Building trust, being consistent and being empathetic are key to winning the hearts of insurance customers
Shera Noorbhai, at Zamara Group, helps us to understand how they are successfully delivering great customer experiences in insurance.
Tell us a bit about yourself…
I head the governance, risk and compliance function for Zamara Group. Zamara has two main business lines — actuarial and administration & consulting and brokerage. I have held various roles in the Group including, head of operations & administration, co-heading the actuarial division and being part of the consulting and advisory teams. In the various roles I have held, I have engaged with members, trustees, sponsors of retirement funds, service providers and regulators.
Zamara’s Brokerage Arm recently won the best broker in customer satisfaction award (Think Business Insurance Awards 2020), tell us about the journey to getting here…
At Zamara, our call to action is Powering Prosperity. For us, this means helping all our clients, individual or corporate, to uplift their financial condition — thus powering prosperity.
Mahatma Gandhi said: A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider of our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so.
This statement and our call to action, have a significant impact on the way we work at Zamara. We work to improve the lives of our members, before retirement and in retirement. That is our reason for being!
A common thread in each of the roles I have undertaken was providing the best advice to my clients. Knowing who your client is and understanding their needs, are critical to developing a solution that addresses their concerns.
For your client to listen to you, they must trust you. For a client to trust you, you need to demonstrate that you understand them, their concerns and their challenges. Building that trust comes over time — by consistently providing appropriate advice, all the time, even if it’s difficult for the client to listen to. When the client understands that whatever we do is for their best interest, then we begin the process of building trust.
Generally, it’s quite difficult to have entire organisations have a customer focus, how have you done this?
The challenge with insurance or retirement planning is that appreciation of the products only occurs after the fact.
What do I mean by this?
Insurance is only appreciated after an accident. Before that, it’s always thought of as an expense that we can do without. Similarly, savings for retirement — a cost we can easily do without; until we get to retirement and realise we haven’t saved enough.
Individually, we all have contributed in some shape or form towards someone’s kitty — medical bills, taking care of our parents’ needs in their retirements and many others. Knowing these realities, we are keenly aware of the challenges our clients face — and in structuring our services for our clients, we treat them as if they are our parents, our relatives, our friends.
How has COVID disrupted you and how you serve your customers?
When I started my career, there was a heavy reliance on paperwork. Since then, we have seen several organisations digitise. Covid-19 forced most (if not all) corporates to fast-track their digitisation.
At Zamara, we were fortunate as we had commenced our digital journey a while back. All our records are digital, including all mail that we receive. As we handle sensitive information, we have firewalls and authentication in place to ensure staff only access information that they need to, to carry out their duties.
With broking, we deal with various parties; insurers, insured and regulators. To track these relationships and the various client documents that we need to provide the relevant cover, we have invested in a system that tracks all client transactions from quotations, to payments, to renewals, to claims management, to claims settlement, etc.
Lockdowns and curfews meant we had to get non-client facing staff working effectively from home. Our phone network enables our clients to reach us, as we work from home. With the lockdowns, we have proved that our systems work and we can provide our clients with a seamless service.
Any closing thoughts?
A lesson I have learnt over the years, no matter what anyone says, is that customer service is not easy, it never was, it never will be.
Dealing with emotions (read fellow humans) requires patience, is hard work, requires consistency, requires you to listen more and speak less amongst a host of other skills.
Having said that, communication is key. No matter the type of news, good or bad, it must be shared. A client may be upset if you give them the bad news, but they know to trust you in the future, as you will not shy away from telling them the news — good, bad or ugly.
