In short
Customer loyalty and trust built through human connection, prevention/service (not just claims), and measurable retention; how to shift large organizations from cost-cutting and automation toward empathy, better customer experiences, and clearer communication (including AI-assisted document rewriting).
Guests
Conny Kalcher, Chief Marketing Officer at Zurich. Background: nearly became a teacher and journalist; started as a teacher, then moved into marketing. Spent ~40 years in marketing and global roles at LEGO (Denmark and UK), including innovation work (TV shows, computer games), licensing/books, and even HR. Later joined Zurich after meeting the CEO; leads customer-focused transformation in retail insurance.
Key claims
Shareholder-focused firms often reduce innovation and shift efficiencies onto customers; loyalty can be quantified via net revenue retention (NRR). Insurance trust is undermined by low expectations; Zurich differentiates by high claims payout (97% in the UK) and proactive service (e.g., hail alerts, concierge booking). Empathy training improves TNPS/friendliness and is sustained. AI should be used to make communications clearer and more human, with legal oversight.
Notable examples
LEGO adult sets and “LEGO Ideas” community co-creation (e.g., Simpsons set); adult “botanicals/flowers” line; Zurich hail alerts; service desk/concierge; Spain retention center calls; AI tone-of-voice tool rewriting customer documents.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOConny's Career Path and Experience
2:21 to 3:38
Explore Conny's diverse roles in marketing and how they shaped her.
“I care a lot about developing things for and delivering to customers.”
The Importance of Diverse Roles
3:38 to 4:50
Understand how varied experiences enhance perspectives in marketing.
“I was an account man briefly in advertising before I became a copywriter.”
Lego's Customer-Centric Approach
4:50 to 6:04
Learn about Lego's focus on customer needs and brand continuity.
“Interestingly, I suppose you also took is Lego privately owned or is it a public company?”
Balancing Education and Entertainment
6:04 to 7:05
Discover how Lego merges educational and entertaining elements.
“And it, of course, gives a lot of continuity.”
The Success of the Adult Lego Market
7:05 to 9:00
Explore the strategy behind targeting adult Lego enthusiasts.
“And so you also then, of course, did something extraordinary, which I have to admit, if you'd proposed it to me, I would have said you were mad, which was the adult market as well.”
Community Engagement and Innovation
9:00 to 11:21
Find out how Lego engages fans to drive innovation through ideas.
“And now it's embraced to the full with also the line of the flowers, which is maybe more aimed at a different target group.”
Sustainability in Lego
11:21 to 12:36
Learn about Lego's efforts in sustainability and recycling.
“So it was almost the case of going a little bit too far in order to achieve the middle.”
Transition to Zurich
12:36 to 14:01
Hear about Conny's transition from Lego to Zurich and her initial hesitations.
“I mean, there are you can make it from recycled plastic.”
Transitioning to Customer-Centric Insurance
14:01 to 15:32
Learn how one individual's career shift led to a new vision for insurance.
“and I just thought insurance companies, they're not really customer focused.”
The Challenge of Old Institutions
15:33 to 16:40
Explore the complexities of transforming a long-established insurance company.
“And in particular, it was because it allowed you to focus as much on customer experience and retention as a simple acquisition.”
Show all 31 chapters
Reframing Insurance Perception
17:44 to 21:05
Understand how to change customer perspectives on insurance services.
“I think 50 % of people or more don't claim in any given year.”
Building Trust Through Transparency
21:06 to 22:24
Discover how transparency can enhance customer trust in the insurance industry.
“And there is something with the narrative that insurance industry hasn't been good at telling.”
AI and Nuanced Customer Service
22:25 to 25:41
Learn how AI can revolutionize customer service and decision-making in insurance.
“But if you say, but this is who we are, this is what we do, and then, you know, be proud of when we serve people well.”
Retaining Customers Through Human Connection
25:42 to 28:00
Explore the importance of human interaction in customer retention strategies.
“That, in other words, is the customer service reasonably good?”
The Importance of Customer Retention
28:00 to 29:00
Learn how customer retention plays a critical role in business success.
“But they can nonetheless make that claim that I brought in X million in revenue, which is worth this.”
Feedback Mechanisms in Customer Service
29:00 to 30:20
Discover the value of feedback from customer service as a learning tool.
“And that voice is being fed back into the business and makes changes in the business.”
Measuring Customer Loyalty with Data
30:20 to 31:40
Understand how to quantify the impact of customer loyalty on profits.
“And so the temptation is always to overinvest in transactions and underinvest in relationships, which I think is interesting.”
Balancing Acquisition and Retention Strategies
31:40 to 33:40
Learn the importance of balancing new customer acquisition with retention.
“the value we are creating um and and especially if you're in financial industry the more you can quantify the impact of what you do, the better.”
Value of Long-Term Customer Relationships
33:40 to 35:00
Explore how long-term relationships with customers enhance loyalty.
“So we need to learn from that on an ongoing basis.”
Creating a Customer-Centric Culture
35:00 to 36:20
Learn how to shift an organization towards a customer-focused culture.
“boxes a year to an industry where we may be selling 1.3 products a year to a customer.”
Building Trust in Customer Relationships
37:20 to 39:40
Understand the necessity of trust in customer interactions.
“And that's because it was very obvious to me after having worked in an industry in toys that's a lot about empathy, it's a lot about emotions and connecting on an emotional level with the children and excite them.”
Empathy Training in Organizations
39:40 to 42:01
Discover the implementation of empathy training in customer service.
“Because Mark Evans, I remember, he had someone on secondment at direct line from some actuarial part of the business.”
Empathy Training for Customer Service
42:01 to 43:59
Learn how empathy training using actors can improve customer service metrics.
“bring the whole team together for a couple of days where we bring in actors, professional actors, who will act out some of these most prevalent scenarios.”
Redefining Customer Service Metrics
44:00 to 45:29
Explore how to shift from traditional metrics to measuring helpfulness and satisfaction.
“And what's in terms of the metrics or rather, you know, the bonus structure and metrics you use to incentivize this behavior.”
Customer Experience Standards
45:30 to 47:18
Understand the establishment of 33 customer experience standards to improve service.
“That had an extreme, I think they, at one stage, they had a customer service call that lasted six hours or something.”
Empathy Gap in Customer Expectations
47:19 to 49:45
Discover the disparity between customer expectations of empathy and what companies provide.
“So a standard could be the conversation needs to take place.”
Using AI for Clear Communication
49:46 to 52:15
Learn how AI tools can help rewrite complex customer documents for clarity.
“And I think that was a big eye-opener for us that it's the customers wanted more.”
Challenges of Legal and Technical Language
52:16 to 55:24
Examine the issues with legal language in customer communications and how to improve them.
“And then we created this AI tool where you could take your existing document letter or whatever it was, put it into the AI tool, and it will come up with a new version based on these principles.”
The Need for Customer Service Standards
56:00 to 56:59
Discussion on the importance of establishing benchmarks for customer service quality.
“of just making communication seem non-evasive, non-terrifying, comprehensible, helpful, friendly.”
Understanding Customer Expectations
57:00 to 1:00:26
Exploring how consumer perceptions of customer service impact their purchasing decisions.
“It's crunch time at work, and you need to bring wings to your workday.”
Customer Loyalty and Retention Metrics
1:02:00 to 1:06:03
In-depth conversation about customer loyalty metrics and their importance for businesses.
“I mean, this is such a welcome finding for me because the discovery that someone is actually trying to rebalance the value of investment in retention and experience relative to acquisition.”
Transcript
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0:56Conny Kalcher:Fans of Lego, which are the really high spenders, they will spend thousands of pounds on Lego. They were helping pulling up other people, which then took Lego away from being a play toy.
1:17So, of course, I'm trying to get, I will actually follow Alfred's policy of asking the guests to introduce herself to a large extent. except to say it's a great honor to welcome Chief Marketing Officer of Zurich, Connie Kaltcher, who has an extraordinary coincidence with me in that I think you nearly became a teacher and nearly became a journalist. I also trained as a teacher, nearly became a journalist and ended up in advertising. So we've got that in common.
1:48Conny Kalcher:That's cool. Fire away with your own introduction. Delighted to have you here. I'm delighted to be here thank you very much for the invitation and the introduction yeah it is it is true I started out my career as a teacher but soon moved into marketing I've been working in marketing for almost 40 years many of the years in the Lego group in Denmark and in the UK all in global roles and then after that in in Zurich one of the biggest insurance companies in the world and I'm really a customer person at heart. I care a lot about developing things for and delivering to customers. That's what drives me.
2:32Conny Kalcher:That's what gets me up in the morning and that's what I'm excited about. This is fantastic. So one of your great focuses, I think you were at Lego in multiple roles, weren't you? It wasn't only in the marketing role. You were also in filmmaking, almost an extraordinary plethora of different roles within what is a fantastic marketing organization, obviously, but so much more than that as well. Tell us a bit about that, particularly the filmmaking. I'm intrigued by that. Yeah, I was very, very lucky to be part of many upstarts at Lego. The good thing about the Lego culture is all about innovation, trying new things and seeing how far you can stretch the brands and the products.
3:12Conny Kalcher:So I was part of developing TV shows. I was part of developing computer games for kids as an initiative, just dabbling in the water, finding out how Lego could be relevant in that space. But I was also doing innovation and other things and even running HR at a certain point in time. Wow. Wow. So I was trying many different things. So, I mean, how useful, presumably having covered the waterfront. I was an account man briefly in advertising before I became a copywriter. And I think we see less and less of this in an age of specialization. But having done more than one role within an organization, I think, helps in multiple ways.
3:54It helps in terms of your own perspective. It also helps in terms of your relationships with other people because you've been their side of the fence as well, I suppose. Did you find the same thing?
4:05Conny Kalcher:Absolutely. I really enjoyed doing different things within the group and connecting to different parts of customer needs or kids' needs, but also understanding the organization on a broader scale. I often had roles which was kind of breaking new ground, so trying something we hadn't done before. So the first computer game, as I said, or doing Lego licensing or doing books and things like that for kids. So it's all breaking new ground and seeing how far we could stretch the brand. But then at the same time, you get a deeper and deeper knowledge about children, a deeper and deeper knowledge about your colleagues in these spaces and the industries that are catering for your core customers.
4:50Interestingly, I suppose you also took is Lego privately owned or is it a public company? It's privately owned.
4:56Conny Kalcher:It's privately owned. Yeah. Which explains partly, I suppose, the focus on the customer. Because one of my complaints is that increasingly in companies which are shareholder focused, the customer effectively takes a backseat. And what I notice happening is, one, a decline in innovation and brand investment generally to meet short-term objectives. But the other thing I tend to see is effectively where operational efficiencies are introduced at the customer's own expense. So it's a great story to the stock market that you've managed to transition 40 % of your customers from human checkouts in a supermarket to self-checkout.
5:40It's a wonderful story to the stock market because it's a plausible story with a cost saving narrative. But the long term costs of that are that your customer is paying a price for your own internal efficiencies, which may not be that great a business move. So that's fascinating. So it's still effectively family owned, I guess, is it?
5:59Conny Kalcher:Yes, it is. It's the fourth generation, I believe, that's running it. And it, of course, gives a lot of continuity. It gives a lot of belief in the brand and what the brand stands for. It gets a lot of shared knowledge about what's right for the brand and what's not right for the brand. And that is kind of, yeah, a fantastic asset to have. And I guess it still has an underlying mission or purpose, without getting into the whole brand purpose question, which can get a bit tedious. But ultimately, the educational purpose still underpins everything, I guess. yeah it's a combination of education and entertainment i would say because if you go purely didactic you can easily use the kids it lose the kids but it's it is about being relevant for the kids of today and delivering something to them that they find exciting you know some parents would like to say yeah when i grew up we only had red bricks and yellow bricks and we could only build very simple things but if if lego had followed that direction it would have been gone out of business so it's really about understanding what is it the kids of today what do they want what do they need what makes them excited about something and we we had a period where we were very much seen as a toy company for six-year-olds and if you were a nine you wouldn't be seen near lego and that has flipped that has totally changed yeah because children are unbelievably ageist aren't they if you if you buy a pepper pig toy for someone who is one year over the the core target audience for pepper pig it's perceived as a massive insult yes and so children have this weird thing of if you're not careful of completely rejecting the things they enjoyed two years before.
7:51And so you also then, of course, did something extraordinary, which I have to admit, if you'd proposed it to me, I would have said you were mad, which was the adult market as well. Which was, I think, one of the bravest. And, you know, I'll have to confess, if you'd gone to me as a marketing person, I like to think of myself as fairly adventurous and happy to entertain, you know, slightly outlandish ideas. But the pursuit of the adult market with very high-priced, fantastically sophisticated versions of Lego. That was an extraordinary success in a way, wasn't it?
8:25Conny Kalcher:Yes, but it was also, now it sounds like something we just switched on overnight, or we made a decision, let's be for adults, but it wasn't like that. There was a lot of resistance within the company. We're for kids, we're really not for adults, and how would they see us in the future if we become too adult and not for the kids, etc. So it's really only when the community numbers became so convincing and the share of the sales was growing and growing and growing that we embraced that new business opportunity. And now it's embraced to the full with also the line of the flowers, which is maybe more aimed at a different target group.
9:08Conny Kalcher:That's astounding. I saw that. Is it botanicals it's called? Is it? Yes. I saw that. They're things of extraordinary beauty. I mean, that again was a brilliant, brilliant lateral move. And again, who is the adult target audience? Because I have to confess, it doesn't include me. It might well include my brother, I suspect, or if you're allowed to anyway. um who uh what happened you you tentatively started producing i suppose brand partnerships was was a great foundation of it yeah a lot of the the star wars fans for example that bought lego as kids they weren't ready to give up star wars when they became adults so they kept on buying for example and and other developments were is that we we did something called lego ideas where we allowed the community to come up with ideas of what they would like to buy in a Lego box, which was a big revolution.
10:05Conny Kalcher:So they came up with, you know, that they wanted to see the Simpsons in a Lego set. And so we didn't have to produce a whole line. We could just produce one set. And there were a lot of these fan communities that had overlaps with the Lego community and some other kind of property, IP property. And by doing that more and more, it became visible that this target group had real buying power and real interest in other types of models. And there were other ways of servicing them, not having 10 SKUs, but having different SKUs that were priced higher, more complicated. And in an interesting effect, we saw that these fans of Lego, which are the really high spenders, they will spend thousands of pounds on Lego.
10:54Conny Kalcher:they were helping pulling up other people because they were kind of the community spreading everything on social media in their networks in their communities and other people and kids would see their amazing models of what they could do and that would inspire them which then took lego away from being a play toy into a creative medium so that also presumably helped with the whole of children at the age of seven or eight rejecting it because they saw it as... So it was almost the case of going a little bit too far in order to achieve the middle. I always think it was very interesting that the Indian restaurant Dishoom, in order to get people to come in at lunchtime, open for breakfast.
11:39Yes, Mark. It's rather like that very clever form of overshoot. I also remember, by the way, I had one of the most interesting conversations I had a a few years ago was with Lego discussing the question of sustainability and recycling. And I remember saying to them, look, to be absolutely candid, if there is one brand I've ever had to talk to which doesn't have a problem with being reused, you know, I can't envisage ever throwing away Lego. If I owned Lego, I might pass it on to somebody else. I might keep it. I might put it in the cupboard. But it is almost infinitely reusable. Obviously, I think the bricks lose a certain degree of cohesion after 100 uses or something.
12:23But I remember saying that of all the toys, of all the things you buy for children, which cannot be accused of being environmentally unsustainable, Lego came at the top. And I think I did the slightly irresponsible thing. My colleagues would probably have shot me for it of saying, you really don't have much to worry about here. I mean, there are you can make it from recycled plastic. you can recycle it if people want to and so on and so forth yeah an element some of the softer
12:48Conny Kalcher:elements are today yes done by reusable materials so the problem is the clutch power you know of course in the bricks that they the clutch power is not as strong so by doing something that's recyclable not a hundred percent but it will move the knowledge of the company more and more in that direction and then eventually maybe it will be a much higher percentage that's reusable And then one day, so you're marketing director of Lego, you're presumably in Denmark at that point, and you get a call from Zurich, I think, if I'm right. The headhunter first calls you and asks you if you're interested in working for Zurich, which is, it does seem like quite a flip.
13:28And at first you basically rejected it. Is that right?
13:31Conny Kalcher:That is true. I actually had left Lego at that point in time. and I was working in a different company with my husband and I had a very cozy life working with him on the clients and his business and traveling the world together. So we had kind of, I had thought no more corporate. For me, I'm done with corporate. I want a different, freer life more as an entrepreneur. And then I did get a call from a headhunter about this position at Zurich and I just thought insurance companies, they're not really customer focused. So this is not for me. And I pointed to some other people that might be interesting for this headhunter to talk to.
14:14Conny Kalcher:Maybe it was my own lack of understanding about insurance and what insurance is all about. But that was how I perceived it seen from the outside. And I thought, you know, I've done, all my career has been about how to do good things for customers and really move the needle on that with some of the leading companies in the world that I learned together with. And just seeing me in a whole different group was difficult for me. But then some few months later, I got a call from somebody in my network who had been working for Progressive for many years in the U.S. And he had been in the same network as me, and he said, there is this job at Zurich, and it really has your name written all over it.
14:58Conny Kalcher:You should go talk to them. So Mario would like to talk to you and see if this is something for you. So actually being invited to talk to the CEO, of course, made me super curious and interested. And I thought that's different. So I went and had a meeting with the CEO and I heard his vision for insurance and how to make insurance more customer friendly than what it is or was at that point in time. And that was very inspiring. And then I was back the week after we had another conversation and then I was done. I was hired. You were hooked. Yeah. And in particular, it was because it allowed you to focus as much on customer experience and retention as a simple acquisition.
15:40Is that right?
15:41Conny Kalcher:Exactly. That was part of it. But it was what really made me interested was the transformation. It was trying to do something in a business that's not known for this. and I should caveat with that that we have two lines of business we have commercial insurance where we're one of the leading in the world and we're top top tuned to be customer focused but in our retail business which was much closer to my world where we serve individual customers we were less advanced and compared to Lego really not on in the same league so for me it was really the challenge. What do you do in a company like that, that has the intent?
16:22Conny Kalcher:They want to do it. But it's an old super tanker. It's been around for 150 years. What can we do to make that change? And that I was super interested in. And then with his vision and backing, I found it very attractive. Today, we helped a latte for Sam coffee shop get an insurance quote simply and easily. and made sure a floral delivery van was able to make someone's day. We're the Hartford, with decades of experience insuring millions of unique small businesses. When it comes to your small business insurance, Thank you. one size absolutely does not fit all. Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash smallbusiness.
17:10Conny Kalcher:K-pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boy's Breakfast Meal, and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. A participating McDonald's while supplies last. The interesting thing is, of course, it's seen traditionally as a distress, purchase or as a grudge purchase. I think 50 % of people or more don't claim in any given year.
17:53So they're always inclined to increasingly doubt the value of what they're spending.
17:59Conny Kalcher:Yes. And so part of the aim of this was to take the existing customers, the existing retail customers of Zurich, and get them effectively to sort of reframe how they thought about insurance. Is that right? Yes, by actually also delivering differently to them. So one of the challenges is exactly what you're saying, that 50 percent of the customers we don't talk to through the year. And we know from our data, the customers we engage with more often, they have a claim or they have more products. They're much more happy. yes so so what part of the things we were doing is reframing who we are so we're not just about protection we're about prevention protection and service and that gives you more space to deliver value you know so you will kind of do more things for your customers in order for them to feel the relevance uh in a different way that's the whole industry is moving in that direction but it's a a different framing.
19:00Conny Kalcher:Prevention, of course, is a brilliant conversation because it benefits both parties, doesn't it? Exactly. You don't want your customers to have an unfortunate accident. You know, they don't want to have, well, you know, they don't want to have an unfortunate accident. And as you said, it actually reframes the whole conversation effectively away from what you might call just being an emergency service towards some sort of partnership. Yes. Very, very interesting. So we can play a different role. So, for example, in some countries, we send out hail alerts. You know, in your area, there's predicted to be a hail alert.
19:38Conny Kalcher:Maybe you should park your car in the garage. And it's not just to save money, but it actually is also for the customer to be able to take action. They don't want the hassle with having to repair their cars either. So in finding more of these things or when you've had an accident, we have service desk. We have concierge services. We book the car in for service. All of these things around the situations that's normally hassle situation for a customer. What can we do to make that easier? How can we be playing a better role in that situation? This is absolutely fascinating because, in a sense, it's also gloriously meaningful precisely because it's so unexpected.
20:21And you do have one advantage, I think, in insurance, which is that generally customer expectations are quite low. They assume, I mean, one of my assumptions with insurance, which has pleasantly surprised me on a few occasions, is you assume that the claim is going to be paid with great reluctance. And when the people are actually perfectly helpful and positive, it comes as a delightful surprise. which is I think in a sense you have an interesting relationship because people, until they claim at the very least, start the relationship from a position of default mistrust. They're always paranoid that you're going to find a loophole or find some objection or reason not to pay.
21:06Conny Kalcher:And there is something with the narrative that insurance industry hasn't been good at telling. So like in every other industry, there would be players that are the decent players that will do the right thing. You pay maybe a bit more, but you get better service. It's more reliable. And I think we haven't been good at telling that story. So, for example, in the UK, we have a claims ratio of paying out 97 % of claims, you know, but in the perception of a mind of a customer, it's maybe 50%. So as an industry, we also need to get over ourselves and communicate these things more. Yeah, maybe some companies cannot put that number as high as we can put it in our case, but we should do because we are a premium provider.
21:52Conny Kalcher:So we provide premium service and people should know, which is something that becomes even more important now that people are using AI search to find out which insurance they should use. those criteria suddenly become important and we can't be shy or or not wanting to brag about these things we need to state yes but if you take out an insurance with us guess what in this case we pay out this amount of claims that should build trust and i know trust is also an important concept for you you know the more that we if we don't say anything we are prone to be perceived as anybody else. But if you say, but this is who we are, this is what we do, and then, you know, be proud of when we serve people well.
22:38So in a sense, the very act of marketing is a form of differentiation, because my guess is that half the people simply rely on, you know, comparison websites for a large amount of their, you know, their new customers. They compete purely on price. And the problem when anything turns into a pure price competition is, in a sense, the company with the worst levels of customer service or indeed the lower level of claim satisfaction is going to win. It's a race to the bottom.
23:10Conny Kalcher:Yes, exactly. And also, you know that we're so technical that comparing one policy to the other policy of what benefits and what payout rates is totally difficult to do as an individual. It takes hours. I did it myself when I moved to Switzerland, just trying to compare. Being in the industry myself, I thought I should try to understand these different providers. It's a nightmare. But it's not a nightmare anymore because you just use ChatTBT, which is much more refined than a price comparison side. And then you say, these are my criteria. This is what I'm looking for. For me, it's important that there is a high claims payout.
23:49Conny Kalcher:For me, it's important I get service, I get access to personal advice. And of course, it's not the same for everyone, but it's our job to understand what is important to what consumer group and how do we then service them so they will be happy. So one very interesting point about, which I have to say, this is the first time I've heard it happen, but one of the great advantages of AI-based search is that it makes possible much more nuanced decision making. Yes. Because one of the things that's always concerned me, for example, with the classic intermediary case, you know, online travel agents, which is I've literally found myself so fixated on price that in order to save£17.50, I book a flight that leaves Gatwick at like 5.30 in the morning.
24:44And then two days before I fly, I realized there's no way I'm going to get my kids out of bed that early. And we end up staying in a hotel overnight, which costs 200 pounds. And you realize it's a completely false economy because effectively what you've done is for ease of comparison, you fixated on the price. And all the other stuff that matters gets effectively sidelined. Yeah.
Read the full transcript
25:08Conny Kalcher:And I think the future will be much more us prompting on things that are important to us. What are the factors in what category and what business that's important to you when you travel or when you buy a new suitcase or whatever it is? And then as brands, we have to be much more responsive to that individual need and make sure that we can service that rather than communicating blanket the same thing to everyone. And we will learn over time how people are prompting and what's important to them. So, intriguingly, one of the things, given your search criteria, one of your criteria was you want to be able to talk to a human being, I think, wasn't it?
25:50That, in other words, is the customer service reasonably good? Because one of the cheapest ways in which you can cut costs is effectively to force the entire claims process online. The problem with that is that every claim is subtly different in some shape or form. and consequently the price the consumer has to pay for navigating your own internal bureaucracy isn't really worth paying and there are certain questions i've always said where actually this has to be well it might be in three or four years time a very very sophisticated automatic agent for some part of the call but there will always be an element of complexity or the outlier that requires you to talk to a human being and i think i think it should be choice
26:41Conny Kalcher:though i think the good brands will give the choice to the customer because you will still find the customer who wants to do it everything automatic at one o 'clock in the morning yeah and they should be able to do that and then you find other people with more complicated cases who who would want to talk to a human being or at this stage in the process i want to talk to somebody and the the winners in the future will be the ones who understand that and give them options and if we go straight into this efficiency uh run that you talked about before it's just about cutting cost out cutting cost out but it's also cutting relationship out it's also cutting any emotional connection out with the brand so so that's not going to that's not going to win in the long run if you want to be at least a meaningful brand to your customers.
27:32I've always wondered, because I know you're absolutely, I think quite rightly, fixated on customer retention. I've always wondered what very good call center staff would actually be paid if they could lay claim to the real value they create in terms of retention, in that salespeople obviously can lay claim, whether rightly or wrongly, to quite a lot of value by claiming that this sale would not have happened in less for me. Whether that's true or not, of course, is a bit debatable. But they can nonetheless make that claim that I brought in X million in revenue, which is worth this. If you're contributing to customer retention, which I think can be just as decisive, by the way, with a good phone call as it can be an acquisition, you could acquire that data, but it would take three or four years to actually prove your case.
28:25Conny Kalcher:We do have that data. Not in all countries, but we do have it in Spain, for example, where we have this retention center, which is part of the contact center, where their job is to be the voice and the dialogue, be masters of that dialogue with the customers when we have renewals or when we haven't talked to somebody for a long time, just reach out to them hear how they're doing if there's anything we can help them with so we're we're really exploring retention quite a lot and also it actually is meaningful to a customer service center to be both doing service calls but also retention calls or or sales calls so i i think it's a very good perspective of of valuing that in the same way as you value the sales people Yes, I've always thought also, of course, the call centre is incredibly valuable as a feedback mechanism because it's there where you discover what people can't do online.
29:28Yes, exactly. In other words, if you don't have some sort of human feedback mechanism for people who've tried to self-serve and failed, you'll never learn what it is you're doing wrong because all you'll have is a lot of people leaving you without knowing the reason why. Yeah, exactly.
29:44Conny Kalcher:And I think what we could be better at is really using that data, which is also something that we are working on, you know, that it's another way of also valuing the people who work in service more by making sure that they are the carrier of that voice of the customer. And that voice is being fed back into the business and makes changes in the business. So we serve our customers better. It doesn't happen everywhere, though. But it's the right way to go, I think, because the value is unbelievably strong. Yes. And of course, relational value is slower to emerge than transactional value. And so the temptation is always to overinvest in transactions and underinvest in relationships, which I think is interesting.
30:32I had a very mischievous phrase where I said, in many cases, the customer wants the marriage and the chief financial officer thinks they're running an escort agency. But, you know, in other words, one person effectively wants this long-term relationship of ever deepening trust and understanding. And the person who's actually on the other side of the relationship effectively wants it to be transactional where every transaction is a standalone event. Yeah.
30:59Conny Kalcher:But that's where we need the data so we can prove that this is not just a costly exercise to be servicing customers well and relating to them. It is actually a meaningful business strategy because it creates loyal customers in a different way. And you've actually developed a model, haven't you, which shows with the, I think, with the chief operating officer or the chief financial officer, you developed a whole model which effectively shows how a one percent increase in retention translates into revenue and profit is that right yeah it was very important to us and i think it's something we've struggled with in marketing for years yeah is to actually say how do we quantify the value we are creating um and and especially if you're in financial industry the more you can quantify the impact of what you do, the better.
31:51Conny Kalcher:So we teamed up with our CFO after having actually cleaned our data and made sure we had a global database of our customer data. And then we kind of combined that with the financial data so that we today have a view of our customers, how many we have, what they spend on what, how long they stay with us, what's the customer lifetime value, etc. So we can now measure what we call net revenue retention. And this is a metric that Fred Reichelt kind of introduced because he was unhappy with NPS not being so quantifiable. So moving to NRR where we can see here, we can see on our customer base how much revenue we got from our customer base in the previous year.
32:42Conny Kalcher:Then we look at how much revenue we lost by losing customers how much revenue we are losing by losing products from customers there's another bucket how much income we have by renewals and then how much income we have with upsell and cross sell so servicing more needs and then that comes then to a total number we look at that number over the previous year and then if we are if we are above 100 we have created loyalty we have more customer value with us from that customer base if we're below we have lost loyalty so it gives us a number to have a discussion with our our financial people on but also with the markets and it moves away from we just need to acquire some new customers it's it's we need to acquire new customers but we also need to loyalize the ones we have and make sure that they stay with us because if they're fleeing us in drones, we're not doing everything right.
33:43Conny Kalcher:So we need to learn from that on an ongoing basis. And the model presumably accounts for the fact that to acquire a new customer to replace one that you've lost is now, I would argue, increasingly becoming more expensive, isn't it? Exactly. Yeah. So once you actually put that comparison in how much, yes, okay, we are spending some money on existing customers, but how much would it cost to actually acquire a new customer to replace any of these customers we lose? Yes. You also know that, you know, any customer who's been with you for two or three years is probably disproportionately valuable because they're capable of being loyal, which some people aren't.
34:25I mean, there are simple price chases in the market. Yes.
34:29Conny Kalcher:But we also learn, for example, when we look at the data that if a customer has a life insurance with us and they also have a car insurance with us, they stay longer. That's logic. But they stay longer for both. actually a car insurance is a commodity product it's a price game you go with the cheapest but if we have a deeper relationship with our customers price is no longer so important for them they know what we're delivering they know the value is worth something for them so it's like i came from lego where we had many customers would buy eight boxes a year or ten boxes a year to an industry where we may be selling 1.3 products a year to a customer.
35:16Conny Kalcher:So it's a very different world. And there's not really anyone in the insurance industry who has solved that riddle of how we get customers to understand or how we demonstrate to customers what value we can deliver to them. There's still something in that we need to find out. What you've also done, I think, is you've done some really interesting sort of experimental behavior in creating a customer focus. And you use the analogy of a supertanker. You have 60 ,000 employees. How on earth do you effectively move that supertanker around so that it's facing towards the customer more and perhaps towards the spreadsheet a bit less?
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36:03Conny Kalcher:Like access to the trade desk, our team of passionate traders ready to tackle anything from the most complex trading questions to a simple strategy gut check. Need assistance? No problem. Get 24-7 professional answers and live help and access support by phone, email and in-platform chat. That's how Schwab is here for you to help you trade brilliantly. Learn more at schwab.com slash trading. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus Let's go Get ready for a new case We're gonna crack this case and prove we're the greatest partners of all time New friends You are Gary the Snake And your last name The Snake Dream Team New habitats Zootopia has a secret reptile population You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home You're clearly working it Zootopia 2 Now available on Disney Plus Rated PG yeah and um it's also by the way i think you also have an interesting issue of differentiation in that i think the default position of the customer is probably some degree of mistrust and it's also worth remembering i think that in a lot of categories which have been obsessed with cost cutting and excessive automation a lot of your customers are probably going to be once bitten twice shy so they've had one bad experience and effectively as a result they kind of mistrust the category so so as you said making yourself significantly different in the category and that basically requires i think a cultural change it's not just uh it's not just a small process or an investment in the call center though it will undoubtedly entail that um so you've actually brought in empathy training, is that right?
37:54Conny Kalcher:Yeah, that's true, yeah. And that's because it was very obvious to me after having worked in an industry in toys that's a lot about empathy, it's a lot about emotions and connecting on an emotional level with the children and excite them. and then coming into an industry that's very factual, very finance driven and very inward focused and not focused on the customer. And then from listening to calls and being in customer meetings, et cetera, et cetera, we are extremely professional. We're very, very good at what we do technically. But that's not enough. You need to go from not just talking to the head of people, but also talking to the heart and connecting with them.
38:46Conny Kalcher:So we started to set out with a CX vision, so a customer experience vision, that every interaction should be about building a meaningful relationship. Because if you only talk to your customers very few times, you need to make that connection. So it's not when somebody calls in and they've had an accident, your first question should not be, what's your policy number? right it should be i hope you're well you hope you're good and what happened what can i help you with so and and in in reality people want to do the right thing if you're on the phone you want to do the right thing but if you for years have learned that it's more about the technical skills and being technical correct how do we then move that to still being technically strong and technically correct but then actually bringing your whole self into that conversation and and building that relationship.
39:37Conny Kalcher:So we started looking at training for that. Because Mark Evans, I remember, he had someone on secondment at direct line from some actuarial part of the business. And they said, I don't know why on earth they've seconded me to marketing, because I'm rubbish at drawing. And you always have that terrible problem in an organization which I suppose the dominant cultures are both legal and mathematical. That marketing is a slightly uneasy bedfellow. Yes. And so carrying, I know that I'm pretty sure that Cheryl, who's the marketing director of Aviva, holds for the whole board of the organization a customer day every year.
40:21And it's effectively getting the entire board to spend one day of their year entirely focused on the idea of customer value and psychological value.
40:31Conny Kalcher:Yes, that's a brilliant thing to do and i think it is important that it's on their agenda as well you know we also have the same strategy day every year with our with our board which is also about the customer but it didn't used to be like that and and it's it's it's not only on that level you need to do it on that level but it needs to be in all across all levels in the organization and then it's it's about bringing a home to the organization so they want to do it it's not like okay headquarter has asked me to do uh empathy and i will be a nice and feely touchy feely from now on it's really a a different way of doing business but bringing bringing your human side to work so we're training it in two ways we're training it with with online training where you can do it in your own time and get the basic understanding of not customers are not all the same and this is how you could address them.
41:28Conny Kalcher:And this is how you can do things in a nicer, kind of more empathetic way. The other thing we're doing is deeper. And that's where we go into a department, say a claims department, and we do kind of a diagnostic first. So what's happening in this department? How do they answer the phones? How do they talk in emails? What are the issues they are having? What are they being measured on? How do they find their day-to-day stressful? So we do that diagnostics. And then it takes four days. We talk to the leadership team about that. And then we bring the whole team together for a couple of days where we bring in actors, professional actors, who will act out some of these most prevalent scenarios.
42:12Conny Kalcher:And then they will show them variations of how these situations could be tackled in a more empathetic way. And then it's interactive with the participants there, and then they try it out themselves. But they're not criticizing their colleagues. They're looking at situations that they can recognize from their everyday life because it's based on the audit. And then they get it under their skin, and then it's like a penny drops, and they get it. This can be a better, different way of working. And what we're seeing after this training is that in some instances, the NPS score and the friendliness of the advisor goes up.
42:51Conny Kalcher:20 plus points and it doesn't it doesn't drop again it stays up there so it makes a difference so they get so well well okay because that would always be my fear that you could bring in some improv actors and you would see a short-term change but presumably because they notice the change it has in the person they're talking to on the phone they actually stick with the new behavior Yes, because I think they genuinely want to do the right thing, but also they can see the impact on happier customers. It makes their life easier, and they even see a strong impact on how they collaborate, because empathy also goes towards your colleagues.
43:33Conny Kalcher:So you bring these tools into play also with your colleagues, so it becomes a more empathetic organization. So I think that's the real trick is to go to that deeper level where people can see the difference and feel the difference. It's not 20 % percentage points everywhere because if the level is already high, it won't go up that much. But it is significant. And we measure it over time. And it is a step change that continues. So we have numbers now two years back. It's the same level. Yeah. And what's in terms of the metrics or rather, you know, the bonus structure and metrics you use to incentivize this behavior.
44:17Presumably, you had to bring in a slightly new scoring system to acknowledge this. Because, you know, one of my great beefs is the extent to which call centers are in many ways brilliant, brilliant entities. But they're often judged on completely the wrong thing. how brief you can make a call seems to be a terrible, terrible, terrible measure. Yes. How did you change the sort of bonus structure?
44:44Conny Kalcher:Well, we're measuring them on helpfulness and friendliness and satisfaction, so TNPS. And then we also look at some of these more operational standards. you know that is so ideally in my world i wouldn't measure how many calls you have by by hour because that's a very negative uh but that takes a longer time to change some of these more operational measures because again it's this is how contact centers have been driven for years and and it's it's a bit of a journey also for the leadership team to go to okay so once we've changed how friendly we are, how empathetic we are. We also need to change how we're measuring this.
45:28Conny Kalcher:So we haven't done a total overhaul across all customer service, but that's what we're standing in front of to look at as well. Do you know Sappos? Yes. I knew a few people who worked there. That had an extreme, I think they, at one stage, they had a customer service call that lasted six hours or something. It was a point of absolute sort of principle with them that you didn't get off the phone until the problem was solved. Yes. And I think they had a lot of influence on everybody. Also on me, I went there a couple of times and visited them and tried to understand their philosophy. And I thought that was a great break with tradition.
46:11Conny Kalcher:It's not about a factory that needs to churn out as much as possible. It's really about this connection. They would also send out 10 pairs of shoes if that's what you wanted. If that's what you want. No, no. And I also remember a story about Dyson, which does this very well, where someone was presenting the call center operational statistics to James Dyson, and he kind of interrupted them halfway through and said, as far as I'm concerned, if one of our customers chooses to get in touch with us, we should treat it as an honor and respond accordingly yes and that's what we do as well because we we kind of as part of this whole transformation we also defined 33 standards customer experience standards where we looked at all our data what customers were not happy with and what we should be doing better across the world and then out of that we created 33 standards of what good looks like?
47:06Conny Kalcher:What is it their customer experience they are expecting and how should we be developing that? So we defined the standards in the global organization and then each market are being tracked on how they improve these standards and then they are finding their own way to deliver on them. So a standard could be the conversation needs to take place. Any conversation with a customer needs to start where the last one ended. That's a brilliant, yes. So, in other words, you don't have to effectively go through the long litany of explanation more than once. Yeah. It's what you said before. You shouldn't push your inefficiency over to the customer.
47:50Conny Kalcher:No, no. Absolutely. You need to make sure that if you've asked this question before, that's captured and you know it when you have a new conversation. And that's it. It's a stretch goal. It takes a while to get there, but this is the ambition. So we did 33 of them. Another one was it should always be easy to find the contact details. So if you want to talk to a human being, it should be easy for you to find out how to do that. We're not hiding that on the back of a brochure somewhere. The number of websites which make it impossible to find a telephone number or any other form of contact other than the website itself.
48:28I mean, I think that's partly the fault of the people who design websites, who, of course, are probably disproportionately telephobic and webophilic. So they are the kind of person who designs a website is the kind of person who thinks that all interaction should take place via a screen.
48:47Conny Kalcher:That could be. That could be. But there are also people who are hiding behind it. There are also people who are deliberately hiding behind it. There was a very brilliant management consultant I spoke to once in the field of customer retention, who said there was a single heuristic rule which divided customer-focused companies from customer-avoiding companies, which he said was whether the call center was allowed to call out. He said that was a complete, it was almost a complete sort of watershed between the two, you know, between the two philosophies, if you like. And one of the strangest things, which I've always ranted about, which is almost certainly one of your 30 or so measures, is that if the company never willingly contacts you to help, your natural assumption is that they're trying to hide.
49:37Conny Kalcher:Yeah, probably. Or that they're trying to avoid you. And so when someone does call you and say, did that experience go well? Or are you happy? Or whatever it may be. It's extraordinary in terms of the potency it has, because it suddenly creates enormous trust that this is an organization which wants to solve my problem rather than avoid it yes yeah exactly and that's a clear demonstration that that's you didn't consider the cost of making that call the contact was more important um to you but if we go back to empathy i think there's we also did a a study on empathy and there's a clear gap between what customers are expecting from companies on empathy and what companies are delivering.
50:23Conny Kalcher:And I think that was a big eye-opener for us that it's the customers wanted more. So for example, in financial services, 88 % of customers say they expect empathy when they have an interaction, but only 63 % feel they get it. So there is a gap between what are people expecting from companies and how are they delivering on it. And I bet you it's only going to get worse with more AI coming into the picture. Ah, interesting, because AI could be used to make things better. It will almost certainly, at first, be used to make things cheaper. Yes. Which is my great terror. I'm not actually, well, I am frightened of AI in the sense of, you know, killer drones.
51:09That does frighten me. But at a purely kind of marketing level, what frightens me isn't AI itself, but the uses to which it will be put. Now, in fairness, you have made a very good use of AI in rewriting documentation, haven't you? Yes. So I'd love to know more about that. So you had sort of 60 ,000 documents or whatever that effectively needed to be rewritten. Yes.
51:34Conny Kalcher:So we went through this transition where we kind of redefined the brand. We redefined our visual identity to be more humanly engaging and warm and realistic in how we communicate. um but then we we send out these letters or policies that nobody can understand so then there was a disconnect between how we were presenting the the brand in advertising and how we were then interacting directly with our customers on an email or on whatsapp or in a policy so in order to create a new way of communicating we created a a new comm strategy We called it tone of voice. And that had 10 principles for, you know, avoid jargon, you know, tell it as it is, highlight what's in it for the customer, use bullet points, simple, simple, simple rules and direction giving.
52:28Conny Kalcher:And then we created this AI tool where you could take your existing document letter or whatever it was, put it into the AI tool, and it will come up with a new version based on these principles. so if you think about you have to rewrite all the documents you have that are customer facing it'll take years it'll take tens and tens of years but by this document by this um ai tool because this was not work that we hired new people for this was just a big workload people being put on top of people's day-to-day work and then in order to make that easier we created this tool so they could quicker get to bigger solutions.
53:10Conny Kalcher:And the transformation is extraordinary from where we were. And you kind of needed a PhD to understand the three first sentences in a letter to today where it's easy, it's engaging. And there's still a human in the picture because the system would come up with a new version. Then you could say, make it shorter, make it more friendly, use more bullet points or edit it yourself. So it was not without human oversight, but it just helped the process. Did it still need legal approval at the end? I was just wondering. Some of them did. Not all, but some of the documents did. That's true. Because I suppose you couldn't quite trust an AI if you told the AI to be helpful.
53:53you you couldn't quite trust the ai not to promise something that it wasn't actually legally um entitled to promise so but but but that that actually when i think about it isn't it because nearly every company of that size particularly in financial services has this 10 year old accretion of communications which no one's really looked at funnily enough you know this is before ai you know one of the projects a friend of mine wanted to start a business which was simply um i'm glad we didn't because ai would have killed the business which was simply we get good retired copywriters once a day you know you'd find retired copywriters from the advertising industry and you'd say okay we'll pay you a few you know a few hundred pounds a day or in your retirement just to rewrite a single piece.
54:48Conny Kalcher:Yeah, that's quite meaningful as well. Before we had AI, that would have been a very meaningful process as well because if you just put your people to do that, they're not necessarily good writers or good communicators, the people who are in a normal department. But the copywriters would be understanding how to see it from the reader's perspective and making it understandable, engaging, etc. So... And lawyers, of course, are terrible copywriters, generally, because the entire focus is covering every possible eventuality with the natural consequence that you sound massively evasive. Yes. You know, you sound massively noncommittal.
55:32You know, it's rather like, when you get married, you know, you say, do you so-and-so promise to. Now, most people answer, I do. A lawyer would always want to answer, it depends, or to add some caveats or some qualifications. I think that's really – this is a fantastic project. I mean, it sounds – and by the way, I mean, you could significantly – I think you could put 1 % on GDP if every single business of this kind went through that same exercise, of just making communication seem non-evasive, non-terrifying, comprehensible, helpful, friendly. Do you think one of the things I'd love to do, and it's not for me to do, but somebody could do it, whether it's the Consumers Association or some other body, is to have a kind of kite mark for customer service.
56:28so that organizations just as you had the plain english campaign which was a very good thing in the uk where all your communications could be certified by the plain english campaign um if you actually took your 30 principles of customer service and effectively said if you match up to these criteria you can display a particular logo um because my my terror with something like insurance, where, of course, you don't really understand the proof of the pudding until 18 months after you've bought it. If the natural assumption of the consumer is that customer service is going to be terrible, particularly if you interact online, then what we're seeing is an enormous, effectively, an invisible lost opportunity in lots and lots of people being unwilling to buy very worthwhile things like insurance, simply for fear of the customer service nightmare that would result.
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58:25Conny Kalcher:yeah i think there is a place for a standard of some kind of what good looks like uh almost like like which you know the witch guy exactly the witch best buy and actually having because as you said there are there are cases where you know a 19 year old buying motor insurance isn't really going to care about the customer service it's a legal requirement they can barely afford it They take the cheapest insurance they can. And to some extent, you know, bad customer service is probably a trade off they're willing to make. But if you look at I mean, one of the things I notice is if you look at an aging population where the old disproportionately have the disposable wealth.
59:09Generally, the older you are for a very, very simple reason, which is, by the way, the older you are, the more you value your time to an extent. okay you know impending mortality etc etc um then actually those are people those people who have more money to begin with are willing to pay for the promise of very good service yeah they also
59:31Conny Kalcher:maybe in some instances more dependent on it or yes or kind of have lived longer so they understand what it means and when bad service is being delivered what that means so so yeah you have different backgrounds and we all companies have their own focus customer group that they deliver to for sure. I mean, if anybody ever wants to steal that idea and start a kind of kite mark or verification mark for companies that meet certain criteria in customer service, I'd be absolutely ecstatic if someone stole that idea because I think, you know, as I said, there is the danger that at the time you make a decision, price is very salient, customer service isn't.
1:00:19And consequently, it will be in the interest of many companies to reduce price at the expense of customer service, which is probably what the consumer is looking for at the moment of purchase. But in the defining moment of experience, it's a very false economy.
1:00:36Conny Kalcher:yeah exactly and and that's also why we see that customers are very happy even after a claim situation yes because that's where they get their payback you know so that's that's where we need to be there's a moment that matters and we need to live up to our our promises so you this has been absolutely fantastic you forced me to uh go and um uh actually investigate net revenue retention I did meet Fred Reichelt once. For those of you who don't know, he was the originator, when at Bain, I think, of the Net Promoter Score, which is the idea that recommendation, your willingness to recommend, is a pretty reliable metric, to some extent, in terms of customer loyalty.
1:01:22And now the Net Revenue Retention thing is his, effectively, metric to financialize the value of an increase in that score. Is that right?
1:01:31Conny Kalcher:Yes, yes. That's very, very interesting. His thinking is moving into that space, and he even takes it further where you deduct what you spend on marketing as well. But we don't use that. We stop at net revenue retention. But we're very inspired by his thinking, and everything he stands for is very much the basis of what we think about loyalization as well and how to deliver excellence to customers. No, that's fascinating. I mean, this is such a welcome finding for me because the discovery that someone is actually trying to rebalance the value of investment in retention and experience relative to acquisition.
1:02:21And I think you then get rid of that quantification bias where you're focused not on the things that matter, but on the things that are easy to measure which i i think is i think besets a lot of businesses
1:02:32Conny Kalcher:nowadays of course some some are really it's easy for some if you are digitally only to have these measures you have it to hand and it's easy for you to understand but more traditional businesses don't look at their business in this way so so then it becomes a helpful tool to change behavior And I think that's what we are all about in our journey is how can we help the organization change the way they act, not by telling them you need to be customer focused, but by giving them tools and processes and structures and frameworks and strategies that naturally takes them into a different space that is more focused on the customer.
1:03:13Conny Kalcher:And then we do the right thing as a bigger organization collectively. I mean, the most reliable metric of the health of the business, to some extent, is customer retention. In the sense that, you know, there are businesses that look, I mean, you know, the classic example would be that thing that, who was it created, which was a kind of Twitter competitor called Threads. OK, you know, you can have a business that grows immensely fast, which gets everyone or clubhouse. OK, there are businesses which grow immensely fast because they have some sort of novelty feature about them, but they're not remotely sticky.
1:03:53Conny Kalcher:Yeah. And actually, you equally have businesses which grow very, very slowly, but are very sticky. So I've been spending a lot of time talking to the, you know, the electric car, the car industry about electrification. And the point I make is that my presentation was entitled Don't Panic, because I said that they'd solved the biggest, you know, the biggest issue, which is, you know, ultimately, if you're looking at the next five to 10 years, is simply that people who buy electric cars very rarely go back. It's rather, you know, Europeans, for example, resisted having automatic transmission for years and years and years.
1:04:31And they came up with all, you know, I want the sense of control you have with a manual gearbox and so on and so forth. And it was a very slow migration. But what ultimately happened was nobody who'd driven an automatic ever went back to a manual. And so, you know, that question of how effectively, you know, can you create genuine stickiness and lasting behaviors? Now, there is an issue, isn't there, which is that I suppose, do you have the fact in insurance that you can always save a bit of money by being promiscuous? Or have you managed to overcome that? Because it used to be that in certain forms of insurance, you bought a new customer with a massive discount.
1:05:12And then effectively, then, you know, you charge them progressively more and more as time went on.
1:05:18Conny Kalcher:Well, I think that that practice has been kind of stamped out. It's kind of been stamped out. It started very much via the regulation in the UK, kind of pushing back on that because it was a false economy as well. So I think that's, again, a way of the past, but still maybe sticks in some people's minds. Yeah, I think that probably lingers in people's minds because I suppose it's the expectation that matters, not the reality. And that's particularly true in insurance. Well, all I can say is this has been absolutely fantastic. I'm immensely heartened to discover there are people who are taking this seriously and not only taking it seriously in terms of, you know, investment, but actually in terms of measurement and quantification.
1:06:03And I think I know who I'll be renewing my insurance with. This sounds incredibly heartening.
1:06:08Conny Kalcher:Well, that's the best compliment you can get. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It's wonderful. Connie, thank you ever so much. That's a fantastic, by the way, very similar career journey to my own in a way. Okay, good to talk to you. It's been a huge pleasure. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye-bye.
From the publisher
Conny Kalcher, Chief Marketing Officer at Zurich, joins Rory Sutherland to explore why most companies get customer experience wrong.
After decades at LEGO and now at one of the world’s largest insurers, she explains how businesses drift into short-term thinking — and what it takes to shift back to building real, lasting relationships.
During her time at LEGO, she helped expand the brand beyond children into a global creative platform, unlocking new audiences and deeper engagement. In her current role at Zurich, she’s applying that same thinking to transform a 150-year-old organisation from product-led to customer-led.
From training empathy across 60,000 employees to using AI to simplify thousands of customer interactions, this episode is about turning “customer-first” from a slogan into a system.
They explore trust, retention, human behaviour, and why the companies that win are the ones that stay valuable over time.
Follow Rory
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LinkedIn: in/rorysutherland/
Follow Elfried
Instagram: @elfriedsamba
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https://www.butterflyeffect.xyz/
Follow Conny Kalcher
LinkedIn: in/conny-kalcher-198ba5/
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