Ageas has been on a journey.
Its decision in February 2022 to sell its commercial insurance business to Axa UK and Ireland for an initial £47.5 million, left the firm committed to its personal line insurance business. To grow, Ageas decided to offer less, but do it better than everybody else.
“A laser-like focus on what we’re best at doing, was what was needed to deliver better results for our customers, our people and our shareholders,” Ant Middle, CEO with Ageas UK, told CXM.
“In making these tough choices, we have been able to invest more in the business areas we wanted to build,” he explained.
The business strategy is bearing fruit. The company’s half-yearly results showed 49% growth in the first six months of 2024, driven primarily by customer and premium growth. Since assuming the top job mid-way through 2020, Middle has spent much of his time fashioning a customer–centric organisation.
It’s not just talk — the firm has the figures to back up its claim. Ageas boasts a +50 Net Easy Score for how customers navigate its services. First time call resolution sits at 80%, and its customer-facing consultants consistently score above 90%, showcasing their industry knowledge and expertise.
Ageas recently won the Best Company Culture (for a large organisation) category at the UK Customer Experience Awards in October. At the same event, it earned a silver for its voice of the customer (VOC) work and a bronze in the Digital Transformation category.Ant Middle also picked up the UKCXA’s Lifetime Achievement award for a relentless focus on employee and customer experience that has propelled the insurance firm’s outstanding business performance.
“Customers sit at the heart of our purpose — to understand people [and] simplify insurance. It’s part of our DNA to consider them whenever we’re rolling out a technology, process or product,” he added.
“Customers sit at the heart of our purpose — to understand people [and] simplify insurance. It’s part of our DNA to consider them whenever we’re rolling out a technology, process or product.”Ant Middle, CEO, Ageas UK
Putting customers at the heart of everything is far easier said than done. It means more than delivering polite and efficient customer service. It requires a comprehensive approach that embraces acute listening to customers, continuous improvement of customer journeys, and an empowered, empathetic workforce.
In the last 12 months, Ageas has revamped its customer journeys to remove ‘pain points’ and introduce a greater degree of self-service choices to its customers. Alongside online chatbots, the insurer has also introduced voicebots for customers that want to self-serve, but don’t want to go online.
The work to improve customer journeys has been underpinned by its comprehensive voice of the customer (VOC) programme. “Listening to our customers and getting them involved early in the process has been important,” said Middle.
Ageas customers are asked to complete a survey every time they buy, renew, make a claim, or change their insurance. By following up with its clients, the insurer is able to gather around 15,000 completed responses a month.
Quarterly relational surveys are also issued to gather feedback from clients that haven’t been in touch. “Last year, we underwent a significant project to map and enhance all our customer journeys,” said Middle.
“By seeking direct input from hundreds of customers and analysing our data, we were able to transform our end-to-end customer journeys, eliminating pain points and providing service choices,” he added.
Ageas has invested in technology to improve its customer insights and journeys. CallMiner is used to build an understanding of why customers call even when they don’t explicitly need assistance.
It also rolled out Signavio to map customer journeys and link them to key processes, systems, and documents. By plugging-in VOC data directly into customer journey steps, Ageas gains insights into performance and customer sentiment, enabling it to respond accordingly. To stay attuned and responsive to VOC data, Ageas hosts weekly service tolerance meetings to measure where the firm stands versus its NPS targets.
Customer journeys are reviewed quarterly using VOC data, with a diverse group of stakeholders pulled into a room to interpret insights and comments and analyse scores. “We took a customer-led, insight-based approach,” Caroline King, chief customer officer, Ageas UK told CXM.
“That meant really getting under the skin of those journeys using tools like speech analytics software and analysing the feedback in our voice of the customer surveys,” she added.
To ensure that executive leadership teams remain tethered to customer experience, they are regularly immersed in customer journeys to build understanding and empathy with the client base. “It’s important [that] the voices of customers are heard from the phone lines all the way to the boardroom,” said King.
“It’s important [that] the voices of customers are heard from the phone lines all the way to the boardroom.” Caroline King, chief customer officer, Ageas UK
“Our entire UK executive team [is] immersed in real customer journeys, listening to calls and experiencing claims through our customers’ eyes,” she explained.
The mantra ‘understanding people and simplifying insurance’ is embedded throughout the Ageas’ workforce. The customer-centric approach starts with the recruitment stage.
“Our recruitment process looks for people with the behaviours, attitudes, and values that align with ours,” said Middle.
“We look for individuals who can show empathy and who have a fundamental understanding of what ‘customer’ means,” he added.
According to the CEO, Ageas has taken a fundamentally different approach to hiring staff for its contact centre. Staff aren’t there to answer calls or settle claims. It is their job to “understand people [and] simplify insurance.”
This was a “significant cultural shift“, said Middle, that has laid the foundations to deliver industry standard NPS values and Institute of Customer Services ServiceMark accreditation.
Ageas’ customer-facing roles are constantly changing as part of ‘Project Evolution’. With bots and online self-service deflecting routine customer journeys, contact centre roles, skills, recruitment, and training are all changing.
“The interactions our people have with customers now often relate to more complex questions, and [so] a much broader set of skills and knowledge are required,” said Middle.
“The interactions our people have with customers now often relate to more complex questions, and therefore, a much broader set of skills and knowledge are required.”Ant Middle, CEO, Ageas UK
“We know each customer query is different, so it is much more about predicament management and understanding and adapting to a customer’s query or issue ‘in the moment’,” he added.
Data suggests that the changes brought by Project Evolutions are popular, with employee engagement sitting at 9.1/10 within the customer operations function.
Ageas’ current CX strategy stretches out to 2027 and encompasses “ambitious plans” that include additions to its range of digital and self service channels, said Middle. Increasing the use of AI to complement the firm’s current services is high on the agenda.
“The way customers want to engage with businesses continues to evolve, so front of my mind is how our technology and digital model can support our customers,” commented Middle.
“As part of our strategy, we’ll enhance our digital and self-serve tools for our customers and brokers to keep pace with how they expect to deal with us. We also plan to increase the pace of development and level of investment in data, AI, and technology,” he added.