The most inventive or innovative thing I have done to date occurred while I was working as the head of Supply Chain for a lifestyle services group engaged in the gadget (e.g., devices) insurance business. It came to my attention that many of our customers were not pleased with receiving cash settlements for their insurance claims, because this form of settlement failed to restore them to their original position prior to the damage taking place. In other words, they may have received money, but were out a device that they favoured, or out of a device, period. This was a point of customer dissatisfaction, and it was important to me, as head of the Supply Chain, to analyse the situation and come up with a potential solution. After all we were a lifestyle company, so we should be highly customer-centric.
In response to the above-noted issue, in about a 24 hour time span, I gathered my team and identified all of the customers who had received a cash settlement for their claims within the last 12 months. The result indicated that this impacted a total of about 20% of our customer base. I then commissioned a customer study, which ultimately involved more than 3000 customers concerning the claims settlement process.
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Without many exceptions, the overwhelming response was about their failure to be restored to the position they were in prior to their gadget being damaged. In the course of this analysis, we also identified the devices these customers had insured and confirmed with our purchasing manager, that such devices were not available to procure as replacement, and hence the cash settlements rendered.
Now armed with this information, I had a duty to seek a resolution to a known cause of customer dissatisfaction. My resulting innovation was the development and implementation of a gadget recycling website, which bought gadgets back from consumers. Our primary targets were those devices that we did not have available to send out as insurance replacements. To beast capture the UK market, we strategized to pay the highest prices for these previously owned devices, whether operative or not.
Upon receipt of the devices at our distribution centre, they were sorted, triaged, and sent out to repair and refurbishment centres throughout Europe for repair and return to a functional state. Once returned to stock, we began providing replacement devices to our gadget insurance customers in lieu of the less-favoured cash payment. In fact, as a result of this innovative program, the percentage of cash settlements dropped from 20% of claims to just 3%, which also provided a considerable benefit to our company’s profit and loss statement.
Thereafter, we went on to create a “customers happiness” team whose raison d’etre was to analyse the customer experience and to identify, develop, and implement best practices gleaned therefrom. My team personally contacted more than 2500 customers, in order to debrief with them regarding their experiences with our Lifestyle Service groups.
During this process, I personally spoke with upwards of 100 people, asking them to re-assess their experiences with our company. From this sampling, I then invited 25 people to visit our offices as guests, for purposes of having a detailed discourse with them regarding their experiences before and after the launching of the gadget buy-back website. My specific emphasis was upon the conversations concerning our company’s claims processing and service. In particular, we engaged these guests in a frank dialogue regarding their increase in customer satisfaction upon receiving an insurance replacement device, as opposed to the formerly offered cash settlement. This honest 360º feedback has come to be an operational norm in the company, and has been successfully been applied to other situations in which management desired to analyse customer mindset.
