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From Resource, September 2006
Copyright by LOMA
Creating a Service Culture:
How UnumProvident Did It
In 1999, the new
UnumProvident Corp. that resulted from the merger of three companies had a lot
of work to do, as far as integrating all 3,000 of its customer service employees
into a seamless organization. So its leadership decided that if this new entity
was going to become known for excellent customer service, there was no better
time to get everyone not just on the same page, but the right page. Here’s how
they made it happen.
By Stephen Hall
Redesigning and re-implementing
an organization’s culture with the customer in mind is no small feat.
But when you’re faced with
the task of doing the same thing in an organization that employs 3,000
people—and getting them to buy into the new culture—suddenly you’re
looking at a truly monumental feat of customer service management.
This was exactly the challenge UnumProvident Corp. faced after the 1999 merger
of the three companies that currently comprise the disability and supplemental
income provider. Prior to the merger, these three companies—Unum Life
Insurance Co. of America, the Paul Revere Life Insurance Co., and Provident Life
and Accident Insurance Co.—were already known for the high-quality service
they provided to brokers and policyholders. But according to Thomas Thompson,
senior vice president of client services for UnumProvident, the distractions
that a merger tends to create led to a decline in service levels, with customer
satisfaction rates slipping accordingly.
But today, following the implementation of a customer-focused business culture
across all of its business units, UnumProvident boasts customer satisfaction
levels that are higher than what any of the three companies had before the
merger. At the 2006 LOMA Customer Service Conference in
Orlando
,
Fla.
, Thompson teamed up with Ann Hibbard, vice president of market development and
communications at UnumProvident, to talk about how their organization created
this culture and put it into practice at every level.
Defining the Target Environment
UnumProvident delivers service
in two ways, according to Thompson—through its 37 field office locations and
its three home offices. “We think that’s a strength of our organization:
We’re a large organization, not just one location,” he said. “Our products
are sold through brokers. So if you’re in a service culture like us, you
don’t have captive agents. We really have several levels of customers that we
serve: the brokers that distribute our products, employers that purchase our
products, and our end customers.”
UnumProvident’s
home offices are set up to provide service to small- and mid-sized customers as
well as basic support for large customers. Meanwhile, its field offices are set
up to provide more customized support for large customers and complex cases.
“A lot of the feedback we get from our customers is that while they like home
offices and 800 numbers, they really want to see a face, locally,” Thompson
said. “So we have one of the largest local field service operations in the
disability income industry. We provide a lot of customized support out of our
field offices, including new business setup, broker support, and a lot of sales
and cross-selling support. Our service environment is pretty complex.”
As for
its contact centers, UnumProvident has chosen to buck the trend of outsourcing
contact center services to overseas vendors and keep this function within the
organization. “I’ve probably talked to every overseas outsourcer, but one
thing we’ve learned from our merger is that our call centers are a core
competency, and we do not want to relinquish that to anybody else,” Thompson
said. “That’s a decision that I think has paid off for us. Employees in our
home offices and our field offices talk with customers, and we feel they can
represent our company much better. And we’ve made a big investment in how we
train our people, both in our insurance product services and in skills for
communicating and handling customers’ problems. We really have to give them
the skills to work with our customers.”
In
addition to organizing its services by customer need, UnumProvident categorizes
its customers by size segments. “Generally speaking, we organize around our
small and medium customers getting more direct service,” Thompson said. “And
our larger customers want that local service, so our field offices make up a
very customized operation. Many of our large customers essentially want us to be
an extension of their human resources department. So we’ll ask a full-time,
dedicated service team to answer the phone with the name of that employer, and
they’ll set up a dedicated number just for that employer. As you can see, we
have such a wide range of services that creating a service culture is an
interesting task for us.”
The Customer Service Commitment
Picking up where Thompson left
off, Hibbard said that because insurance is often perceived as a commodity,
UnumProvident needed a strong, customer-focused business culture that would set
it apart from the competition. “Certainly we’re the leader in what we do, in
our niche market of disability and income protection,” she said. “But we
needed to break the mold. We were challenged with creating a service culture
across 3,000 people in 37 different locations, which is no easy task. So Tom and
I and several others set about trying to determine the best way to do this. We
wanted a service culture that looked at customers based on their needs, their
size, and the way they want to talk to us—by phone, by fax, over the Internet
or in person. So with that challenge, we developed a roadmap to create this
service culture.”
UnumProvident
began by putting together a service commitment for Customer Loyalty,
UnumProvident’s customer service organization. “We had to articulate for
3,000 employees our service commitment, which is: ‘To build long-term customer
loyalty by delivering highly responsive service to every customer, every
time,’” Hibbard said. “Not just satisfaction, but loyalty. Not just on
Mondays and Fridays, when the call volumes are larger, and not just to the
people that are nice to us. We wanted to deliver highly responsive service to
every customer, every time. The second part of the commitment reads: ‘Customer
Loyalty will be recognized as an organization that consistently demonstrates
strong dedication to our customers through the actions of each employee.’
“So
this is where we begin to build the service culture,” Hibbard said. “You
know how easy it is to mis-communicate. So while we think we get it, it’s
always better to really articulate it. Then we thought, ‘Well, we’d better
tell our employees a little bit more. We think it’s really important for them
to understand what we mean.’”
UnumProvident’s
Customer Service Commitment goes on to state that its employees strive to do the
following:
Provide a high-quality customer
experience through knowledgeable, well-trained service professionals. “We
picked those two words—knowledgeable and well-trained—because that’s what
our customers told us they wanted,” Hibbard said.
Focus on the service
fundamentals. “We could spend a lot of time on things that are not meaningful
to the customer,” Hibbard said. “Instead, we wanted to focus on the things
that are important to them. And they told us that those things included
courtesy, knowledge and responsiveness.”
Listen to our customers and
respond with a sense of urgency. “It’s the customer’s timetable, not ours,
that’s most important,” Hibbard said.
Deliver innovative customer
solutions. “If you don’t change, you don’t move forward, and at
UnumProvident, we cannot stand still,” Hibbard said. “We need to have our
finger on the pulse of the marketplace, understand what our customers want, and
come up with solutions for them. They look to us to provide them with
information. Are they pressed for time? Absolutely. Is billing one of their
favorite things to do? I don’t think so. So we really have to look at how we
can make the life of a human resource benefit manager that much easier.”
Partner with each other to meet
customer needs. “There may have been times when you’ve eaten at a restaurant
and asked a waiter or waitress for something, and they’ve said, ‘That’s
not my table’ or ‘That’s not my problem,’” Hibbard said. “That’s
not the kind of attitude we want to encourage among our employees. Instead, we
want seamless integration across our organization. At some companies, the
experience you have when you call into a call center is different from the
experience you have when you call the claims organization, or when you’re
face-to-face with an agent. We want our customers to have the same experience
across the company, because every experience influences a customer’s opinion
of us. We wanted a consistent feel to every customer experience, and we were
able to do that for 37 different locations.”
Make it easy for customers to
do business with us. “We know our business is very difficult to understand,”
Hibbard said. “We know there are contracts. We know there are differences
between what people think they bought and what they actually bought, so we need
to make things as simple and straightforward as we can.
“We
created this statement so that when we say we’re committed to service, every
employee understands what that really means. We had to get granular with this;
we really had to help everybody understand it, because the thoughts were flying
every which way. They thought, ‘Being committed to customer service means I
need to smile when I talk to the customer on the phone.’ True, but it goes a
little bit deeper than that.”
According
to Hibbard, employee response to UnumProvident’s statement of customer service
commitment has been extremely positive. “They understand what we’re
committed to,” she said. “In fact, all of the components of this statement
came from employees. In roundtable workshops, when we said, ‘What’s it going
to take to make the culture?’ they started throwing things on the table. They
really made us think about it. The creation of this commitment was not top-down;
it was really bottom-up. It entailed listening to our employees and our
customers so that we could build an environment that would work for them.”
Establishing Service Standards
Creating a strong customer
service commitment is certainly important. But in order for it to actually mean
anything, Hibbard explained, it was necessary to also create a set of metrics
that would help UnumProvident determine how well it was doing at delivering on
that commitment.
“We
got ideas for our metrics from a host of different places,” she said.
“Employers and brokers were more than happy to tell us what they thought, as
well as what kinds of timelines work for them. So we listened to what they said,
and to the words they used, such as courtesy, responsiveness and knowledge. We
also asked our service employees, ‘What do you think we should measure you
on?’ And we asked ourselves, ‘How do we take what we do as a company, look
at that outside experience, and decide what we measure? Is it how fast we do
this? Is it how fast we process that? What’s the customer’s
experience?’”
It was
at this point, according to Hibbard, that UnumProvident realized the importance
of focusing externally as well as internally when it comes to deciding on
service standards. “When we first started talking about standards, everything
we had was internal: ‘We move it from Bucket A to Bucket B in 12 minutes.’
Well, that’s not obvious to the customer. We have work standards, of course,
but service standards are based on what the customer’s experience is. And a
very common one is the ability to answer 80 percent of incoming phone calls
within 20 seconds. We went back and forth and tried to determine the point at
which a customer would hang up, because we didn’t want more than 5 percent of
our customers abandoning us during a call.”
Therefore,
UnumProvident determined the point at which delays incrementally affect the
customer by testing to see how long it would take before customers hung up.
“Many times, when you call your bank or other organizations, you get a message
that says you’re in a queue and that the average wait time is eight minutes,
or three minutes, or whatever,” Hibbard said. “To customers, that seems so
much longer. In one test, we found that people wouldn’t wait more than 45
seconds, which is not that much time. That’s why we had to get very aggressive
with our timeline of 80 percent of calls handled within 20 seconds.”
This
external focus was combined with an internal perspective so that call center
personnel could be leveraged as efficiently as possible, Hibbard said. “We
know, for example, that most of our phone calls come in on Monday mornings, and
a lot of them come in on Friday afternoons. Given that, we could put a staffing
model in place to handle those calls. If we don’t get a lot of calls on
Wednesday afternoons, we don’t have to staff up as much on those days. And one
thing that Tom introduced with the call centers was the opportunity for some of
our call center employees to work from home. Alternate work arrangements are
becoming very common; productivity actually increases when people work from
home. As a result, there’s more availability for our folks to talk to our
customer. We also measured how much time we spend on those calls, and we found
out what tools they needed so that they can better manage that customer
interaction and drive service levels and satisfaction levels higher as a
result.”
Research: Benchmarking, Metrics
and Actions
One element that is crucial to
maintaining UnumProvident’s customer-centric culture is doing regular
research, which includes getting customer feedback, doing benchmark studies to
see how they compare to their competition, and studying how customers use the
tools UnumProvident provides to interact with the company. “We need to know
what customers are telling us on an ongoing basis; to ask them once isn’t
enough,” Hibbard said. “We also need to know what the competition is up
to.”
In
addition to talking to employers and brokers to gauge their level of
satisfaction, UnumProvident also conducts new customer implementation studies in
order to successfully manage and improve those relationships from day one.
“With new customers, as soon as their policy has been implemented, we get
right back to them and say, ‘How did it go? What could we have done better?
Did we meet or exceed your expectations?’ This has helped us to understand
that we can provide more of our services online, and that can be to our
benefit,” Hibbard said. “They don’t want to constantly refer to a notebook
that sits on a shelf. They want interactive tools on the Internet, and we’re
going to continue to do just that.”
UnumProvident
also conducts studies that test the link between satisfaction and loyalty to
help them identify the true drivers of loyalty. “We do a lot of studies
through the contact centers to see if customers’ expectations have changed,
whether we should tighten up on some of our service standards, and how much of a
difference it would make,” Hibbard said. “As far as the service goal of
answering 80 percent of incoming calls within 20 seconds, we found that no
matter how much we tightened up that standard, satisfaction wouldn’t go up.
For example, there’s no real benefit for us to strive to answer 90 percent of
incoming calls within 10 seconds. We tested it, we talked to customers, and we
found that it makes no difference to them. So 80/20 works for us.”
In
addition, UnumProvident is constantly testing and retesting the usability of its
online tools. “We actually go out and sit down with benefits administrators in
front of a computer and say, ‘OK, show us how you used this particular tool.
Why did you go to this Web page? What does that word mean to you?’” Hibbard
said. “That way, our online tools are designed from the customer’s
perspective. When I review my 401(k) plan online, and I’m trying to determine
what my investment portfolio looks like, the terms I use for things aren’t the
words I see on the Web site. I have to think, ‘OK, what term would they have
used for this?’ At UnumProvident, we want to use the words our customers use.
We may call it ‘premium,’ but our customers may call it ‘my bill.’ We
may call it ‘remittance,’ but they may call it ‘invoice.’ We get into
that kind of detail so that we can speak to customers in a way that they
understand, and we can understand them and leverage the relationship even more
so.”
As
soon as enough research had been done at all of these levels, UnumProvident came
away with some key findings. “One thing we found was that those who use online
billing are more satisfied,” Hibbard said. “They stay longer. Our retention
rate on customers that do online billing is over 90 percent. So that told us
that we need to take some action to aggressively market our services more. And
it wasn’t our salespeople selling it; it was our service people introducing
and marketing it. We actually had a plan administrator say to us, ‘I used to
dread that bill; now I get up to do a dance on my desk when the bill comes.’
If that’s all it takes to make her happy, we’re more than happy to do
that.”
UnumProvident
also learned that the main reason customers contact them is to confirm that they
received the claims information the customer sent—a discovery that prompted
the company to be more proactive in its communications with customers. “One of
the things we’re going to do now is a bounce-back to the customer, either
through an automated phone call or an e-mail, to let them know right away that
we received their materials, and that they can expect a certain result within a
certain amount of time. Right now, when we get a new claim in, we send out a
service commitment card that says, ‘Hello, my name is Ann Hibbard and I’m
your claims representative, and here’s what I’m committed to doing for you.
I will be fair and impartial, and I will ask you for additional information. I
will respond to you within the following timeline.’ And then the claims
representative’s manager actually signs the card, and we’ll send it out. So
the customer has not only the name of their claims person, but the name of that
person’s manager.”
Another
key finding of UnumProvident’s research was that customer awareness of some of
its value-added services was very low. “For example, we have survivor support,
where we’ll go in and actually do counseling with beneficiaries after a life
claim,” Hibbard said. “We have tools that help with FMLA (Family Medical
Leave Act) and short-term disability versus long-term disability. So we decided
to increase our communication to customers about these services.”
Finally,
UnumProvident learned that when it came to communicating with its mid-sized
customers—the ones that consist of 251 to 1,999 employees—it had a lot of
work to do. “Small customers need a lot of hand-holding; they’ve probably
filed one claim in their entire experience,” Hibbard said. “On the other
hand, large customers just do it by rote. But there was a segment in the middle
that we were missing.” In response to this finding, UnumProvident’s sales
staff began initiating a contact on a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis.
“We were just amazed at what we learned when the sales associate and the
broker went to the customer to talk about how things were going and what could
be better. The other thing we found was that service employees in the field
office played a huge role in helping us to better understand what customers’
needs are, to anticipate their needs, and to talk to them about solutions that
would help them. So we really tried to use this research to help us create
service standards and metrics that would, in turn, drive an approach to customer
service that you can really touch and feel. It’s not just an attitude or a
philosophy.”
The
research also revealed what UnumProvident’s customers thought of the
company’s performance—and while the results were by no means disappointing,
they did reveal some room for improvement. “We talked with customers to
determine what percentage of them thought we were excellent, very good or good,
in terms of overall service,” Hibbard said. “Eighty-seven percent did. That
was not a great number. Now, for many companies just starting down the path of
creating a customer service environment, 87 percent is a great number. But we
were ahead of that number prior to the merger, so 87 percent didn’t feel good
to us. So we got those groups together and started talking about what we needed
to do.” A few years later—in 2002—UnumProvident’s percentage of
customers who thought the service they provided was excellent, very good or good
rose to 91 percent. “That felt good, so we kept doing what we were doing,”
Hibbard said. And late last year, UnumProvident went back to its customers and
polled them again. This time, the number rose to 94 percent—a score that
pleased UnumProvident Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer
Robert Best so much that he gave his employees an extra half-day off in 2006.
Building a Service Culture
Of course, creating a
customer-focused business culture from the ground up just isn’t possible
without training employees extensively in how to do their jobs within that new
culture. And while such training is as costly as it is time-consuming, Hibbard
said it was a necessary investment to make in order to ensure the long-term
viability of UnumProvident. This training was broken down into 10 learning
modules that emphasized the tools employees needed to use and the values they
needed to uphold in order to take a blueprint for customer service success and
turn it into a business reality.
“The
first module we introduced was just an introduction to the organization,”
Hibbard said. “This was for new and existing employees, to help them
understand where they fit into the scheme of things. The second module is the
Service Commitment Manager’s Tool Kit. So much of an employee’s ability to
deliver is based on how they interact with their manager. So we created a tool
kit to help managers understand what the commitment means to them and how they
can contribute to it. The third module is ‘the MAGIC of Customer Relations.’
This is a course taught by Communico, a company that actually comes in and
teaches employees the 33 steps of MAGIC—which stands for “Make a Great
Impression on the Customer”—and how to manage a telephone call.”
The
fourth and fifth modules are respectively titled “Handling Challenging
Calls” and “Face to Face Interactions.” “A lot of our employees in the
field deal directly with brokers or employers,” Hibbard said. “Many of them
have never had this type of training before, including how you get business, how
you deal with the difficult part of that relationship, and how you cement the
rapport on a go-forward basis.”
The
sixth module, titled “Service from the Customer’s Perspective,” is fairly
self-explanatory. “This module is focused on finding out what service looks
and feels like to the customer,” Hibbard said. “This is when we actually
started to bring in the research. We wanted to learn what customers do and do
not care about, as well as how much more we could impact the customer through
the way we dealt with them.” The seventh module, “Working as a Team,”
discourages the lack of communication and interaction that often occurs between
departments of a company. “We needed to get rid of the ‘white space’ that
happens between departments,” Hibbard said. “We needed people to talk to
each other and understand the handoff process. You can’t just perform your
task on a project, throw it over the wall and say, ‘Well, I’m done with
it.’ You need everybody to really understand the chain of events that are
obvious to the customer.”
As for
the eighth module, “Time Management,” Hibbard said, “It’s easy for us to
think that people just intuitively know how to manage time, but they don’t. So
whether it’s phone calls that need to be managed, prioritizing your work, or
figuring out something as simple as how to use Outlook Calendar, people needed
tools to help them better manage their time. So we provided them with those
tools.”
The
ninth module is titled “Using Empathy with Customers.” “Sometimes
customers call with some very difficult information to share with us. So we
needed to talk about how much we needed to let the customer talk to us. Because
sometimes they want to say, ‘You know, my father was a really unique
person,’ or ‘My sister was a wonderful lady.’ We have to give them the
space and the time to do that. Of course, we also need to know the right time to
sort of step in and gently nudge the conversation forward.”
The last module of
UnumProvident’s Customer Service Excellence training program is called
“Professional Business Writing.” “E-mail is a great way to communicate,
but only if people know proper English, as well as the types of things that
should and should not be in an e-mail,” Hibbard said. “For example, they
need to know that putting a picture of kittens at the bottom of a signature
block in an e-mail doesn’t really work for us. So as you can see, there’s a
whole host of things like that that we’ve been working on to help our
employees have the tools they need to deliver the kind of customer service we
want to be known for. They can take these modules in any order that makes sense
to them.”
The Balanced Business Scorecard
Thompson then returned to the
stage to discuss the final components of UnumProvident’s customer-centric
culture. “Up to this point, we’ve talked about how we organize our company
around delivering service,” he said. “We’ve also talked about the things
we do, including researching our customers and getting their feedback and the
way we train and work with our employees. The last piece of this project is
about what happens to help employees do the things that get our scores up to the
94 percent that we mentioned earlier.”
The
first tool that UnumProvident uses in this capacity—the Balanced Business
Scorecard—is relatively new to their
U.S.
operations, Thompson said. “It originated in our
United Kingdom
business, and we then brought it over to the
U.S.
First, the scorecard looks at shareholder value: ‘What is our financial
return goal? What is our profitability goal? What is our sales goal?’ We
review this scorecard monthly with all employees to see where we’re going. It
also looks at customer satisfaction levels, which we monitor on a monthly basis.
It looks at operating excellence, including our expenses. We’re not afraid to
tell our employees that managing expenses is as important as delivering service.
But I think one of the most important aspects of the Balanced Business Scorecard
that has helped us move forward is the section that looks at our people. We go
out to our employees and let them know what our people goals are for the year,
and we track them. Last year, one of our goals was to reduce turnover. I had
some turnover in our contact center, and those of you who manage contact centers
know that that’s usually one of the areas with the highest turnover. Well, we
started having people work at home, although we had very rigid standards and
requirements for this. As a result, they were much more productive. We now have
a third of our contact center people working from home. As soon as we did this,
our turnover went down in about a month. But we put that in front of our
employees all the time so that they know: Yes, we have expense goals. Yes, we
have sales goals. But we also have people goals.”
Performance-Based Incentives
At the time of the merger that
created UnumProvident as it exists today, each of the three companies—Unum
Life, Paul Revere and Provident Life—already had an employee bonus plan in
place. But according to Thompson, most employees could not see how their
individual and department performance impacted corporate results. Initially,
UnumProvident switched over to individual bonuses only, based on what a manager
thought about an employee’s performance. “We wanted to really recognize only
those employees that were making a significant difference,” Thompson said.
“Well, that didn’t help us, either.”
Therefore,
2006 is UnumProvident’s first year of doing a performance-based incentive in
which each employee’s performance toward the overall corporate goal is
measured. “Once the corporate performance goals are met, then we go to the
business unit performance,” he said. “So you have to support the corporate
direction, but you also have to support your teammates in your own area and make
sure you accomplish your own goals. And we want to motivate people on their own
to make sure they do those things on an individual basis as well. So we really
use three factors to calculate a bonus. And employees track individually how
they’re doing and know what they need to do to catch up.”
Employee Recognition
According to Thompson,
UnumProvident’s employee recognition program has been one of the most
effective things the insurer has done to improve results on the Balanced
Business Scorecard, if not the most important. “We’ve developed what we call
our S.C.O.R.E. program,” he said. “Its name is an acronym for the following
principles: service excellence, customer focus, ownership of issues,
relationship development, and the idea of ‘every customer, every time.’
It’s designed to help us focus on making sure we provide high-quality service.
“We
do this in two ways,” Thompson continued. “First, we have quarterly awards.
Employees are nominated by their manager for providing excellent service. With
each quarterly award ceremony, we give out three types of awards: the Service
Excellence Award; the Leadership Award, which includes a leadership award at the
employee level; and the Dream Team Award. The company president is at every one
of these meetings, as well as all the officers of our service organization. And
we use these meetings not only to recognize employees, but to train other
employees in what excellent service and leadership is. And when an award
recipient comes up to receive their award, we don’t just say, ‘Oh, you did a
great job, congratulations,’ and everybody applauds.
Instead, we describe exactly what the recipient did. And our executive
vice president gives them an award and shakes their hand, once a quarter. I’ve
been up there handing out the awards, and I’ve seen recipients beaming with
pride and showing emotion. This has been one of the better things that I think
we’ve done in our company.”
The
second part of UnumProvident’s employee recognition program is an annual trip
to the Walt Disney World® Resort in
Orlando
,
Fla.
“Now, obviously with our service employees, we can’t just set goals, and
then everybody leaves for a few days,” Thompson said. “So every year, we
recognize about 5 percent of our employees.” UnumProvident has been organizing
the Walt Disney World® trip for six
years now—but by no means is it strictly an opportunity for employees to
forget about work and hang out with Mickey and Donald. “It’s a recognition
and training event,” Thompson said. “We have half-day business sessions. We
partner up with the Disney Institute, who has been great to work with over the
past six years, and we’ve learned a lot from them. Employees who go on the
trip are required to take the training back to their office and do some sessions
for people who didn’t get to go, so they really pay close attention during the
training sessions. We announce these awards at our home office in front of all
employees. And it’s a big deal: Units sit together and really make a lot of
noise when one of their own is recognized. And I think the recognition has made
employees think, ‘I want to go on the Disney trip next year’ and ask their
manager, ‘What do I have to do to be there?’ This motivates people to really
work on their own to earn the trip, rather than their manager saying, ‘Do
this, do that.’”
Monitoring Service Standards
Finally, Thompson explained the
color-coded goal-setting program that UnumProvident uses to monitor how well
departments are doing at meeting goals. “We use the colors red, green and
yellow,” he explained. “Green means an area is doing well on a goal, and red
means they’re not doing so well. But we’ve set it up in such a way that we
have stretch goals. And we’ve told employees that if we don’t have a couple
of red, then we have not set goals high enough. We monitor this on a monthly
basis, so it’s something that we’re really building into our culture.
Employees know what our goals are, they track them, and they understand the
direction we’re supposed to be going in.”
Most
recently, UnumProvident relaunched its Great Idea Program, which gives employees
the chance to make suggestions and recommendations for continuous improvement of
service delivery. “We’ve had a program off and on over the years, but we
recently restarted that, because with all the things that we’ve been doing, it
really made sense to go ahead and do that, too,” Thompson said. “You can’t
get great ideas from employees if you don’t ask for them. I think we got 1,100
different ideas in the first six months. And we’ve implemented over 100 of
those already, just in the first year. Some of these ideas are small, but they
do make a difference. So we really put all of these elements together to
encourage employees to help us meet and exceed corporate goals.”
In
closing, Thompson summed up what he deems the most important elements of a
business culture designed around the customer experience. “First of all, if
you don’t have top management support, you’re really not going to be
successful,” he said. “There are 3,000 employees in the client services
organization that I work in, which is about 25 percent of our workforce. And our
CEO attends every one of our quarterly meetings as well as the annual training
and recognition event. He’s made a commitment to do that, and he’s done it.
And it really means a lot that he does that, so you have to have the top people
involved. Also, getting the necessary training done is a huge investment of time
and money. It costs a lot to bring several hundred people to Walt Disney World®
once a year. But we’ve made that commitment and have done it every
year, and it’s really paying off for us. The other thing we’ve learned
through this process is that it takes time for this investment to produce
results. It didn’t happen overnight for us; we started this in 2001, and it
got a little better every year, as you can see. And finally, we’ve learned
that service is both an attitude and a culture that has to be nourished. I think
we have a long way to go in our company; we see service challenges every day,
but our ability to successfully meet these challenges has been improved as a
result of what we have implemented. And all these things have come
together—the training, the recognition, the motivation, the goal-setting, the
performance measurement, keeping those goals out in front of our employees—to
really make a difference for us.”
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