How To Lose $210K in a 5 minute Conversation

“It is not what you say that matters, but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages” – William Carlos Williams – American Poet 1883-1963

I had been holding on the line for just a couple of minutes to report my insurance claim when finally a harried agent answered the call. Just thirty minutes earlier, a careless maintenance truck driver had been texting on her phone when she collided with the front end of my car. Up until that moment, after dutifully paying my insurance carrier about $7,000 per year for the past several years to insure our vehicles and our home, I had never needed to speak to my carrier before:

• Agent: “Hello, this is Linda speaking - can I have your policy number please”
• Me: “Ummm hold on – let me look for that – it’s buried somewhere in my glove box – can’t you just look it up from my name and plate number”
• Agent: “Well I could but it’ll be easier if you could find it hun”
• Me: “Umm…ok, seriously? Ok hold on…” 
• Agent: “Well, as it seems you're having real trouble finding it then let me look it up for you – name and address please?”
• Me: [incredulous pause] “Here’s my name and address….”
• Agent: “I can’t seem to find….oh wait… yeah I found it….which vehicle is it”
• Me: “It’s plate number PO911”
• Me: “I am involved in an accident that I need to report"
• Agent: “Are there any injuries”
• Me: “No"
• Agent: "Have you filed an accident report with the police"
• Me: "No, I didn't know I had to - should I? I mean the other driver has admitted fault and has provided me with her information"
• Agent: "So why don't you claim against her insurance company - you know you could do that. It's really not that hard to do - I mean you do know how to do that don't you?
• Me: [long incredulous pause] "I had no idea - I mean aren't you my insurance company". 
• Agent: "Well if you still want me to go ahead and handle this I can"

The rest of the call was pretty much the same – not once did I get the impression she was concerned about my accident. In fact, if there was one sentiment I could definitely feel – it was "how quickly can I get this guy off the phone" including talking over me, and rushing me along. Whether that was how she intended to come off or not, we were just on completely different wavelengths at my moment of distress.

Those first 5 minutes speaking with that agent sitting in her cubicle 950 miles away forever changed my perception of my carrier for the worst.  I told myself that right after the claim settled, I was going to switch to a new insurance carrier for our home and our vehicles – after all, if I were just a policy number to them, why should I be loyal to them?

The Importance of Service Experience:  With typical customer acquisition cost for property insurers being about $350/customer along with a total customer lifetime value of a policy holder at around $150,000 - retention is key. However, call centers – which still accounts for almost 75% of how clients (yes the millennials too) prefer to communicate with their carriers, are faced with the conundrum of high turnover (over 27% on average), and up to 9 months for an agent to get up to speed. And with flattening product and price differentiation, the service experience is the most important area that organizations can differentiate themselves. 

It's Time For Better Conversations: Over the past 20 years, the Fortune 1000 have spent $30B on CRM solutions that provide agents with information on customers and what to say to them, and another $8B has been spent in the last 5 years alone to try to understand customer opinion through narrow surveys and flawed self-reporting. Yet, we're still barely moving the needle in Net Promoter Scores. 

Organizations have under-invested in one critical area - which is helping the front line agents have better conversations with their customers. Agents are not robots that read off a script. They deserve to have the right tools to help them achieve more productive conversations.  When I think of Linda the claims rep that fielded my call after the accident, I realized that she was 10 steps ahead of me, and may have just been having a tough day. Could visual cues to tell her how she was being perceived by me have helped the conversation? I think yes.  

Voice conversations are the most effective and powerful way people interact with one another because it is dynamic, real-time, and emotive. No amount of emojis are going to replace that. But how do you accomplish that at scale when your organization has 20,000 agents handling millions of sales and service conversations and only a few dozen supervisors to train and watch over them? 

Cogito is here:
Cogito is a company determined to change that. They believe in the power of conversations. After almost a decade and several millions of dollars of research in behavioral science, signal processing and big-data analytics, it is the world's first and only real-time conversation improvement tool that allows a sales, service or care rep to visually understand how their customer is perceiving them, and suggest changes to their tone, pitch, and 'talk time' to improve the outcome.  It's also a way for supervisors to instantly spot interactions where the conversation is in trouble, and jump in before it goes into the ditch. It integrates with existing analytics and quality monitoring tools to understand trends before they become problems, and it works with most popular telephony and CRM systems - both on-premise and on the cloud. 

Along with fellow advisory board members Donna Peeples (AIG's first Chief Customer Experience Officer), Stephanie Nashawaty (Group VP of Oracle's Customer Experience Solution) and Steve Papa (Founder/CEO of Endeca and now venture/entrepreneur), I'm looking forward to helping organizations have better conversations with their customers that ultimately delivers better care, retention, and growth.