Interview with Mara Bain, Chief Experience Officer, Western National Insurance

This is the second in our Aiming for the Hearts of their Customers interview series, with seven Minnesota customer experience leaders sharing their strategy for the coming year.

The Western National Insurance Group is a 500-person private company that offers property and casualty insurance. Mara is the company's Chief Experience Officer, a role she began mid-year. Mara came to Customer Experience through an unusual route, having previously served as their Controller. She has hit the ground running, however, working with teams from throughout the company to create a Customer Experience framework, and launching programs to help further improve an experience that already has many strengths.

"We have three customer segments. First are our independent agencies. We recognize that many key policyholder touch points are controlled by our agents. By optimizing our agents' experience with us, we are positively impacting the service they provide our ultimate customer. Next is our ultimate policyholder, which can be either an individual or a business. Finally, we have our employees as customers." The employee was unique. While most customer experience programs recognize the employee as a key stakeholder, it is unusual to include them as actual customers.Mara explained how this is a reflection of the Western National way to involve everyone. "In a customer-centric culture, we believe it should be the job of those who rarely touch the external customer (IT, HR, finance) to support those who do."

Mara defines customer experience as "addressing every touchpoint with the brand," including both direct and indirect interactions. She distinguishes it from customer service, which she defines as a "person-to-person interaction."

Mara coordinates the customer experience working group representing leaders from across the company. These leaders are ambassadors, setting the customer experience strategy and sharing it with the greater company. As is common with many Chief Experience Officers, Mara does not have a big team ("I used to have an intern"), but instead works with the greater organization to accomplish their customer experience goals.

"My role is to influence and organize. I pull together teams from across the company to work on key initiatives. While I have no direct reports, you could say I have a team of 500."

"We are early in our measurement journey. We use the Net Promoter Score for our agents, and we measure claim satisfaction rates. As we formalize our customer experience program, our fourth initiative is 'Measure and communicate through effective metrics.' Defining those metrics is a critical part of our 2014 efforts."

Bringing your customers to life is a critical need for customer experience programs – one that is often overlooked. I was pleased to see that Western National Insurance came up with a unique way to help put their employees in their customers' shoes – literally!

"We have a campaign called "Put Yourself in their Shoes" to bring the policyholder to life. A central hallway space has been reserved to display policyholder shoes. Graphical elements will be added to figuratively identify the customer and detail Western National's impact on their home or business." The company is adding color by a separate program of recording 3-5 minute videos of claimants to show their story and reinforce positive customer experiences.

2013 was primarily about establishing the customer experience framework and introducing it to employees. The Customer Experience team has identified four priorities for 2014:

Some specific action steps already identified: