Through your customers' eyes


22 November 2010


At a time of shrinking margins and budgetary cuts, how does one ensure that the consumer is not left to bear the brunt? Aviva’s John Gilbert tells Phin Foster that financial institutions should turn themselves on their side and customers must always come before cost.


When the UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) announced back in January that it would require firms to publish information on their levels of complaint handling, there was a collective intake of breath among a number of leading institutions.

Those receiving 500 complaints or more over a six-month period would now have to make public on a biannual basis the number of complaints opened and closed, the percentage closed within eight weeks and the proportion upheld.

First figures were released in August, with a set of consolidated data from the FSA arriving the following month. For the banking sector in particular, the timing could have been better. Customer relations were already fragile, with banks suffering from an unprecedented degree of unpopularity. Furthermore, in a difficult operating environment, focus had predominantly centred on the consolidation of capital positions and the cutting of costs. These are not themes one instinctively associates with customer focus and the fear had to be that, once released, the numbers would provide yet another stick with which to beat the industry.
Such concerns were not entirely unfounded.

"Look at those results and you see two very distinct groups: banking and insurance," says Aviva's John Gilbert. "The former revealed itself as doing very badly and some of the worst performers were the established retail banks. Levels of trust probably remain at an all-time low and there is still plenty of distance left to travel."

That is not to say that Aviva, or the insurance sector in general, is anywhere near the end of its journey, but a glance at Gilbert's business card is indicative of how seriously his organisation is taking the challenge. He was recruited from Egg banking in 2008 as customer and operational excellence director, a role with a wide ranging remit encompassing measurement and insight, operations planning, customer experience, including complaint handling, and continuous improvement.

The overall goal is to create a more customer-focused company and the position is now evolving to concentrate more closely on these last two areas. However, the inter-related nature of each component means he will most certainly not be ceding ultimate control any time soon.

"They must be greater than the sum of their parts," Gilbert declares. "We're certainly not getting rid of anything; it's simply an acknowledgment that stability has been achieved in certain areas and now is the time to really push on with others. I retain influence and some accountability for measurement and also process planning and it's important I stay involved in order to see how each area relates to the other."

Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement is a programme Gilbert initiated in September 2008, using lean, Six Sigma and Kaizen techniques to drive a range of projects across operations influenced by customer feedback. This has been done in parallel with a company-wide cost efficiency drive, started in 2007, which looks to drive £400 million of costs out of the business by the end of next year. These might seem like contradictory aspirations, the assumption being that improving customer satisfaction necessitates spend, but the Aviva director argues that the two share a symbiotic relationship.

"Like any business you have to strike a balance between people, cost and service," he begins. "When I look across the portfolio of improvement projects, although many of them have been cost-orientated, that has never been to the detriment of service. Eliminate waste from the process and you simultaneously satisfy the customer and the business, delivering service more quickly but through less effort. I'll admit that it can sometimes require a leap of faith on the part of managers, getting them to recognise that going after improved customer service in a lean way will ultimately benefit the bottom line, but that's why you need to move through a number of stages of evolution, bringing people with you."

The idea of getting buy-in from all stakeholders lies at the very heart of Gilbert's message and he believes the cost-cutting initiative has been invaluable in bringing people onside.

As that initiative nears its end, the argument emanating from his office is that only innovation can get them over the line as the continuous improvement phase moves from operations to encompass the entire business. "Sharing a burning platform for improving the business where accountability lies with all levels means people have little choice but to get involved," he argues. "There's a great deal of Dunkirk spirit that comes through sharing the challenge. It's not only management's responsibility to make those decisions and fix everything; it works right down the line and that is a fundamental mindset shift that requires us all to innovate on a continuous basis."

In his efforts to engender this transformation, Gilbert has also been assisted by an even more fundamental shift at the company, although he rejects the suggestion that it constituted a "fresh start". When Norwich Union was re-branded as Aviva in June 2009, it meant a lot more to people within the organisation than a rush on stationery requests.

"It has served numerous purposes," Gilbert explains. "Clearly it repositioned the brand and declared that we are now one big organisation backed by a lot of resources, but it also galvanised people behind the movement to satisfy customers and drive performance and helped initiate the shift from focusing on cost, then service-to-service, then cost. That's a genuinely good place to be and we are now putting better, faster metrics in place, helping us to improve our understanding of what the customer is telling us and how best to respond."

These have included conducting net promoter score (NPS) surveys at each stage of any given transaction process, asking customers to numerically rate the service they have received on the basis of whether they would recommend the company to friends and family. Such measures not only help improve future performance; they also offer an opportunity to rectify issues in real time.
"We get that feedback and not only analyse it ourselves but forward the information to our frontline," Gilbert explains. "If there is a problem, they are then in a position to contact the customer directly and help fix it. Alternatively, if the score is positive it enables them to celebrate success.

"We also use external indicators, surveys carried out either on our behalf or by independent industry specialists, our own talent and performance management system (TPMS), extensive complaint data and numerous other sources of information, including what our frontline staff capture and generate on an ongoing basis. To all intents and purposes they're lagging indicators and only tell you what's happened in the past when what you really need to know is what's going on right now. Getting there boils down to speed and accuracy and those are things we can always improve upon."

Technology is a means to an end

It is also an area where technology comes into play. While the overall process is human-led by its very nature, there is no doubting that having the right IT systems in place in order to automate and accelerate the dissemination of information can make all the difference. While Gilbert does not dispute this observation, he fears that too many organisations view technology as an answer in itself.

"Technology must always follow process," he argues. "That is something a lot of businesses fail to realise and they spend a lot of money automating things they shouldn't be doing in the first place. Software can be a great enabler, but it can also serve to reinforce and embed defects. That only makes fixing them far more costly and time intensive."

This philosophy has acted as the jump-off point for all IT investment under Gilbert's watch. If a company or department is only as good as its data, one needs to be sure that the figures are beyond reproach.

"Look across all the work that we do and you'll find that for reasons of circumstance and practicality very few rely on technology change," he observes. "That is quite deliberate and it is because we know how much time such implementation can take and that our system, as in our processes and environment, isn't necessarily conducive to delivering such technology change at the speed we require."

Drive processes

But this is no Luddite talking and investment has certainly been made in technologies that can drive processes forward. The mix includes platforms developed in-house and off-the-shelf solutions, but all must serve a very definite purpose.

"The places we've predominantly invested have been in solutions that enable us to capture measurements more effectively and in more comprehensive ways," Gilbert explains. "For example, we've installed a solution that allows for the capture and screen-scrape of data from within existing processes, which it then presents across an integrated dashboard.

"We've also brought in technologies that can accelerate analysis and organisation of the vast amount of information we receive. Our verbatim analysis tool, for example, allows us to take customer verbatims and categorise them extremely quickly so that we know the types of things they're telling us without having a dozen people poring over millions of unfiltered comments trying to make sense of it all."

While some solutions have been tailored in conjunction with external suppliers, Gilbert is clearly extremely proud that his overall drive for continuous improvement has been embedded within the organisation without a single consultant stepping foot through his door. For him, stakeholder ownership is what will make this process work and that is best achieved through developing its message organically.

"This is something you should always build internally," he declares."If you outsource its creation to an external company and ask for them to set everything in place for you, when the time comes to take on the mantle there's no momentum with which to propel it. That's why we built up a team and deployed them across all operations. The next stage is doing it business-wide. The entire thing is about processes and people. Get both working in harmony and you're well on the way."

Gilbert acknowledges that a wider roll-out may present some fresh challenges, but adds that the momentum already generated means that there will never be a better time to start. While bringing people round to a new way of thinking is never easy, being able to demonstrate a clear track record of success presents a great motivator.

"Engaging people right across the enterprise is key," he believes. "Our organisation, like most financial services institutions, tends to be quite function-orientated. We need to break down the silos and turn the business on its side, seeing ourselves as our customer sees us. It's only when you start looking at processes from an end-to-end standpoint that you start to realise how little integration there is. That's a big job, but providing people with a common goal and accountability gives them little option but to start working together."