A conversation with Martin Faux, LV= General Insurance

Martin, we know that the insurance industry can be complex – both from a business perspective and from a customer perspective – it’s a highly regulated environment with multiple organisations within its supply chain. There are introducers, networks, brokers, MGAs and so on, but at its heart is the customer, and developing a trusted relationship is critical to any organisations’ success. Providing a good, if not excellent, customer experience (CX) is one of the core characteristics of LV= General Insurance. What have you been doing to improve your customer experience whilst navigating the complexities often found in insurance and the increasing customer demand?  

So we’ve been doing a huge amount of work on CX, it is a continual process and never ends. Customer behaviour changes, and we’ve seen this during the pandemic where customers that perhaps would have preferred to call us now use digital channels. For example, we created some very simple claims forms using Salesforce to enable customers to report their non-critical home claims. In this example we saw around 25% of customers choosing to report their claims via an online form.

If we think of our Broker business, then in a B2B world it is about simplicity and enabling brokers to transact quickly and efficiently. Again, using Salesforce with the support of BearingPoint we created a new Broker Portal, enabling our broker customer to manage a range of transactions without the need for them to talk to us.

Martin Faux

If we think about our digital marketing activity, then this is an area where we have effectively transformed the way we work, in-housing our key digital channels, giving us the flexibility to change at pace across our owned and earned channels, whilst enabling us to drive more personalised messages. Using Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud capability, and with the help of BearingPoint, we have significantly changed the way we drive our email, SMS and social media activity.

We often hear that ‘simplification’ is a key trend for insurers; making the customer journey easier - whether it’s getting a quote, reinsuring, or contacting customer services. How important is technology for insurers to advance in their digital transformation journeys, and to ultimately meet their customers’ needs?

Technology is critical to digital transformation, but it is also about having the right operating model, so it is also about the people and process too, technology alone is not enough.

When we were looking for a partner to work with us, we needed a company that had an understanding of the Insurance sector, but equally a company with a wide range of technical capabilities, not just those needed to meet our initial requirements but one that could help deliver against our long term strategic objectives.

Salesforce is a feature rich extensive capability that covers a wider range of business functions. So understanding the business and then being able to configure and integrate Salesforce at pace, is a key requirements for any business. LV= General Insurance are no different here.

What do you think makes a project successful?

At the end of the day, it is the people that make something a success or not. The way we were able to work with BearingPoint with the right mixture of on-shore and off-shore resource was key. Having a company that shares similar values is also really important when you have to work together day to day.

Martin Faux

Having implemented Salesforce in 2019 to replace a number of existing fragmented CRM solutions, can you explain the benefits you saw?

I think we have seen a range of benefits from implementing Salesforce over the past few years. We started small with implementing Salesforce’s Chat, Email & Social capabilities, replacing the solution we previously had in place. This enabled us to improve the experience, particularly across mobile devices where previously we had been constrained commercially.

As we in-housed our email marketing, using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it gave us greater agility, and our speed to change increased, as well as seeing uplifts in our conversion rates.

We have gone on to further exploit the technology to greater effect, enabling us to deliver some significant programmes of work across our Retail and Broker businesses.

And what are you hoping to achieve in future? What’s next for LV= General Insurance?

There are a number of areas where we see Salesforce supporting us, I guess the main one being around providing more personalised messages and journeys for our customers. We have already started our personalisation journey – our email campaigns being far more personalised than we had previously, but there is so much more we can do in terms of delivering the next best actions to meet the needs of our customers across a range of channels.