn’t enough – they needed to go straight to the source for the truth.
The Opportunity:
“Without statistically viable data from a trusted source, we didn’t have great visibility over the customer experience.”
A foggy windscreen into customer experience
As the insurance arm of TAG, DPL Insurance takes care of changes to policies or helping with claims but the actual policies themselves are sold through 700 car dealers and finance companies.
“Although we don’t sell directly to customers, we are still accountable to our customers for their end-to-end experience,” shares Natalie Ross-Murphy, Marketing Manager for DPL Insurance. “As we’re not there with them at the time [they buy], we needed visibility over their experience and a rigorous way of measuring customer satisfaction.”
Up until 2019, DPL had been relying on the rare feedback they did receive, along with anecdotal feedback from agents – but they were limited in what they could do with such a small amount of information.
“Without statistically viable data from a trusted source, we didn’t have great visibility over the customer experience,” explains Natalie. “That meant we couldn’t identify or prioritise strengths and areas of improvement needed, or provide training on how to improve sales and customer experience.”
They also wanted to safeguard the business against future complaints. To avoid any issues later in the process, it’s vital that customers make an informed decision when buying insurance products, and that they understand the cover they are receiving. DPL needed a way to find out immediately if a customer had issues or questions.
“And on top of this, we were keen to increase our volume of Google Reviews, as we recognised how important they were in terms of building our reputation as an insurance provider.”
They needed a way to get large quantities of feedback from a trusted source – so they turned to Customer Radar.
The Process:
“The dashboard is ideal for seeing all the high-level information in one place. So all of the team, including our Board, can follow how we’re trending and see the results of our initiatives."
Navigating the road of implementation
“We wanted real feedback from real customers, in real-time,” shares Natalie. “We could see that using Customer Radar would give us an initial benchmark and then ongoing, 24/7 feedback to be able to see the impact of changes we made, as well as emerging trends.”
Implementation was, according to Natalie, “a breeze”.
“Customer Radar offers a very structured, weekly onboarding process that steps you through the set-up. It also gave us a way of explaining the programme simply to our team, so they understood the benefits it offered us and were able to start using the comments constructively straight away.”
Knowing how important data was to the DPL team, Customer Radar worked with them to ensure the dashboard would highlight the key data they needed to take action – such as customer, product, policy number, agent, and Autosure salesperson.
“The dashboard is ideal for seeing all the high-level information in one place. So all of the team, including our Board, can follow how we’re trending and see the results of our initiatives,” says Natalie.
Other features she highlights as particularly useful include receiving alerts for lower-scoring feedback (so they can quickly follow up and turn a bad experience into a good one), the word cloud that shows keywords customers are using in their comments, and the monthly prize draw that acts as an incentive for people to give feedback (which Customer Radar manage).
Also important was ensuring that customers didn’t get overloaded with requests for emails – so Customer Radar worked with DPL to design an email plan that ensured that no matter how many policies customers bought under different brands, they only received one email asking for feedback. And even when emails proved challenging, Customer Radar were there to support.
“The integration with Mailchimp was difficult to navigate as a relative novice. We’d used it for simple campaigns, but setting up templates and using tags took some work. The link was super long, but Customer Radar helped me find out how to not have that ugly link show up in the emails and to embed it behind a pretty ‘To participate click here’ button – a much better customer experience!
“They even went outside their remit and consulted with us on things such as the effectiveness of the email subject line – and now we often see open rates of more than 80% and click-throughs of more than 25%.”
The Impact:
“Customer Radar gave us a direct connection to end users, making it fast and easy to listen to their voice.”
Data to drive a great customer experience
DPL needed more visibility over their customer experience – and that’s exactly what they’ve got.
“We’re now receiving around 7,500 responses a year. As a data-driven business, we love this, as it gives us statistically viable data to mine.”
What’s more, many of those responses are then turning into social proof, as customers who give feedback are prompted to leave a Google review.
“In this day and age, a business’s online reputation is critical. Even though we don’t sell directly, we take care of customers once they’ve taken out our insurance products, so it’s important that we have a strong reputation. In July 2020 our Google Star Rating was 3.1 from 165 reviews. Now when people Google us, they see a high star rating of 4.5 from a large number of reviews, over 1,400.”
Since implementing Customer Radar, DPL has also made a number of positive changes in their business – from clearer policies to better training. It also enables them to celebrate what makes their team great.
“The customer comments on the sales process allow us to give specific feedback to our agents – the ones selling our products for us. But I think the part both our sales team and the agents really like is that they can identify positive comments, especially those that have mentioned helpful salespeople at that agency, which reinforces what a good job they’re doing and helps our agents with their own staff retention.”
Natalie’s message to anyone considering implementing a voice of customer programme is simple: “Go for it. You won’t regret it. This really is an inexpensive way to monitor customer satisfaction and experience.
“Customer Radar gave us a direct connection to end users, making it fast and easy to listen to their voice.”