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Steve:
If you provide a service that specializes in complex solutions for your customers, then it's important you make certain they know you're listening to their feedback.

Stephanie:
To be quite honest, it was pretty clear that it was something everyone in the organization was aligned to do. We recognize the business benefits of it. We recognize the customer benefits of it, and it really just helped us have those broader conversations with leadership. To get everyone aligned on this closed-loop process is ultimately going to benefit our customer and therefore have ultimate impact on our business as well.

Steve:
Let's take a look at a company that decided to follow up on customer feedback right from the start. On this episode of The CX Leader podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. As we like to say on this show, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader. And this podcast explores topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for your company. Closed-loop feedback. It's not a foreign osubject On this podcast. We talk about it all the time and you can find those episodes on our website, by the way, cxleaderpodcast.com. But today we thought we'd look at a company that services a complicated insurance market and how implementing a closed-loop follow-up early in that company's life has impacted their growth. My guest on this episode are uniquely qualified to talk about this. They are from SageSure, a company that specializes in solving the complex insurance needs of homeowners and small businesses and challenged markets. Stephanie Sullivan is a customer experience manager and Kevin McEnery is the AVP of Customer Experience, both at SageSure. Stephanie, Kevin, welcome and thank you for being guests on The CX Leader Podcast.

Stephanie:
Oh, thank you so much for having us.

Kevin:
Thank you, Steve.

Steve:
Well, it's my pleasure. And as we typically do here on the show, I always like to just set the context just in case our our listeners aren't familiar with either you or SageSure. But it sounds like they should be. But so just give us a little quick background on you each personally and then maybe a little bit more on SageSure, just to kind of set the context, Stephanie, would you like to go first?

Stephanie:
Oh, I'd love to. Thank you so much, Steve. So I actually I graduated college with a degree in marketing and quite frankly, had absolutely no idea what I wanted to go into. So my first role straight out of college was actually in a leadership development rotational program where I had the opportunity for three years to rotate across the marketing organization of a very large insurance carrier. I absolutely loved it, and a lot of my rotations helped me understand little parts of things that I enjoyed about marketing. But I really couldn't put the word on what it meant to bring all of those things together. Finally, my last rotation was actually on the newly developed customer experience team, and what I really liked about that rotation and just what I've learned about the discipline since then is how it encompasses market research, market analytics and a bit of psychology and consumer behavior all into a single field. So since graduating that program, I've kind of moved up in my career since then, recently came to SageSure about a year ago, and I've been loving it ever since.

Steve:
Well, that's a great background and you do kind of come from a classic marketing training, which is kind of one of the typical tracks we do. And I think particularly in B2B and complex solutions, the customer experience and marketing are very well connected. I think that your background is perfect for the business, so congratulations. Kevin How about your journey to be a leader and then maybe you can give us a little more data and background on SageSure?

Kevin:
100%. So I been in the insurance industry for the bulk of my career over 15 years. I spent a lot of my time with Nationwide Insurance before kind of taking the leap and moving over to SageSure. Throughout my career, I've been in lots of different areas. I've worked in strategy products, continuous improvement, a couple of special project oriented roles, and really just love. I love solving problems and collaborating with others to figure out solutions. And I think what I found was really interesting is I was doing continuous improvement and doing a lot of internal process improvement, and I found two roles later by flipping that sort of outside in or inside out and starting to look at things from the customer perspective, it was just fascinating. It was creating all kinds of great cross-functional collaboration. People were aligned, understood where they contributed, and a lot of the improvements were just win win scenarios. So I absolutely loved the work that I did with customer journey mapping and and since then at SageSure, I've really gotten to do a lot of work, a lot of which we'll talk about today on Voice of Customer programs and have really, really enjoyed staying that up here at SageSure. And I love the fact that we're measuring experiences and analyzing those and sharing results with our stakeholders. So I love exciting to be here today.

Steve:
Well, you got another classic kind of background with the continuous improvement, quality improvement. I've been in the business a long time and you know, some of the early work came out of like total quality management, Six Sigma, and if you're familiar with those techniques, which I'm sure you are, Kevin, but you know, they always ask for some sort of voice of the customer. There has to be some valid requirements we used to call them, so that customer input was essential to that. The other thing you said strategy. One of the I think, the coolest things about our profession today and why we like to say it's never been a better time to be a CX leader is that you're you know, your CX strategy is very much tied to the corporate strategy today because that's the way most companies are differentiating, is providing an amazing experience that their customers just, you know, don't don't want to go somewhere else to get so. So tell us a little bit more about SageSure and sort of the business that you're in and any kind of firm or graphics you might be able to share with us, just like number of customers or number of employees, you know, the areas that you cover. Just again, to kind of set the context for our discussion.

Kevin:
Yeah, 100%. So my number is maybe a little out of date just because we're continually growing. You know, when I when I came to SageSure, it was kind of like a startup without the risk, if that makes sense. We're also rapidly approaching a billion dollars in direct written premium, and the company has just year over year had just profound incremental growth. So it's definitely a fast growing, fast moving company. We specialize in, as you mentioned, challenge markets really good at in coastal states believe we're in 14 states. And so we're doing a lot to help protect folks, you know, a catastrophe prone areas. And really we're we're providing a solution where a lot of carriers shy away from.

Steve:
And is it primarily for residential or do you also do commercial and multifamily or…

Kevin:
Yeah, we're primarily primarily home homeowners, residential, but we have created a commercial lines department and program, and that's a big area of growth and focus for our company.

Steve:
Yeah, well, congratulations on the success, so I'm really delighted to hear about the topic today. closed-loop process is something that we've just talked about all the time and it kind of is amazing to me how many companies can't seem to do it very well, but you guys have obviously done it. But take me back to the beginning sort of, you know, and maybe I'll just jump back and forth. But maybe, Stephanie, if you want to comment on this one first and Kevin, add anything you want. But what was the impetus? How did this closed-loop process get started?

Stephanie:
Yeah, absolutely. I'll kind of weigh in first. Then Kevin was actually here when we first started building out the closed-loop process. So he'll probably have a bit more color to add. But when we think about trying to get this up and running across the business, to be quite honest, it was pretty clear that it was something everyone in the organization was aligned to. Do we recognize the business benefits of it, we recognize the customer benefits of it, and it really just helped us have those broader conversations with leadership that get everyone aligned on this closed-loop process is ultimately going to benefit our customer and therefore have ultimate impact on our business as well. So, Kevin, I know if you want to share a little bit more about you were here when it all started, so I'm sure you have much more context there too.

Kevin:
Yeah, definitely. So kind of as a CX leader, like I knew pretty much from day one that we wanted to invest in a CX enterprise platform that would really enable us to listen, analyze and act on a single platform. That was really appealing to me, really exciting to myself and our our senior leader. And I think for us, like the closed-loop part was really just kind of a no brainer. There really wasn't much thought or really debate on any of it. It was sort of like doing what's best for customers is just kind of embedded into our company DNA. And our company, even before I arrived, was one that would always, you know, take customer feedback from our top producers and execute upon it. So I think, you know, the idea of helping customers with unresolved issues and dissatisfied customers and things like that, you know, I think from our company's perspective, like we want to do something with that feedback. We want to right any kind of wrongs that the customer experience and we want to resolve those issues, so…

Steve:
And you mentioned the customers. Are they both agents and policyholders? So…

Kevin:
That's correct.

Steve:
…you have you have a you have a channel in the business. Full disclosure, I'm on the board of a small Indiana insurance agency and and mutual company. So I know enough about insurance to be really dangerous here. But it is a complex stakeholder ecosystem with the agents and the and the policyholders. And and then I assume you write some direct to?

Kevin:
We, yeah, so we we distribute through kind of national partners. So big names like Geico and things like that. And then we work with independent agents as well who in turn work with our policyholders and customers. So from a CX point of view, we consider both our producers, you know, the agents that write business with us as well as the policyholders, you know, to be our two main customer bases. Yeah.

Steve:
So how did you go about setting it up, Kevin? I mean, I love the way you guys put it. You know, like we believe this is the right thing to do and we, you know, we want to make sure that it benefits the customer. And I think that mindset is really important for our listeners to kind of you've got to start with that. But then how did you kind of execute it and how is it grown over the, your 15 years here, Kevin?

Kevin:
Yeah, so I think. It started, we had really a couple of different use cases that we worked on, prioritizing kind of internally with our stakeholders. Qualtrics and Walker were also a big help and helping to kind of pinpoint those. They gave us lots of great referrals from other companies, which was really helpful to talk to other insurance practioners have done who have done this before. I felt like that was just really insightful and really valuable. So I think that was kind of the start. So we picked obviously Policy Services, which is our contact center being a really big one because we have a lot of volume and a lot of transactions there. We picked claims and then we pick digital and we've currently are up and running on on all three of those. For servicing, particularly given that it's such a high volume area where we'd be setting up, you know, pretty frequent closed-loop processes, things like that, we really wanted to partner with an expert. So that kind of primed us to work with Walker Consulting to make sure that we are set up for success and that we had a partner who's who's done this before kind of guiding us through. So that was really helpful.

Steve:
Do you follow up on every single survey or just the ones that end in a call for action or are unfavorable responses?

Kevin:
We're mostly following up on the dissatisfied responses.

Stephanie:
Yeah, and one cool thing, too, is we also have there are some positive folks like some positive surveys that we're able to get back and we're able to flag them in a way that allows us to contact them again, just thank them for their feedback and thank you for their continued support. So as part of this closed-loop process, absolutely, you really want to make sure that our dissatisfied customers are the ones that we're reaching out to, rectifying, however possible, elevating that feedback. At the same time, when it comes to those really awesome responses, reading through those verbatim commentaries and just acknowledging folks for their for their kind words or just their willingness to provide feedback.

Steve:
Yeah, no, I've always said that's one of the biggest I think drivers of of good response rates on your surveys is if you continue to educate the folks you're trying to get the feedback from on what you're doing with the information. So are there other programs or communications you do either back to policyholders or agents or your employees or anything along those lines?

Stephanie:
Yeah, absolutely. So when we talk about I'll actually I'll stick with the positive realm first, just because that's where we just ended a little bit. But when we think about getting that positive feedback back from our survey responses, one thing that our team has really helped to establish is a recognition program. So actually, like at this point, once a quarter will be recognizing the various CSRs who have just really demonstrated outstanding service to our customers. You know, that's not necessarily measured by a number that could be reading through verbatim commentary, and they're getting called out for their professionalism, their knowledge, their overall kindness, things like that that we're able to pick apart and just really elevate those positive stories. And I think that also obviously feeds into that positive CX culture that we're looking to build. So that's definitely a way we're able to just elevate and share some of that positive feedback. And when it comes to just the general feedback we get, of course, not always negative. Sometimes it's, you know, really satisfied customers who just have some ideas or just feedback on what we could do to just make that edge and just get that much better.

Stephanie:
And that feedback we're able to share at a variety of different forums. You know, we have different events where we actually gather our producers all together and we're able to present back to them. Hey, we heard from you all. These are the top three areas of improvements over the last six months or quarter. Here are the improvements we've made that directly that were directly influenced by your feedback. So really making sure that our folks know that they're being heard and that we don't just talk the talk at SageSure, you know, we it's embedded into our DNA to really do something about it. If you look at our values, you'll see it all over the walls of every office. You know, we make sure that we're literally running down the halls, what we call it, but running down the hall to solve customer issues and make sure that we're prioritizing them in a way that can also genuinely improve their experiences and letting them know that we're doing so as well.

Steve:
Yeah. Let me go to you in a minute, Kevin, but I just want to reinforce one thing that Stephanie shared. If you are not using your verbatim comments from your feedback surveys to do recognition of individuals who are called out, start. I mean, we may be foreshadowing some take home value here today, but that is a very much a best practice and it's a really a great way to start tying your employee experience directly to your customer experience.

Steve:
We're all pros, right? So, you know, it's important we hear from you about what topics you think would be most helpful. Let us know how we're doing by going to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey. You'll even have a chance to score some free CX leader podcast swag. That's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week are Stephanie Sullivan and Kevin McEnery, both customer experience execs at SageSure, a insurance company that specializes in solving complex insurance needs of homeowners and small businesses and challenging markets. So, Kevin, let me come to you. And and so you get this feedback and you find areas of dissatisfaction. I think Stephanie said, you know, if you have an overall happy customer, but they do have some feedback, that's a blessing. How does SageSure kind of take that and build that back into the customer focused processes?

Kevin:
Yeah, So we do a number of things. One of the things that I think we've had a lot of success with is putting together ongoing dashboards. So working with different leaders and stakeholders and sharing the results on a weekly or monthly basis so they can see how they're doing, trend performance, understand performance by different call types or interactions, and also pay attention to the CSR role based dashboards that we've created that enable the supervisors to see how their different CSRs are performing. And then they're really good about using that for coaching. And they actually, interestingly enough, like we do coaching almost like right after the fact, like our supervisors are right on it, they're listening to calls, they're looking into what happened and they're working with our CSRs to to fix and address those.

Steve:
Hey, just to clarify, so you have dashboards at the CSR level on CX?

Kevin:
We do, thanks to thanks to Walker.

Steve:
Well, you know, it takes two to tango, believe me. And not not a lot of companies are there. So kudos. Again, that is really state of the art today, particularly in a in a contact center environment. So I did not know that. So see, I learned something every time I do one of these podcasts myself.

Kevin:
So the closed-loop ticketing is that reporting is actually also really valuable…

Steve:
Yeah.

Kevin:
…because our leaders can see and they've set like some strong slides around some of those, but they can see how many tickets are closing, how long it's taking them to close, what the root causes are. So that's a really popular dashboard as well that we produce.

Steve:
And that was part of the the early program early on. Right. It's always been sort of part of the philosophy, if you will, of of what you were trying to accomplish. Right?

Stephanie:
Yeah. And I think it's definitely been been iterated on since since building out the program. You know, we did we had goals across the organization as a whole of how fast we wanted to close different tickets, you know, just kind of keeping our eye on certain measures and what those goals might look like. But one thing that Kevin and the rest of the team have done an awesome job on since the inception of this program is really making sure that we're collaborating back with those teams as well. So keeping an eye on making sure that our closed-loop processes do not feel additive to them, that it really meshes with their way of doing work. And that way if we need to adjust some of our dashboard views. So it shows them it's more in line with the metrics they're used to tracking or if we need to adjust our SLA's so that it's feasible for them and they still feel empowered to be able to close the loop with their customers in the expected amount of time. You know, it's definitely been iterated on. But I think to your earlier point, having that leadership buy in from the get go to establish those goals has just more more so empowered us down the line to be able to make those iterations and just have that partnership on an ongoing basis, make sure it's effective and that we're gaining the support of those that are involved in the process every step of the way.

Steve:
Hey, Kevin, with your perspective over the long term and watching this program grow, how is it impacted sort of the growth of the business? Or could you share like any maybe anecdotal area where you really were able to improve some process that you got real tangible business impact from that was also beneficial to your customers?

Kevin:
I can tell you that the the survey work that we've been doing and servicing claims and digital has yielded in a lot of a lot of improvements. Digital particularly is really exciting because a lot of that is just highly actionable. Like we'll get verbatim comments and surveys and the product managers in our team can actually use those verbatim in the producer ID, they can go into our systems and figure out exactly where, you know, there could be a bug or a defect or areas that customers are getting stuck and then they actually they address that. And that's just an ongoing basis that we have with our digital process with servicing a lot of kind of key themes and opportunities have arisen especially around a lot of times our servicing folks aren't able to answer directly with customers. They have to work with our underwriting departments to get answers. So a lot of improvements have been made to kind of shore up that cycle time and get greater, greater linkage between our policy services and underwriting teams to help our customers. So those are a couple high level examples.

Steve:
And you mentioned earlier policy services claims and digital. Would these be sort of transaction type surveys or do you have sort of a more overriding relationship survey?

Kevin:
We do. So one of the great things about when I join SageSure, we have an overall we called our producer Research Satisfaction study.

Steve:
Okay.

Kevin:
So that was there like upon my arrival, which was like a huge gift as a CX leader because we had NPS scores for a couple, a couple of years worth of data and a lot of really great in-depth information about the holistic experience, like what touchpoints were most important, which ones had the highest and lowest satisfaction. So that's been a great resource. And funny enough, that actually did advise some of these transactional surveys because a lot of these are NPS key drivers and areas that we know either reduce detractors claims, for example, or can drive promoters like servicing. So I definitely see these surveys as we continue to enhance and improve ultimately driving our NPS beacon metric.

Steve:
So is the digital survey, is that done via intercept when they're on the website?

Kevin:
Yes. Yeah, we've the first thing we did was we put feedback tabs on all of our sites and applications.

Steve:
Yeah.

Kevin:
We have quite a bit because we have policyholders, we have producers and we have employees, so we have feedback tabs on all of those sites. And then we've been doing quite a bit with intercepts, especially on our My SageSure, which is our policyholder facing self-service platform. And so we've got one that's really interesting is we have like a claim banner that's on our claim tracker page. So as customers are looking at their claims, it says How, how is your claim going or something to that effect? They can click it. We take that feedback and we close the loop on that so we can actually kind of redirect the claim and help improve the claims experience ideally during the claim when it when we want to improve it. So that's been a really kind of interesting one that we implemented.

Steve:
Stephanie, A couple of times you've referred to the iterations and the fact that this began early and you've scaled it up and we've had other episodes and other podcasts where I know there's a lot of value in just iterating off of what's working before you scale it, but share a little bit about sort of what this has meant to the company over the years as you've stayed committed to this closed-loop process and also grown it along with the company.

Stephanie:
You know, when you think about older organizations, they often find themselves kind of retrospectively, I hate to use this word, but fixing processes, you know, breaking them apart and rebuilding them that have been around for the past few years. And so it stage share is able to do is we're able to really use customer feedback, you know, very early on in our in our lifetime and really just build and design processes and products that are based with that customer centric mindset. So it's kind of cool to think about that. Our future as an organization is really being designed about what's best for our customers from that customer's perspective. And so when we think about having these insights readily available, you know, being able to follow up with customers and hear it straight from them themselves to say, Here's what my feedback is about, here's what would make this good experience great, etc. That's really powerful and it's really being leveraged. And I'm not just saying this, it's truly being leveraged across the organization as part of like our strategic planning year to year to be able to prioritize different projects, to really make sure that all of our leaders are on the same page of what it means to be best in class, what it means to be that that service provider that we all are constantly striving for.

Steve:
If you've ever listened to the podcast, Stephanie and Kevin, you know, I ask every guest this question when we when we close out, it's it's kind of our hallmark. We call it take home value. It's basically your best tip or the one idea that you know, a listener to this podcast and I don't know how you're going to get it to one idea after everything we talked about, but I ask every guest and you guys are no exception. So, Stephanie, why don't you give your tip first and then Kevin If you could follow her, that would be great.

Stephanie:
Yeah, I'll give it my best shot. So I think one thing that's really important to note about SageSure's success so far is that it has been an iteration. But the first step that I think a lot of organizations could do, like today and just start acting on it within the next 10 minutes or so is really to start working with other parts of the organization to understand how is VOC being captured today, if at all, and if it's being captured, how is it being utilized? And I think one building those partnerships is really, really beneficial down the road, but it really helps to establish that business case for centralizing a VOC platform and the processes that would then return value back to the organization. And then again, just collaborating with folks helps you to build some champions along the way as your organization starts getting on board to build out more of a formalized, closed-loop process.

Steve:
Great. That's a great tip. I really like that. How about you, Kevin?

Kevin:
Yeah, I think kind of tagging into the theme of kind of collaboration, you know, I think it's super important to view stakeholders and partners across the organization really as a. Partner in the work. So obviously we did that on the big servicing project and getting those policy services up and running. But I think it could be small things like aligning on customer research. We have a process today where folks submit request for customer feedback and myself and my team will sit down with those folks and we'll talk through what they're looking to learn the business context, key questions, and then we'll we'll work together. We'll share our our thoughts and expertise from our CX lens, but we'll ultimately work together and mutually decide the best course of action. And I think just getting those folks kind of involved in creating the approach really helps with delivering insights to meet their needs as well as makes them very receptive to opportunities and improvements.

Steve:
Well, you guys have put together a first class program here and there's so many great lessons, but I think kind of a theme of both of your take home value is collaborate with the business owners in the company. And that is very much a great mindset for our CX pros to do. You know, it really isn't like if you build the data, they will come. You have to go out, you have to talk their language. I think you each kind of made comments earlier on that this can't be viewed as something extra to do. You know, it got to be essential. And you've built that with the iterations and the culture that you've built there. So congratulations and thanks. Thanks a lot for coming on and sharing your story. I really appreciate you having you as our guests.

Stephanie:
This is awesome.

Kevin:
Thank you, Steve.

Steve:
And if anybody would want to continue the conversation, we know that you can both be found on LinkedIn, but maybe give us your website, too, just in case people want to check out SageSure a little more or…

Kevin:
Yeah, definitely. Just www.sagesure.com.

Steve:
All right. Thanks again. Really enjoyed it. I hope you'll come back and give us an update at some point in the future, But thanks again for sharing your story.

Stephanie:
Absolutely. Thank you, Steve.

Steve:
Stephanie Sullivan is a customer experience manager and Kevin McEnery is an AVP of Customer Experience, both at SageSure. They run in a heck of a CX program there at SageSure. And I really want to thank them for being on The CX Leader Podcast. And if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it is a great time to be a CX leader. And if you listen to this podcast, you've got some great ideas about how to improve your program. So keep doing it is worth the cause and the effort. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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