He discusses the links between consistency, quality, work environment, customer experience — and how they impact agents.
In terms of claims, how does The Hartford define quality?
JH: We define a quality claim as one that’s accurate. So we pay the right amount of money to the right people for the right reasons. We meet all of our commitments to the customer when we do it, so we deliver great service. If we say we’re going to inspect your car at noon the next day, we show up at noon. If we say we’re going to return your phone call, we return your phone call. And we resolve the claim at the earliest point in time that we can without negatively impacting our ability to be accurate. So we look at quality holistically. We talk about accuracy, service, cycle time, all of those things together.
How does The Hartford assess quality?
JH: We have a quality management system where we look at the outcomes of our claims in a holistic way. So we look at individual claims files to determine whether they meet our definitions of accuracy and quality. We start with individual claims and we build up from there. We have aggregated data for the individual, the team, the office, and nationally at the line of business level. So that system allows us to monitor the performance of everyone from an individual claims handler all the way to the entire claims organization.
How does this affect the final product?
JH: We’ve got dashboards that allow us to report on our results pretty much in real time, where people get a lot of feedback and coaching to help them perform better. And the things that we learn through that assessment are used in developing our training curriculum so that we’re teaching people to deliver the kind of quality that we want.
And that really is the trick, we want all five thousand people in the Claims organization to define a quality claim the same way, so that our customers and agents and brokers get a consistent experience.
What’s the benefit of consistency from the customer point of view?
JH: The benefit for the individual customer, whether it’s an injured worker in commercial lines or whether it’s a personal lines customer, is if we consistently deliver a good experience then they’re more apt to have a good one than a bad one.
We know that the individual customer doesn’t experience the average. Whatever service level they personally receive defines their claims experience at The Hartford. So if nine customers out of ten get a great experience and you’re the tenth who doesn’t, you don’t really care what the other nine get. At the same time, we know that nine out of ten is better than four out of ten, so the system we built is meant to deliver a consistently good experience for the customer, and the agents and brokers, so that more often than not everyone receives an outcome that they appreciate and that they value.
We undertook major assessment work to begin this process. Can you talk about that?
JH: We began baselining the entire organization back in late ’06 and early ’07 to establish a starting point, in terms of what are the things we do well, what are the opportunities for improvement, what are the areas where we need more training. The outcome of those baseline efforts was a set of priorities for the organization—to standardize our work and to build business models that would more consistently deliver good quality and good customer service.
And all of this, frankly, impacts our work environment, too. We have three things we really care about: quality, service, and work environment. One of the things that we know about work environment is that if we’re consistent in how we do our work and more clear about what we expect, that people like their jobs better.
And when people like their jobs better, what does that mean for customers?
JH: Customers and agents get a better experience. Quality, service and work environment operate in an interdependent way. You can’t produce good quality if you don’t have people who are engaged and excited by their work. Good service is an outcome of good quality. If you make good decisions and you pay the right amount of money on the claim and you resolve it when you should, customers receive a better experience. And when customers are receiving a good experience, and they feel good about the product that we deliver, then employees feel better about the work that they’re doing. It’s very hard to have good quality and not good service or good quality and not a good work environment and vice versa.
How do all these efforts around quality affect agents?
JH: I think for agents and brokers, what we hear from them is ‘Every time I sign up a policy, I’m using my reputation to make a promise on behalf of The Hartford. So if you place your business with The Hartford they’re going to deliver good service to you.’ If that’s the case, their business reputation, real or perceived, is tied to how we perform when the inevitable claim comes in the door. So if we can help agents and brokers to feel good that they’re reliably going to get a good experience for their customer, then theoretically they would want to place more business with us. ‘Every time I place business with you, my customers get a great experience. I’d rather do that than take a cha
nce with my reputation with another carrier.’ So that degree of consistency and predictability is really powerful, I think.