“Now we’re confident in the essential operational investments we’re making to retain more customers”
THE CHALLENGE
To increase customer retention, a leading employee benefits company sought to evaluate their employer-customer experience in the areas of benefits administration, billing, and payroll. They asked GroPartners to develop qualitative and quantitative research to identify gaps in the ideal customer experience.
CONTEXT
The rapidly changing employer benefits marketplace has a complex 5-level market structure including manufacturers, intermediaries, and end users. Our client’s cutomers are employers and insurance brokers who sell cases and assist in the administration of benefits to employees. The research hypothesis focused on the excess of service options for customers, a result of ad hoc, legacy customization. This created unnecessary complexity in our client‘s internal processes, training, and service delivery. The cluttered service portfolio made it difficult to meet customer expectations while inflating operational costs. It also resulted in a mediocre customer experience vulnerable to customer loss.
THE PROCESS
GroPartners began by tightening up the focus of the study with our client. Next, we devised a strategy for qualitative interviews with internal stakeholders and customers to pinpoint the essential issues with input from multiple perspectives. Armed with the initial hypothesis and qualitative 360° input, we worked closely with our client to develop a quantitative survey design. The data from this survey would lead to recommendations on precisely where to invest in order to improve customer retention.
THE RESULTS
The findings of the research effort provided customer preference data that reflected on specific areas of operations. These data were used to develop recommendations that dovetail with our client’s overall strategic plan. Our client is now confident in the essential investments it is making in its operations toward the goal of retaining more customers. As a bi-product of the research, we also helped our client identify areas in which to limit levels of service and more tightly focus its selling efforts.
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