What can we learn from negative feedback?

Being asked to give feedback is pretty common place these days and there are not many service providers who don’t proactively ask customers to evaluate their experience. Certainly almost everything we buy these days seems to come with a request to leave a review!

Of course we service providers are hungry for our customers thoughts and opinions, it’s essential for ascertaining to what degree our plan for service delivery is actually meeting the needs of those we are assisting.

All feedback, positive or negative is useful. In fact for someone to take the time to raise concerns with their insurance provider when they feel let down is very helpful. They could choose to say nothing and then the organisation doesn’t have the opportunity to make redress to that individual or to learn from their experience and improve.

Being a regulated industry means insurance businesses are mandated to have a clear process to manage and report on complaints. However there must be a mechanism which turns this data into insight that can be used to enhance the service provided, thus making negative feedback truly valuable.

At Coplus we are both product manufacturer and claims handler giving us the benefit of direct learnings from the claims process, which through a systematic process of investigation, assessment and evaluation creates a virtuous circle where learnings directly feed into product governance, benefiting product design, the sales process and claims handing.

Through undertaking root cause analysis on all complaints we can identify the factors that have contributed to the customer issue and also recognise any trends or patterns. As well as enabling the identification of any individual performance issues it gives us confidence that we can identify if there are gaps in our own quality monitoring that has contributed to a customer concern.

We undertake quality assurance through a process of internal audit to ensure a consistent, high quality service so the learnings we take from root cause analysis is really important in order to make sure our process identifies and addresses any potential issues, in order that we do it right first time.

Being able to identify and act on negative feedback is essential to a culture of continuous improvement and in systematically raising standards and exceeding customer expectations.

This article was first published in Modern Insurance Magazine Issue 36.