Staying A Step Ahead To Build Customer Loyalty And Employee Engagement

A young American couple flew to a remote South Pacific island for what they expected to be a relaxing 10-day “babymoon” before becoming parents. Their unborn child, however, had other plans. Thousands of miles from home, Mom began having pregnancy complications only 25 weeks into her term. There was no adequate medical care on the island.

The couple’s travel insurance plan with us included emergency medical benefits and assistance. A simple call to our team led to action: a medical flight to the nearby Philippines, where Mom received quality medical care and delivered her baby.

It’s a happy ending, but only the start of the story. We put Dad up in a hotel while Mom and their premature child received care at the hospital. After the baby aged enough to fly in an airplane, our nurses escorted the family safely back to the U.S.

It’s a case illustrating how we at Allianz Partners build brand loyalty: creating and delivering a suite of products and services with frictionless delivery that makes it easy to do business with us at the appropriate points.

And it’s a story that shows how company leaders can build loyalty in a time when consumers demand more and technology is leveling the playing field.

Customers want you to take care of them. Identify points to do so, and eliminate the friction.

Consumers want unique, white-glove experiences. Delivery must be frictionless and simple—one misstep or technical headache can lose them to a rival who is often a browser window away. We make our products easy to understand, buy and use because we know consumers want to work with companies that take care of them, work with them and fix problems when things go wrong.

Which customer engagement points matter most in your organization? Whether you are selling shoes online or operating an amusement park, understand where customers need you the most. Uncover those frustrations, rally your teams and technologies to build a solution, and launch an opportunity to build a new advocate.

Imagine you are stuck in an airport during a flight delay. Suddenly, you get a text, not about another delay but instead asking how you’d like your $100 compensation paid, because your travel insurance proactively monitored your flight. Money won’t speed up the plane, but in that challenging moment, it might make things a bit better—and you can enjoy an airport burger on us without lifting a finger.

That couple in the South Pacific learned the value of assistance they never thought they’d need. But because we are constantly listening to the voice of the customer, we know the value of our offerings before our customers do, as well as the points at which people in need require them. When you deliver frictionlessly, customers will sing your praises.

Connecting employees to culture and products creates engagement.

Delivering great experiences and customer loyalty takes great people.

The challenge in a hybrid work environment like ours is keeping employees, especially new associates, connected to the mission and culture of the company.

So, we remind our employees how fun travel can be. We want our people to love traveling and love our partners, too. Our Allianz Adventure program awards trips, airline vouchers and concert tickets. Every associate gets access to our annual travel insurance product, encouraging them to see the world while keeping them protected—and inevitably allowing them to experience our product themselves.

We’re also looking at how people’s roles change as new technologies evolve.

Take A.I. It should not altogether replace humans, but it can make our people more productive and create a more frictionless employee experience. These days, we’re bifurcating those tasks that must remain human, those that can be handed to a machine and those where a human can use A.I. to increase their own productivity.

Companies move at the speed of resources and project prioritization—not innovation.

And when it comes to A.I. and other shiny technologies, you cannot do it all.

At Allianz Partners, we prioritize projects that deliver solutions that increase loyalty and decrease friction while managing the constraints of talent and resources. We pick projects that we know we can deliver and have a no-brainer payback. If we under-deliver, quality will suffer, and there’s friction.

It’s helping us better plan for staffing to predict and handle spikes in calls or claims. It’s quickly analyzing documents to ensure the customer has submitted all necessary information, reducing back-and-forths once they reach our claim examiners. We’re testing A.I. to help internal agents quickly identify nuances within the thousands of varying state-by-state regulated policies, helping the agent more clearly explain our policies to customers.

Those new parents whose babymoon was cut short (but who have an amazing story to tell) didn’t see any of our underpinning technologies or meet those people working around the globe to get them home—but they surely felt our innovation and dedication to the mission.

And I’d hope that for them the experience with our people and our tech was frictionless.

Go find your company’s South Pacific story: a frictionless experience that will deliver and build brand loyalty when your customer needs you most.