Insurance:
a transformative business strategy that centres the customer
Strategic transformation
An international insurance company needed help communicating their strategy for their health business.
The CEO and his senior leadership team had already developed the strategy through a series of facilitated workshops. But the output of these sessions had been collated in a PowerPoint deck that was wordy, jargon-filled and visually confusing. The product of many hands, it also lacked a clear structure and coherent, easy-to-recall messages.
The solution: a strategy that speaks the customer’s language
What was needed was a clear set of instructions that any employee could use to build toward the vision and deliver on the health insurer’s promise to customers.
Our inspiration for the language of the strategy? The people every employee is there to serve: customers. So we asked to see verbatim customer feedback. A picture emerged from these thousands of comments. Namely, that customers saw our client as a helpful friend that gives them peace of mind that they’ll be looked after if they need care.
From there, we boiled the strategy down to a series of action points, expressed in simple, actionable language that customers, as well as employees, could relate to.
For example, “Prioritize building essential health capabilities and excelling at the core tasks with precision and consistency” became “End worry and hassle”, language that was drawn directly from customer feedback. Similarly, “Deliver customer value through affordability” became the much more emotive rallying cry: “Fight for fair prices”.
In each case, such specific, concrete language has made it much easier for every employee to connect what’s required of them in their day-to-day work with the organisation’s larger strategic goals.
The outcome: a strategy every employee can understand and get behind
We captured the newly articulated strategy — which was titled The Peace of Mind Plan — in a presentation that the CEO gave at a series of employee roadshows. We wrote the script and created beautiful, simple and impactful slides to accompany the CEO’s words.
Feedback on the sessions was universally positive, with one attendee overheard declaring:
More powerful still, the CEO went on to restructure his team around the action points in the strategy, with leaders given job titles such as Head of Ending Worry and Hassle and Head of the Fight for Fair Prices.
Reflecting the team’s overall vision, the CEO Office itself was renamed the Peace of Mind Office.
“If you don’t understand the plan now, you shouldn’t be working here!”