Importance of Customer’s Trust and Loyalty: Analytical Essay

Analytical Essay

As a digitally focused insurance platform, iGO4 is one of the market leaders in telematics. We also provide home, van and car insurance under the iGO4 brand, combining great customer service along with new and initiative technology helps us to ensure a good experience at competitive prices. This combination of great customer service and new technology has helped us secure different partnerships throughout our existence, including administering insurance for and on behalf of brands like RAC, Darwin and Hastings Direct Smartmiles.

iGO4 was founded in 2007, with the aim of delivering a new and innovative way of providing insurance, in 2011 it launched its own call centre and back office functions in Peterborough in order for it to achieve the aims it set out to. However, in order to achieve this aim and fulfill its purpose, expansion was required as our customers increased, and we therefore opened a second office in Colchester. In 2012, we partnered with Hastings Direct Smartmiles which gave us the opportunity to deliver their Smartmiles ‘black’ box’ policies. After taking on this partnership it gave us a great insight into the world of telematics and later in the year, we launched our own telematics product, Wisedriving to help provide telematics policies to a wider audience.

In 2015, we continued to secure key strategic partners, delivering new products to market within tight deadlines and we kept our focus on relationships with customers and partners clear but also in a way that met the insurance market trends. iGO4 partnered with RAC in 2015 to provision and administer their van policies. As one of the UK’s most well known and trusted companies accompanied by iGO4’s passion to deliver great insurance we have been able to continue broking for RAC in order to continue growing its commercial services beyond just its breakdown product.

In 2017, as a result of growth and need to increase our headcount requirements we extended our offshore operations. This addition saw a proportion of our own brand car inbound calls and a large amount of policy administration handled by a third-party supplier in Cape Town, South Africa.

Since then we have also launched Darwin, on behalf of Direct Line Group. As part of our aims for the future this also saw us add another name to our house of brands by continually working on our strategy and growth plans. As we continue to provide high quality customer service experience alongside our self-service portal, DLG we also able to provide ne technology which ensures better pricing for all of our customers.

Our organisational structure relies predominately on our call centre, without this team of staff we would be unable to process any customer information. We also have a large back office function, including a quality audit team, complaints, customer support unit and training who work in our operations department. Alongside this we also have a commercial, finance, IT, change, marketing, legal and HR team.

For the future, our overall our aim is to find a better way. This is covered by the below:

Strategic pillars:

• Deliver great customer experience – this could be affected by the wider environment by a poor review being placed online. It is then there for all future and existing customers to see, one bad review would have a knock-on effect to the agents that always provide great customer service, as they will have to work harder to compensate for the review.
• Be an innovative and agile broker – if a competitor from the wider market was to launch a product like one that we already sell, this would affect this pillar as the customer would be able to compare and choose between but having multiple options reduces the share of the market.
• Lead and disrupt the market – If a competitor were to release a brand-new product to market, this would disrupt our own place in the marketplace by attracting new partners away from ourselves. This would have a knock-on effect and pull customers away with the new partners to the new product. We would have to work harder to launch something new that may not be ready for market but pushed to a quick release date due to market pressures from competitors.

Key enablers:

• Data and technology – Reliant on technology to run day to day business, if the systems we use become bankrupt and close we would be unable to operate. If they were hacked and data compromised, this would have a disadvantage effect on our business, not only opening our customer’s information but losing the trust of our customers.
• People and capability – if a new call centre were to open within proximity to ours, which offers different hours, pay or benefits this would have a detrimental effect as experienced staff may choose to leave. We could lose knowledgeable staff, which helped earn our customer’s trust and loyalty.
• Key trading partners – In order to provide payment options, we have a partnership with Close Brothers Premium Finance (CBPF). They give us the option to offer to pay via direct debits for our customers. If we did not have this partnership, we would not be trading in a similar way as our competitors as we are not authorised as a funding company. We also use CARS to follow up and chase for outstanding debts following policy cancellations. By using this company, it frees up our own finance team and allows a smoother process to our customers. CoPlus are our First Notification of Loss (FNOL) team, they gather the information of the incident and either handle the claim or pass to the insurer. Using expert trading partners allows for a seamless, knowledgeable process for our customers.

Our company values are something that we live by in order to achieve what we set out to and we believe these should be embedded in all 400 of our staff throughout our Peterborough, Colchester and Cape Town offices. Our values are being dynamic, trusted, resourceful and pioneering throughout everything that we do, and these are integral to iGO4. In order to create these, we wanted values that were meaningful to us as employees but also to our customers and we asked people from across the business what the values meant to them. We analysed common themes and developed a set of descriptions that were meaningful to everyone.

Everyone will continue to have their own interpretation of what it means to be dynamic, trusted, resourceful and pioneering, and that is fine. The important thing is that these values continue to be embedded within iGO4 and guide our way of working.