ACG’s Lori Pon on the Power of Amplifying Customers’ Voices

Today’s carriers are experiencing unprecedented burnout, high turnover rates and early retirement due to the challenging and often stressful nature of working in the insurance industry. In fact, eighty-three percent of adjusters leave their roles within three years. Carriers are understaffed, and supervisors are often overwhelmed, attempting to juggle assignments and balance managing files, people and performance, with few resources.

“Speaking from personal experience, adjusting and supervising are probably two of the most fast-paced, stressful, sometimes thankless jobs out there,” said Mark Snyder, Claims Subject Matter Expert at Hi Marley. “The bottom line is, we need to proactively address this with better tools, processes, and rules of the road. So often, we think we’re doing claims adjusters and supervisors a favor by giving them new solutions when all we’ve really done is erect additional barriers to make their lives a little bit harder. We need to empower them and take barriers away.”

One way Hi Marley is breaking down barriers is with our new Coaching capabilities that leverage message intelligence and actionable insights for every persona to empower employees and supervisors with real-time “needs attention” alerts and guided next best steps to improve the customer experience.

“With all of the different opportunities to look at the intersection of people, process, technology and data, Hi Marley is helping us understand our data and visualize it in a way where we can take action,” said Lori Pon, Head of Claims Strategy and Innovation at The Auto Club Group (ACG) during a recent Hi Marley webinar. Pon joined Snyder and Jackie Booth, VP of Product at Hi Marley to discuss how carriers can empower their employees and delight customers using sentiment analysis and actionable insights for on-the-job coaching.

Insights for Every User

Whether it’s an individual contributor, supervisor or organizational leader, each employee within the Hi Marley application can access the right level of data, Hi Marley’s Coaching Capabilities utilize three insights dashboards:

• My Insights provide employees with a personalized landing page with individual performance metrics and calls to action
• My Teams Insights capture team data and highlights key success metrics so supervisors can provide thoughtful, targeted guidance and mentorship
• My Org insights offer organizational-level data and analytics

“We didn’t want to give a giant Excel to everyone and say, ‘have fun finding the right insights’,” said Jackie Booth, VP of Product at Hi Marley. “We’re making sure to amplify the voice of the customer with our message intelligence so everyone can focus on what matters.”

“When you log into Hi Marley, you have all of these important beacons to help you manage your day. And for us, it’s been a game changer,” said Pon.

Message Intelligence Empowers Employees to Proactively Solve Issues

The Coaching Capabilities’ message intelligence engine ingests data from texting conversations and provides real-time notifications to employees directly within their chat queue, so they can immediately see what conversations need attention. The goal is to amplify the voice of the customer and identify areas of potential dissatisfaction while giving insurance employees the tools to prioritize engagement and resolve issues before they escalate.

ACG partnered with Hi Marley to test message intelligence with about 80 adjusters. During one of the discovery sessions, the Hi Marley team wanted to know more about how ACG was interacting with the technology and found that the adjusters appreciated having a notification at the top of their inbox, alerting them to conversations that need attention. “One of the beautiful pieces is that [Hi Marley] puts the notification at the top of the inbox with a call to action to take a look at the case,” said Pon.

The call to action helps employees understand vulnerabilities in the claims process or situations that could disrupt a customer’s frictionless experience at scale. The underlying models identify and flag areas of concern, including litigation risk (threats of legal action), negative sentiment (recognize when a customer is upset or frustrated) and delays (identify and prevent obstacles in the claims process. Previously, adjusters would be inundated with messages or calls, with no real direction on which ones to prioritize. But with in-app real-time alerts, they can handle “at risk” conversations first.

“One thing we did see as part of our Alpha for negative sentiment messages was a 20 percent improvement in the adjuster response rate,” said Pon. “And that shows the power of that amplification and bringing those messages to the adjuster’s attention.”

Pon continued, “We’re getting great feedback from our staff. We love the new negative sentiment tool; it’s such a great benefit.”

ACG also appreciates the level of transparency Hi Marley gives supervisors into conversations, enabling them to quickly see if something needs an immediate, expedited response. “The additional level of insights helps managers and adjusters understand what opportunities they have to enrich the customer experience and reach out more proactively,” said Pon.

Partnering with Hi Marley

Hi Marley’s Coaching capabilities help make adjusters’ and supervisors’ jobs less stressful and more productive.

“You don’t need to choose between making jobs easier and more productive. By amplifying the voice of the customer and bringing attention to their needs, you’re empowering adjusters to proactively make changes, increasing their productivity,” said Booth.

“The great thing about Hi Marley is it’s so convenient,” said Pon. “And that really resonates with our end users. We have a lot of different things on our desktop pinging at us, a lot of different point solutions. And the great thing about Hi Marley is that it helps simplify and speed up the process and improve communication, which are all drivers to a better experience for both our adjusting contacts in our community and our customers.”

Want to hear more from Mark Snyder, Jackie Booth and Lori Pon about how to reduce customer churn and improve employee performance with Coaching? Watch the full webinar on-demand here.