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Meet the client
Zurich Insurance Group is a leading multi-line insurer, serving commercial and retail customers in more than 210 countries and territories. With approximately 56,000 employees, it provides a wide range of insurance products and services to individuals, SMEs, large companies, and multinationals. Zurich is looking to accelerate its successful customer-focused strategy, further strengthen customer loyalty and become the insurer of choice for both commercial and retail customers.
Challenge
The hyper-competitive insurance sector is particularly vulnerable to disruption with increasingly demanding customers. To become the insurer of choice, global insurers like Zurich need to build meaningful relationships with their customers.
This requires an approach to understanding customer behaviour that’s focused — an ability to deliver for customer needs, behaviours and desires at scale and pace. The right technology and expert support across analytics, culture, insight, and consultancy make this achievable, as Zurich recently discovered.
A need to better understand and serve customers
Before engaging STRAT7, the decisions at Zurich that drove innovation, branding and communication were mostly product focused and not tailored to individual customers’ needs or behaviours.
Zurich wanted to listen to its customers better, making sure they’re always top of mind, and at the centre of every decision the company makes. By better serving them through a more customer-centric approach, it could “loyalise” its customer base and shift their relationships with customers from transactional to deeper and more meaningful ones.
Zurich needed to continuously capture, understand and act on customer intelligence to ignite a shift towards customer-centricity. Success relied on coming up with a compelling vision, driving projects that change the mindset so that all employees behave in a customer-centric way and drawing on the skills of a multidisciplinary, collaborative team.
What our client says
Market segmentation for deeper consumer insights
We conducted market segmentation to understand the ‘why’ behind customer behaviour. We started with Switzerland, the client’s home market, and moved on to other markets after the project’s success.
Approach
- Market segmentation to understand the ‘why’ behind customer behaviour.
- Creation of 360-degree view of customers to help prioritise target audience.
- Implementation of segment-specific activation strategies and tactics.
By drawing on data from multiple sources, inside and outside of Zurich, we created a 360-degree view of its customers, highlighting different groups based on their characteristics, needs, values and behaviours. Priming the database for prioritising and targeting.
We also spent time understanding the individual requirements, restrictions and nuances of insurance in each local market via stakeholder interviews. To understand the differences between each market and adjust our consultancy accordingly.
Combining customer and market intelligence, as well as putting the right systems in place, we helped Zurich activate the segmentation with maximum impact. We drew on our various specialisms to guide Zurich with ongoing, personalised support across strategy, planning and execution.
Segmentation in action: Driving customer-centric decision making
Segmentation has become a widely recognised tool within Zurich for its impact on building meaningful customer relationships. Powerful insights about the customer — who they are, the number of policies they have, the products they’ve bought and what’s important to them — are being used to execute customer-centric exercises across various business units.
The insight-led initiatives are also generating an impact across the business thanks to Zurich’s collaborative approach. Silos have been broken. Teams are working together to wield segmentation to the greatest effect.
What’s more, Zurich is working on a segmentation dashboard to help communicate the tool’s impact, which is increasing traction in other markets for the adoption of segmentation. Plus, the insights and outcomes of its initiatives are painting a global picture of segmentation. Zurich is starting to see common trends for its geographies, as well as what’s different for customers in each market, providing a solid foundation to expand the reach of segmentation in the future.
Impact
Significant increase in the rate of policy adoption for targeted customers
Zurich is beginning to see tangible benefits now that segmentation has been successfully implemented in Switzerland with a significant increase in the rate of policy adoption for the targeted segment vs. a non-targeted segment.
With the insights we’ve helped to generate, Zurich has adapted its value proposition to appeal to its most valuable customers and has designed targeted campaigns to get the right messages to the right customers at the right time.
In addition, thanks to available segmentation insights in their CRM systems, agents can now adapt their communication styles and suggest the most suitable product to their customers. Driving more meaningful customer experiences that deliver better outcomes.
All of this has contributed to an increase in policy density. Zurich hopes to see segmentation have a similar impact in other markets. It will take time as the insurer works hard to drive a cultural change. Encouraging more markets to use segmentation as an effective tool for customer-centricity.
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