Your nightmare is my ho-hum

By the time an insurance claims handler has spent 5 years on the job, he or she has repeatedly seen and dealt with a variety of scenarios. Customers who are clearly legally at fault, yet who cannot accept it; third parties who accept responsibility at the scene of the accident and then can't be found; people who buy a car and think they can drive on the seller's policy without telling the insurance company; losses from lightning hitting a car or customers blithely driving their high-end sedans into (but seldom out of) waist-deep water.

The natural human response is to become blasé and matter of fact. When you figure you've heard and seen it all, it's really hard to see things the way the customer is seeing it. We forget that our 5000th claim, that we already see following the patterns laid down by the previous 4999, might easily be this customer's first such experience. One result is that it is harder for us to display the level of empathy that the customer so often needs from us. 

A few years ago I took a call from an unhappy claimant. He'd been in a three vehicle collision in which he was clearly not liable, but the insurers of the other two cars were blaming each other. He was naturally upset because while that dispute was crawling to (hopefully) some resolution, he was significantly out of pocket. I had experienced a very similar situation a few years ago, that only resolved when I sued, and won, in RM Court. I decided to share my personal story with the customer, while at the same time setting out an approach that we could take that had a chance to move things along a bit quicker.

The change in the customer's mood was instant. Of course what he ultimately wanted was to have his claim paid (so it was important that I addressed his issue at the same time that I was telling him my own story), but he also needed someone to acknowledge the unfairness of the situation. To show  empathy, and validate his anger and frustration.

That's the element of customer support that gets overlooked when we define our roles in mechanical, task-oriented terms. In a competitive market, we absolutely need to be efficient with turn-around times and following up the process. But that's hygiene. We really create distinction when we recognize and take into account that we are dealing with customers who are navigating unfamiliar territory, while worrying about background stuff like: how am I going to get my kids to & from school while the car is laid up; where am I going to find the money for the deductible; how much is my renewal premium going to increase because of this accident?

It's a nightmare scenario, during which the customer encounters what they perceive as the blasé, seen-it-all-before claims handler, writing letters in formal office-lingo designed to mask any trace of personality, delivering bad news via tersely worded emails, casually treating with issues that represent terrifying outcomes for the customer. And it's not that claims handlers are bad people. They are human, and this emotional detachment is entirely predictable based on human psychology.

Knowing this, we have to make an effort to avoid it. We have to define customer-support as delivering what the customer needs. This includes but cannot be limited to the service that we are legally contracted to deliver. It must also extend to offering empathy, emotional support, advice, or whatever else we can. The only way we will be able to do so effectively is by developing the skill of getting out of our own heads, and trying to imagine ourselves in the customer's predicament. Even if we start out not being all that good at it, I'll bet that the customer will see and appreciate the effort, and that by itself will be a valuable upgrade to the level of service that the customer experiences.

Leading Means Following

A couple of months before I started working as a CEO, I saw a television interview that was very timely for me. It was on the American news magazine '60 Minutes', with USA's then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.

Mullen talked about a congratulatory letter that he received when he was promoted to Admiral. In it was a line that had driven his approach to leadership. It said "Congratulations. Just remember, from now on…you'll always eat well, and you'll never hear the truth again."

Mullen's response to that piece of advice was to spend 30% of his time travelling to far flung US military posts, talking directly to the front line troops. I'm sure he knew that the 'truths' that he was hearing from the troops weren't necessarily any less subjective or self-serving than the ones he heard from his Pentagon staff. But they would have been different ones, and would have helped him to form a more complete picture of what was really going on.

Just having face to face conversations with different groups isn't enough though. For this tactic to be effective, the leader has to be careful not to lead the conversation. People react to power by giving it what they think it wants. That's a rational, if often unhelpful, behaviour.

I was lucky enough to have spent a few years working with a CEO who was extraordinarily mindful of this dynamic. Whenever there was a group discussion in the context of a decision to be made, he very consciously held his own views back, and would go around the table asking each person, however junior, what they thought. I remember on a number of occasions being on the spot on a matter about which I didn't have a well-formed view. I felt the way you do in an exam at school when you have exhausted your knowledge about a topic but are still 100 words or so short of the required length.

But the individual's comfort level is secondary (if it's a factor at all). The process more often than not forced people to crystallize and express a view, and with the spotlight on you, the desperation to say something often brought out useful views that would have otherwise remained buried.

This way of operating is a lot harder than it sounds for most CEOs. People who get to leadership positions are often what DISC analysis refers to as 'High Ds'. That's D for Dominant. It's only by consciously fighting that innate tendency to dominate that a leader can maximize value from those around them.