S01E01: Skyrocketing NPS and CX in Service Operations

We premiere 'Ops Game Changers', the new ActiveOps podcast where we share real-life stories from remarkable leaders that are revolutionising the world of service operations. In this series, we explore some of the key challenges faced by service operations as they strive to deliver more - more capacity, more productivity and more business impact. Host, Bhavesh Vaghela (CMO at ActiveOps) quizzes his guests on how they went about unlocking significant value, adopting best practices, and experiencing some game changing results.

In this first episode we dive into the topic of customer experience and its impact on operations and the Net Promoter Score (NPS). To address this topic, we are joined by Angela Vernes (Head of Operations) and Darlene Mbukula (Head of Client Experience) at Nedbank Insurance, a Nedbank Group company that offers car insurance, credit card assurance, life and funeral cover and other types of insurance to more than two million clients. These Ops Game Changers discuss how Nedbank Insurance transformed its business to become more customer-centric, leading to a significant improvement in its NPS score over the past four years. 

Angela and Darlene share insights into the challenges they faced in aligning different business units and creating a common strategy. They emphasise the importance of involving all employees in understanding the customer journey and removing bottlenecks to enhance the overall customer experience. The journey involved benchmarking against international standards, mapping customer journeys, and creating a client-centric culture throughout the organisation. 

Throughout the episode, Angela and Darlene share how they gained buy-in internally by creating a shared understanding of the company's customer-centric vision. They discuss the importance of involving employees from various departments in shaping the customer experience and how they measured success at each step. By implementing metrics, customer journey mapping, developing client service principles, and employing the right framework for measuring, interpreting and strategising, Nedbank Insurance successfully transformed its operations and significantly improved its NPS score. 

Tune in to this engaging episode to learn more about Nedbank Insurance's customer experience journey, the impact of operations on NPS, and the strategies they employed to become more customer-centric. 

Want to learn more about how to radically transform your company through the power of operations? Then don't miss the following episodes and hear more fascinating insights from other leaders in the field of Operations about how they have overcome challenges to drive productivity and boost performance at their enterprises. You can listen and subscribe to ‘Ops Game Changers’ on your preferred podcast platform and also on our YouTube channel, AOTv.

Discover more about ActiveOps.

Transcript

 ActiveOps ‘Ops Game Changers’ podcast

 S01E01 – Nedbank Insurance 

Bhavesh Vaghela: Hello and welcome to the first in our series of Ops Game Changers, the podcast series that shines a light on the crucial role that operations teams have in driving business performance and improving staff and customer experience. My name is Bhavesh Vaghela and each episode I'll be exploring how an operations team has supported a key business KPI or initiative. We'll be delving into how these Ops Game Changers went about doing this and exploring the outcomes they achieved. Today we're joined by two Ops Game Changers. We're joined by Angela, who's the Head of Operations, and Darlene, who's the Head of Client Experience at Nedbank Insurance, part of the Nedbank Group and based in South Africa. Angela and Darlene have been on this really amazing journey on how to improve customer experience in Nedbank. Now, before we delve into that, I guess it's over to you Angela and Darlene, to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit more about your roles at Nedbank. 

Angela Vernes: I'm the Head of Operations for Nedbank Insurance. We look after all of the operations, all of the servicing for our clients, and we've got over 300 employees. And I've been in financial services for over 30 years, spanning multiple roles from credit, finance, risk and compliance, and operations. 

Darlene Mbukula: I look after the client experience value chain for Nedbank Insurance. And what that encompasses is a full value chain, all the way from research and marketing insights, the designing of customer value propositions, our go-to marketing and brand strategies, how we communicate externally and internally with clients, how we manage the conduct risk aspect of our business, as well as the client experience from a management and measurement framework, and lastly, the complaints space. And I think I've been in financial services for the past 18 years, of which 12 I've been in the client experience space. 

Bhavesh: Well, that really does introduce our topic wonderfully well. At the end of the day, we're all customers. We all have our own war stories of good and bad customer experience. You know, it's a fascinating topic, right? And the outcomes of customer experience are not really that easy to achieve. So we are really looking forward to kind of delving into how you were driving that change throughout the organization and how really operations supported and impacted the NPS score. But before we do jump into the topic, maybe one of you could share a little bit more about Nedbank Insurance? 

Angela: Nedbank Insurance is a company within the Nedbank Group. We have got a life insurance and a non-life insurance license. We underwrite products and distribute them to Nedbank clients. We've got well over two million clients on our book. And we primarily sell in the South African market. Africa has got one of, you know, the world's poorest countries and a very young population with low income customers. So we do have to make sure that our products are suitable for our markets. And there's a large unbanked sector. So we have seen in our industry that some insurance companies do try and partner with, for example, cell phone providers, 'cause everyone's got a cell phone. And they use that as a distribution channel. In Nedbank Insurance, we're actually fortunate because we do partner with Nedbank who is part of the group. And we market directly to our Nedbank customers. Currently in South Africa we're also experiencing quite a lot of load shedding. As much as this is negatively impacting insurance claims and the industry as a whole, we also do look for opportunities, and we can then create bespoke solutions to ensure these new additions as people are adding solar panels to their homes and their businesses to try and get off the grid and create their own electricity. Another interesting point is that South Africa, in South Africa, the life insurance market is noticeably bigger than the non-life market, probably about an 80-20 split. And this is primarily due to retirement funding and funeral policies. 

Bhavesh: That's great, Angela. I think it's fascinating. You know, when we were talking a few months ago and you know, you were kind enough to present at our Capacity 22 user conference, one of the things that you said that really interested me was over the four year period, your NPS score or the NPS score for Nedbank went from something, I think it was below eight to something over 74, 75. Now I can imagine that, look, I mean the NPS score is just a metric, right? But if we delve into it, you guys probably had to transform your business and really turn yourselves into becoming a lot more customer centric. So perhaps you could wind the clock back a little bit, perhaps wind it back four years and tell us what it was like for your customers, and what, you know, importantly it was like for your operations team. 

Angela: Thanks, Bhavesh. Yeah, I think, you know, four, five years ago, we had just brought our three businesses together in about 2016, 2017. So it took a while for us to bring three completely separate businesses that had three separate strategies, separate management, management teams, together as one as Nedbank Insurance. In the past, our clients were treated separately. They had very different communications, different ways of being serviced. And now we've actually got a common strategy, we've got a common vision, we've aligned all of our metrics from a client service perspective. And I think that the hard work that we've been going through is now bearing the fruit that we've been waiting for. 

Bhavesh: You know, putting customers at the heart of your business, you know, is easier said than done, I mean, for a lot of industries and a lot of companies. So was there a moment, right, there must have been a moment that was a trigger, that was a kind of a thing that said to yourselves, okay, we've got to do this. We really are gonna take this step and take this journey together with Nedbank. 

Darlene: I think if I can come in there, that whilst we had a direct impact on net promoter score, it definitely was not a chase after the net promoter score story, but more that we were obsessed around how do we become more client centric? So as a business, we actually compared ourselves to international benchmarks in terms of where do we fare on the customer centricity scale? And how do we then embark on that journey? You know, what does it mean to have a full value chain of client experience? And how does it then impact positively in addressing and meeting the needs of our customers whilst we make sure that we remove every possible pain point that we can within that time? So what we then began to do was various things. And I think the first one that you'll appreciate is really the alignment of what does it mean for you and your job and the impact that that has on client? Because I think often, you know, we would think, okay, you're in client experience and you've got a direct impact on client. Meanwhile, let's say you are in sales and maybe client experience is not so much of a big deal. So we brought about that understanding in terms of, you know, the fact that client experience is not a job nor a function, but it's a thread that must run through the business. And that no matter where you sit, even if you're in finance, there is an impact. And one of those key alignments that we did was to really bring people in different rooms, when we began to do what we call customer journey maps. What this brought about is really understanding our current state of doing business from an as-is, taking current processes, taking current capabilities, taking current output and outcomes that clients were receiving. And then we began to map the ideal to be, in terms of actually removing, if we were to remove bottlenecks, what would that journey look like? And that journey then would not be driven from an inside out perspective in terms of whatever capability that we could push out, but it would actually be driven by the needs of the customer. So, and we would validate that by bringing customers in the room. And I think maybe a point of correction is we got it to an average of 69, you know, over the years, and not 75. 

Bhavesh: Well, I think that's a huge journey. I mean, you know, the thing that you're describing, it's all about getting the business to really think about customer experience differently. And I would imagine all the way through that journey, you'd have gone through a whole bunch of roadblocks and some challenges towards getting buy-in, right? Because the buy-in becomes a really important part of any transformational journey. So how did you go about getting that buy-in internally? 

Darlene: Right, I think that's a really great question. And you know, I often see a lot of this, you know, from thought leaders, et cetera. And it was really about creating that one narrative of intent, you know? So there were a lot of pieces to consider, and that's why you needed to sort of bring everybody to the same space of saying, what are we trying to achieve? So there had to be a top down and a bottom up approach in creating that understanding. So a very good example was how we conducted the client journey maps, that it didn't involve people in client experience, but it looked at everybody from the initial touch point of saying, how do you create awareness? You know, who do you need there? And sometimes it was like, let's say people in the branch, people in our product teams, people in group, from a marketing, from a segment perspective, people in finance, people from our technology department. And the more that you got different voices, the more that you created the light bulb moments. And then one of the key things that we actually then did was to then bring about a rationale when it comes to how we fare on the client-centric maturity map from an industry benchmark. And there you got everybody to give their voice in terms of how they saw where we were and how they measured us, you know, in terms of the scale. And what that involved was, you had certain questions around five key pillars, which was leadership and culture, focusing operations on the customer, the whole client experience lens, training and really upskilling our people as well as creating value for the client. And what this did was to create an awakening in people's minds in terms of, okay, so if this is where we are rating ourselves, what are the missing elements? And the excitement then was, oh, okay, so this is what it means now. This is why we are doing certain things. So it was really about that influence and getting the buy-in and making sure that the narrative was not one directional from a top down only, but that there was buy-in across. And you got different ambassadors and different advocates within the different parts of the business. Because then if they began to be evangelists, you know, in the narrative and the outcome that we were actually driving, then you knew that you were set. Because, you know, then it's not about me going to Angela to say, you know Angela, this is what I really need. But there would be that automatic buy in and understanding of, okay, this is what we're actually chasing as a collective. So I think it's that ownership and really the thread that runs through the business, and getting that and people on a journey where it's not about, you know, giving a directive, but how are you moving with people on the journey? But do they understand, you know, what is the purpose and the essence of this journey? 

Bhavesh: It's a fascinating journey you've been through. And I think those light bulb moments that you mentioned are amazing when they happen. I'd imagine, though, that throughout that process, throughout the process you've been on, you've had to demonstrate success along the way, right? So you are measuring different things, and I guess things start to materialize and the momentum just gets bigger and better. So how did you track that success at each step? Did you find that you were tracking different metrics at the start compared to where you are now? How have you evolved? 

Darlene: 100%. So firstly there were a number of different proof points. So it just wasn't about, let's say, measuring the impact and the success of customer journey mapping. I'll just maybe at a high level touch some of the key things that, so we did the industry benchmark of the client-centric maturity assessment measure. We embarked on the customer journey mapping exercise. We worked on really designing our foundational customer value proposition. And what this then brought about was a sense of identity. You know, we got them to understand that, okay, what is our identity from an insurance perspective? What are we offering to our clients? And you know, we came up with different messaging lines and strategies that supported our value proposition. We were also then able to identify more pain points around gaps that we had. Like for example, simplifying our plain language and how we communicate with our clients. The lack of standardization, to what Angela was mentioning earlier, from unifying the service that we give. And we developed client service principles. And we began to then test ourselves around how should we be engaging with our clients and what are those measures? And then I think one thing that is really close to my heart is a framework that we used, which is almost like, you know, our go-to called the MISI framework, which means that at any one point you are working, you know, like around the clock, where you are constantly baselining, benchmarking through the first M, which is called a measure, you know, of some sort. And then you are constantly interpreting, right, as a subject matter expert, et cetera. And then you go to the likes of my colleague here, Angela, where we would strategize together to say, if this is what our clients are saying, Angela, what are you seeing in the business? Let's strategize because this is the voice of the client, these are the actual verbatims. So these are the possible gaps. And what we would always focus on is moving away from treating a symptom. Because when you treat a symptom, you're not then eradicating the actual pain point. But once you do a proper deep dive and root cause analysis, it allows you to implement the right action and to go back round the clock from a baseline perspective. And you constantly test yourselves against this. And obviously this was not, you know, from a one dimensional perspective because you had different proof points, like the impact of the customer journey mapping actions that we took. And we categorize into what is short term, what is medium, what is, you know, long term? And again, there you were looking at impact. What will make the biggest impact in the here and now? And that was cutting across different things like our processes, our people, you know, our products, et cetera, et cetera. So there were a lot of proof points that we continuously and gradually brought, you know, to the business. And again, we would be closing the loop on, remember the journey that we started on, this is where we are, this is what it means, this is what we still need to do. 

Bhavesh: So you mentioned when you would go and talk to Angela, and from an operations perspective, I mean, I guess Angela, when Darlene comes to you and says, right, well, this is what we need to be doing. This is, you know, how we need to be driving our customer experience. How'd you go about doing that? How do you go about transforming the operations team and really getting that team together to deliver this fantastic service? So how did you work together to impact that change from an operations perspective? 

Angela: I think first and foremost, between Darlene and I, we spoke off the same to our respective team. So her team was not hearing anything different to what the operations team was hearing. We also did a lot of collaboration where we bring our teams together, we look at our scorecards, we look at our reporting, we co-create the commentary so that we know why things look like they are and what the actions are and what we need to do. So it was something that we built together. From an ops environment, you do have to spend quite a bit of time to actually bring something to life. So for us, bringing clients' experience to life, we used a lot of artifacts, which we did desk drops on, mousepads with, you know, the client behaviors that we were trying to achieve, calendars, chair bags with the words on. The common language was then also brought into our reporting. So it wasn't something that was just said once, but we actually started to use that language in the way we spoke, the way we communicated at town halls, which we do once a month, as well as our daily buzz sessions that the leaders work with their respective teams on. 

Bhavesh: That's really great. You know, I really like the fact that you're embedding the messaging and the artifacts. That's unique and really good to hear. So was there a single thing that fueled the change from an operations perspective or from an experience perspective? 

Angela: You know, if I think back, I definitely think TCF or Treating Customers Fairly was a bit of a catalyst for us. When this was first promulgated and we looked at this legislation, you know, we said, but we are already doing this. We are doing all the work around the six pillars. But as we started to really delve into it, we realized that we perhaps weren't collaborating as much as we should across all of the areas of our business effectively. We weren't having those deep conversations that Darlene was referring to, where we actually look at the root cause and we make changes to our product and our processes based on client feedback and the reporting and the data that we get. I think for me, the role of client experience also became a lot more elevated in the business. And that's when we started to see the changes and the momentum happening. But I would say that Treating Customers Fairly was really just a richer way of how we manage conduct in our business. We took this a level higher, we aligned it to business strategy, and we infused our conformance lens. 

Bhavesh: And with that, did you have to change anything in operations? You know, did you measure something differently? Were there different metrics that you had to change to meet those new challenges or opportunities? 

Angela: Everything that we talk about with our CX team, we'll try and break down into actions that we can roll out in the ops space. So probably the biggest change was our goal commitment contracts or balance scorecards, if you call it that. We tried to make sure that any metric that somebody was being tracked against, we could actually roll that up and they could see exactly what impact they were having to the NPS score or to the client effort score, whatever we were tracking from that perspective. We aligned our client experience vision and the Nedbank Insurance vision of being the preferred provider to Nedbank Insurance clients. So we can't say that if we have a poor NPS score. So basically by us actually improving that score, people started to really see that what they were doing was influencing the way clients saw our business. 

Darlene: And I think if I could just add something there, you know, and I was almost like that person that went every month to ops to share the results. So whether you really wanted to see them or not, but it was here I come again, here is where we are. And I think that's the nice thing, that there was appreciation of it in the end to say, okay, we can see the impact, right? Because no longer is it just about treating symptoms, but we can really see that we're eradicating the pain points as we dig deep into the root causes. 

Bhavesh: I could talk about this topic for hours. I mean, I'm passionate about customer experience. And I'm just curious, Angela, you know, what it's like now working for operations? I would imagine, you know, prior to this, opinions were probably different, perhaps morale was a little bit different, it wasn't as great because you were dealing with potentially customers that weren't happy. And now you're, I guess, in a probably completely different position. So what's it like now working in operations and what's it like to be within your team? 

Angela: Yeah, I mean, you know, dealing with escalations and complaints is definitely energy draining, and nobody wants to be in a space like that. But I think what we do do now is we really analyze our service levels and our turnaround times with probably a very different lens. Because sometimes it's quite difficult to get industry benchmarks in terms of service levels and turnaround times. So if we feel that we are achieving our service level and turnaround times and Darlene comes in with her report on voice of client and we see that actually, clients are still not happy with, you know, the way that we processed a Gisa claim or a disability claim in the life space, it makes us really go back and re-look at that and say, okay, we need to still tighten this a bit more. Because we are getting disparate views in terms of us saying that we are doing really well and clients saying you can do better. So I think that has been a big eye-opener for us where we actually just keep improving and tweaking those metrics that we track until we see that we're actually getting the same story between our internal metrics and what clients are telling us. 

Darlene: And I think just to add to that part on the changes, while in ops was really the fact that we only did not focus on the impact of the voice of customer, but we were actually also obsessed with the voice of staff. So if this is the impact that the client is experiencing and when you identify pain points, you would look on the backend of that, which is then the internal part of voice of staff. And I think as staff saw that we were interested in their welfare just as we're interested in the welfare of the clients, I think it really began to give meaning and commitment, you know, to the process. 

Bhavesh: It's a really good point. I mean, the whole idea of retaining staff, I mean staff attrition, it's such a big challenge globally for operations teams. So actually, you know, thinking about it from both angles will certainly help, really help. I mean, you have, I assume must have a much stronger workforce that's actually, you know, happy to come into the work, happy to come to work every day and ultimately deliver that great service, which is fantastic. 

Angela: For me, the benefits that we had using the AOM methodology, the fact that we were able to plan our work in a lot better, we knew which available resources we had, we could flex those resources depending on where we needed them. We could really track our work in progress and make sure that they weren't in levels that would result in unhappy clients. I think all of that, you know, that journey has also helped us a lot from an operations perspective. We don't have to spend a lot of effort now in things that are actually just working really well. They've gathered their own sort of momentum and life and we can actually then work and focus our efforts on those root causes. And you know, there's always something to improve on, but instead of having 10 things, we can sort of focus on the top two and make a really big difference in our business. 

Bhavesh: So I guess I was gonna ask you next, Angela, have you got one piece of advice for other operations teams, you know, people that are going through this transformation, who are trying to improve customer experience. What would you say now? Obviously top of the list has to be that you make sure you have ActiveOps, but I know you've already said that already, so. So outside of that, Angela, what would you say? You know, we've boiled down three, four years into 20 or 30 minutes and there's a lot of hard work and effort that's gone in. But if you could think of a couple of things that you would perhaps say that would be the key things that are the key piece of advice? 

Angela: I mean, I'm happy for Darlene to come in here as well, but if I think about this initiative, especially linked to NPS and the changes we've made in our operations team, I definitely think it has to be led from the top. Your ExCo or your management team have to be aligned. They have to show that they are behind, you know, the transformation that we are wanting to make in the business. And you need that inclusivity across all the value chains. 'Cause as Darlene said, it's not just ops and client experience, there's client solutions, which is the product team. There's our biotechnology team as well as our stakeholders that we have within the bank. So a lot of collaboration, a lot of communication. And it's not an easy journey, but it's really, really rewarding. 

Bhavesh: So were there any moments, whether it was, you know, about the staff or whether it was about a customer that you really appreciated that effort and that the effort that'd gone in from the transformation journey that you've been on? Do you remember anything that stands out as unique? 

Darlene:  So I think I'll put it this way, right? When people saw the impact or the importance from a customer journey mapping exercise, creating that good outcome for client whilst you are also creating a seamless experience and making it easy for the staff that engage with the client, so you are actually removing the pain points for the staff, I think that was one of those aha moments where it brought great joy and delight in understanding the process. And I guess especially with the process, when we look at it from the soliciting that took place initially to say, people must be involved across the spectrum of the business. And a lot of people would then write back and say, but why, you know, I don't think my job involves or touches on the impact of client. And only after being through the process and seeing the suggested actions and how they've been categorized, because one thing that we did was to continuously then feed back on the change that has taken place once it was implemented. And when we would baseline, we would then show the progress of that and then people would really appreciate that. And then I think if I look at it from a second, I think it was earlier where you said to Angela, what's the one thing that actually fueled the change? You know, I want to say that if we look at the involvement of leadership, but not taking away the point that ownership resided within the people. So for example, when we were doing customer journey maps or any of the other key initiatives, you had ExCo members there from a support perspective. And an issue of influencing their teams to say, be a part of it. So the narrative that I spoke, the different extra ExCo members spoke, and they actually drove the same message within their teams. And then there was buy-in, you know, from their teams where they would understand that this is not just a client experience initiative, it's actually for the greater good of how we actually show up and how we actually do good for our customers. So that is very, very important when we look at commitment, the buy-in, you know, continuously driving that and meaning what we actually say, but letting the ownership reside within the hands of the people, because after all, they are the doers. 

Bhavesh: What an amazing story. I just have one final comment. It's a very inspiring journey, you know, this journey that you guys have been on. So I wanted to, first of all, thank you so much for sharing that with us and our listeners. It's really interesting just to hear the, you know, I guess the fully comprehensive approach that Nedbank has taken really to tackling that idea of, you know, improving customer experience. From everything from devising those journey maps involving everybody across the business, from branches to finance to product teams. And I guess the biggest challenge is really to excite people within the organization and really get buy-in on the process. And I guess the ongoing commitment, right? The ongoing commitment to continue to drive that transformation and to continually improve those metrics, it really is very impressive. So Darlene, Angela, well done. Just to hear the passion in your voice, as you can really, really tell that you're very excited about this transformation. And you know, that must have translated down to everybody throughout the team and the owners of the customer experience. It's a great story. And again, thank you so much for joining us on the Ops Game Changers and sharing your story with us, and especially your tips in terms of how to drive that change. 'Cause I think those tips will be invaluable as other customers and other operations teams think about going through similar journeys. So again, thank you very much and thank you for sharing your success at Nedbank. And thank you very much to our listeners for joining us. And please do check in to catch more episodes of Ops Game Changers to hear more fascinating insights from other leaders in the field of operations as they go about tackling challenges to drive productivity and boost performance across their businesses and enterprises. So thank you again and bye for now.