Industry Best Practices

No need to recreate the wheel.  ICAE provides best-practices sharing opportunities to help guide, inform, highlight and…just plain make the jobs of consumer affairs professionals easier and more productive.  Here’s what was featured at the 2015 Exchange.  Take a minute to capture and borrow from the best…

For the record, Amica must be handling its consumer affairs really well—after all, Paula Pallozzi, Rhode Island Associate Director, offered to provide the company’s introduction.

From the industry side: Best Practices in Consumer Services and Service Delivery  

Amica Mutual Insurance Company, a Rhode Island company for 108 years, presented the Amica way—and wowed the group. Presenters Ryan Caldarone and Meghan Taylor showcased consumer affairs best practices from the perspective of a company whose mission statement is, to create peace of mind and build enduring relationships. The presenters further defined the mission statement as the core of their culture—where customers always come first.

Ryan Caldarone and Meghan Taylor, Training Supervisors from Amica Mutual Insurance Company discussed the importance of training and how this relates to customer satisfaction.

Amica focus: Train, track, feedback and culture

• Training—the Amica way is to focus on ethics, values, integrity, trust and the customer. These are the messages that are delivered on the first day of employment and reinforced with every interaction following.

In training, Amica employees learn:

• The concept of lagniappe—giving a little extra to the customer/policyholder.
• The need to anticipate, advocate and act.
• The importance of continued training so that exceptional service is delivered to the consumer. (Amica knows that most customers put through a claim on average once every 10 years and that’s the opportunity to prove to the customer that Amica has been and will be a good choice for their insurance business.)

• Tracking—Amica establishes specific service standards for client communication, continuously performs audits to ensure service standards are met, and actively monitors calls. Amica has a no-script environment that enables the customer service representatives to work directly with the customer’s needs and expectations.

• Feedback—Multiple touch points for customer feedback are provided, but the primary resource is the net promoter score (NPS) to measure customer loyalty—a program used since 2012. NPS uses one main question to determine customer satisfaction: How likely are you to recommend Amica? Based on the answer, every surveyed customer becomes either a promoter or detractor, which can be cast into a ratio. Amica likes the net promoter survey because the data is actionable.

Amica is Amazing
Customers are an integral element of the Amica culture—and that helps create a good tone with the claims/loss experience. Amica has 52,000 customers who have been insureds for more than 40 years. It’s not unusual for Amica employees to receive personal thank yous from the customer—a hallmark of good customer service for any company.

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