A different approach to customer focus

We want to be aware of customer needs and market trends as they emerge, and – in concert with our customers – are developing innovative products and services that speak directly to them and to their lives. Our strategy thus aims to recognise our customers’ needs as early, precisely and thoroughly as possible. With the new Customer & Market department created at the beginning of 2018, UNIQA Austria puts customer focus at the heart of strategic product and service development.

Partnering with our customers as equals

Our insurance business is about providing a service. This is why UNIQA works hard to identify its customers’ aspirations, expectations and fears, and to devise solutions appropriate to their specific situations. To truly understand our customers, we spend a lot of time and effort delving into their motivations, their particular circumstances and their needs.

To this end, we have developed user models that describe members of target groups by shared characteristics – so-called “personas”. We cluster them not according to demographic criteria, but by expectations and general attitudes and then expand on these by including insurance-specific aspects and particular attitudes and preferences with respect to subjects like health, mobility and sustainability. These models allow us to approach the entire product development process in a radical new way, i.e. from the customer’s perspective.

Any new product development project is preceded by customer surveys to ascertain the potential added value the project would have for our customers. To do this, we employ quantitative telephone or online surveys or questionnaires, qualitative personal interviews, user tests and eye-tracking methods. Our applications are developed in line with our customer-centred design process, which is divided into three stages: recognising and understanding customer needs, generating ideas and creating prototypes of solutions, and testing with real users.

Because we meet our customers where they have a need, we can provide them with even greater value in the form of individualised services and products. Added value creates loyalty and loyal customers have no reason to switch their insurance provider.

Individual attention, greater transparency

We not only aspire to be there for our customers when they need us, but to make sure they can find us wherever they may look and whatever they may be doing. Instead of limiting themselves to one form of communication, many customers prefer to use whatever form happens to be easiest in any particular situation. They can get in touch with us through one of our 400 ServiceCentres across the country, our customer service representatives, our broker partners, our banking and sales partner Raiffeisen, our website and online customer portal, our app, the UNIQA telephone customer service, the medical Competence Centre, or one of our Central ServiceCentres.

With this broad range of ways to access information and advice, we aim to provide our customers with assistance for all of their insurance-related questions. Our focus is on convenience, intelligibility and transparency. Even reviewing and signing an insurance contract should be easy to understand, transparent and convenient.

From process-oriented to customer-oriented

We regularly assess customer satisfaction so that we know whether our efforts are actually having the desired effect. We have developed our own instrument to assist us in this process – the Customer Centricity Index (CCI), which is regularly updated with additional relevant important goals and data points.

To create a starting reference point for the Index, we conducted a survey of more than 4,000 customers and non-customers in early 2018, in which we asked about UNIQA’s and our competitors’ biggest weaknesses and greatest strengths. We identified five significant drivers of customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend a company to others: “Damage or Loss”, “Sales”, “Brand”, “Service” and “Product”. Of these five, a positive experience related to damage or loss had the greatest effect on decisions to recommend a company to others.

Specific data points were compiled with respect to each driver, which were then used to calculate a relative weighting. Finally, these data points for individual drivers were used to compile the Customer Centricity Index (CCI). Since its introduction at the beginning of 2019, the Index has been computed monthly.

Alongside the collection of these data points, we have also defined goals for 2019 for each of the drivers and additionally created an entire set of measures that were implemented concurrently with the introduction of the Index. These efforts help to ensure a stable and lasting customer-oriented corporate culture.