Looking forward, working together

To celebrate National Customer Service Week, we sat down with Performance Team Leader, Rob Varley, to discuss some of the customer initiatives he’s been involved in this year.  

What has been your favourite initiative so far? 

Definitely Systems Thinking, it’s a comprehensive approach to understanding how different elements interact within a system and produce a certain outcome. The emphasis is to look at every element and aspect from a customer’s point of view. 

We should strive to provide as much value to the customer as possible and strip out as many actions that don’t offer value. Creating a much slicker process makes us more efficient and provides a much better, far easier-to-navigate customer journey. 

How did you get involved? 

In January, I was invited to a multi-disciplinary team comprising skillsets from various areas of the business, including Operations, Partnerships, Marketing & MI, to work alongside a partner on the project. 

We had an initial week of immersion in all things Systems Thinking, a significant part of which was conditioning us not to think as we always had done, to judge solely from a customer’s point of view and to challenge anything that didn’t provide value to the customer.  

Any runners up for favourite project? 

Recently as a business, we have been looking closely at how we communicate the complexity of our industry to customers. We found that, with all the changes that came from the government reforms in 2021, trying to explain to customers the differences in how their claim could proceed can be tricky at best and convoluted at worst. We’ve really focused on reviewing how we explain things, it will take time but it’s a good principle to live by when writing to customers.  

You used to be a frontline advisor, what did you find you enjoyed most when supporting customers? 

Providing good news. It sounds obvious but being able to tell someone that we have arranged rehabilitation or we have a liability response is always rewarding. You can feel some of the stress lift off people.