The Better Business Bureau is Contacting Us About One of Our Claims!?

Note: This article previously appeared in the Experience.com Industry Blog where you will find industry-specific experience stories, best practices, case studies and articles.

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This can’t be good.  Great, I have to respond to a complaint from an unhappy customer.  I wonder which adjuster screwed up.

I know for certain I am not the only person who had these thoughts pop into my mind.  As a claims leader, hearing that the Better Business Bureau (BBB) was contacting us about a claim was never a good thing.

This meant that a customer was so dissatisfied with their Claims Experience that they were compelled to reach out and file a complaint.  

For the claims departments I oversaw, this was just part of the job.  It might as well have been part of the job description:

“Must be able to respond to outside entities in regard to customer complaints in a timely manner”

Why is this the case?

Well for all too long, the BBB and other similar consumer sites have been seen as a sounding board for upset customers.  And typically the only people going out to these sites are customers that have had a tough experience.  

And this just doesn’t go for Claims.  Or Insurance.  Or Financial Services.  

This is the norm across nearly all consumer verticals.  

So what can we possibly do about this?

We need to encourage our happy customers to leave us reviews on external sites.

Wouldn’t it be nice to get a notification that a customer left a positive review on the BBB?  OK, we’re going to head down a path now, so be sure to strap in!

We know we have lots of happy customers, but do we know who these customers are?  Do we know that they’d be willing to leave us reviews?  We should.

By collecting feedback from your customers, you should be able to determine which customers you have pleased.  And which ones will go so far as to do something for you (read:  leave you a review).  

But just because they’re happy and they may be willing to do that something for you, doesn’t necessarily mean that they will.  How do we better our odds?

Ask at the right time and make it simple!

If your adjuster absolutely crushed it on a claim and the customer is loving on your company, asking them at that exact moment will better the odds.  But at that moment just telling them to go to a site to share their thoughts may not be enough.

The goal is to remove as much friction as possible so that the customer finds the process easy.  Providing a link to the review site or your profile at the moment of truth may be one method.  Some sites like Google My Business(GMB) allow you to link precisely to the “Write a Review” window.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

You’re happy with the Claims experience and the adjuster asks you to leave a GMB review.  So you have to search for the company online.  Then you may see that the insurance company has multiple locations.  Which location should I leave the review for?  OK, we’re facing a bit of friction now, so odds are we’re not going any further.

That same adjuster asks if you’d leave a GMB review and sends you a link via email or text.  You click on the link and there it is, GMB’s “Write a Review.”  I’m pretty sure you would be a lot more likely to click a star rating and leave a few comments if all you had to do was click that one link.  

I know what you’re thinking.  Reviews, that’s a marketing and sales thing.  We don’t do that in Claims.  If we start to push reviews, unhappy customers will leave us reviews too.

The first thing I would ask is, do you want to hide from negative comments?  Honestly, if customers have a tough experience, wouldn’t you want to know about it so you can determine if there is something you can do about it?  

Maybe a process is broken.  Maybe an adjuster needs further coaching.

Receiving feedback about negative experiences are golden opportunities to continually improve upon the experiences of all of your customers.

Enough about unhappy customers.  Let’s get back to the happy customers leaving reviews about their Claims experience.

A true differentiator between your insurance company and another is the Claims Experience and service you provide your customers.  The individual stories about a customer’s experience can help your marketing and sales teams attract new customers.  Hell, we may even be able to retain existing customers based on all of this.

It’s crazy how we can shift the mindset of Claims being a cost-center to assisting in revenue generation right?  But we can!

At Experience.com we were helping an insurance carrier partner get their claims department up and running on a customer feedback campaign.  We made the recommendation to design a secondary workflow of the campaign to push customers out to the BBB site to leave a review.

For many of the reasons we mentioned above, they were hesitant.

Because at the time, only their unhappy customers would head out to the BBB.  With less than a 2.0 star rating from 27 customer reviews over a number of years, their BBB profile was a liability.

They agreed to move forward with the secondary workflow to the BBB.  After just 90 days they received 40 more reviews on the site and their average star rating hit 3.7 and on the rise!  Ultimately, their BBB profile made the shift from a liability to an asset.

It changed the story from the BBB being a sounding board of their unhappy customers, to a site where consumers can see the stories of their happy customers.

If we can collectively flip the script, as this carrier partner did, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to get a notification from the Better Business Bureau about one of our claims.