Take the Transaction Out Of the Interaction
Release Date:
Today’s marketing playbooks put social media at the top of many strategies, but regardless of its prevalence, your website is still your business hub and a vital extension of your brand. But when your customers say your site is not friendly or functional, it’s time to rethink your online experience. And in once such case we’re exploring on this episode, the result was award winning. Host Sara Walker welcomes Rajesh Sankaran, Senior VP of eCommerce for A-Max Auto Insurance, for a discussion about their award-winning approach to improving how customers interact with their website.
Rajesh Sankaran
A-Max Auto Insurance
Connect with Rajesh
In this episode:
- Chapter 1: Introduction and Purpose (00:01 – 01:51)
- Chapter 2: Introducing Rajesh Sankaran and Award-Winning CX Innovation (01:52 – 03:22)
- Chapter 3: Challenges and Triggers for Website Redesign (03:22 – 05:49)
- Chapter 4: Overcoming Operational Challenges (05:50 – 07:22)
- Chapter 5: Designing the Optimal Digital Experience (07:23 – 10:05)
- Chapter 6: Using Data to Drive Decisions (10:06 – 12:42)
- Chapter 7: Recognizing the Innovation (12:43 – 14:57)
- Chapter 8: Internal Buy-In and Organizational Alignment (14:58 – 19:29)
- Chapter 9: Customer Feedback and Continuous Improvement (19:30 – 22:45)
- Chapter 10: Future Enhancements and Roadmap (22:46 – 25:25)
- Chapter 11: Take Home Value (25:26 – 26:54)
- Chapter 12: Closing Remarks (26:55 – 28:04)
Highlights
A “Super Clear” Experience
“It’s a online store. You land on my website, you have a understanding of… I need insurance, but I don’t know what coverage I want to select whatever. So we’re able to provide that experience in a way that’s super clear to the customer. And they’re able to walk away with, okay, I get it now I’m comfortable buying or I can actually transition seamlessly from seeing the quotes here to click a button. And I’m chatting with an agent, either through SMS or through an online chat, and I’m able to fulfill my transaction and get covered and protected for my me and my family.”
Providing the least-frictional experience
“The approach we took was… hey, how do I as a consumer, when I log when I come on to the A-Max’s website, what am I looking for? I’m looking for the quickest way to get and find my cheapest options to get insurance… How frictionless can I make that journey? But at the same time, collect all the relevant information from the consumer to be able to give them an actual quote that they can actually look at and say, yep, this feels right, I’m going to purchase this. And that’s the most important. And in certain cases, customers, when they land on the website, they’re not entirely sure of what they want. Being able to guide them also and in a simplest way, and not burden them with a million questions, but ask them the right amount of questions and in the right way, and get that information from them and and make them understand there are these are your options. And here is how you go about it in the least frictional way.”
Transcript
Sara:00:00:01
Want to stay competitive? Then you need to be innovative.
Rajesh:00:00:04
Customers, when they land on the website, they’re not entirely sure of what they want. Being able to guide them also and in a simplest way, and not burden them with a million questions, but ask them the right amount of questions and in the right way, and make them understand there are these are your options, and here is how you go about it in the least frictional way.
Sara:00:00:26
How one company’s use of creative solutions resulted in an award winning innovation, on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.
Announcer:00:00:42
The CX Leader Podcast is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.
Sara:00:00:53
Hi everyone! I’m Sara Walker, host of this episode of The CX Leader Podcast, and thank you for listening. It’s a great time to be a CX leader, and on this show we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you develop great programs and deliver amazing experiences for your customers. Today’s marketing playbooks put social media at the top of many strategies, but regardless of its prevalence, it’s your website that still is your business hub and a vital extension of your brand. But when your customers say your site is not friendly or functional, it’s time to rethink your online experience. And on today’s episode, we’re exploring one such case where the result of that need to change was award winning. I’m excited to welcome Rajesh Sankaran, senior VP of E-commerce for A-MAX Auto Insurance, a provider of low cost insurance for consumers and businesses. And he’s going to tell us all about how they won the bronze award for CX innovation at the 2024 US Customer Experience Awards. Rajesh, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.
Rajesh:00:01:52
Thank you Sara. I’m excited to be here and look forward to the conversation.
Sara:00:01:55
Yeah, likewise. I think maybe to get us started off on the right foot, it’d be helpful for our listeners to maybe just hear a little bit about what makes CX and the insurance industry, and then in particular, your section of the insurance industry, unique. And maybe what led to the the website redesign project that ultimately you just received this recognition for?
Rajesh:00:02:19
Sure insurance is boring and nobody wants to deal with it. So …
Sara:00:02:24
Till they have to.
Rajesh:00:02:25
Exactly.
Sara:00:02:25
Right.
Rajesh:00:02:26
Until they have to and there is no choice, right? You have to have insurance to drive, and in most states it’s illegal to drive without insurance. So that puts it as an advantage being in the industry, being able to service customers, um, that where it’s a necessary commodity. So you have to have insurance. So that helps us. Now what is, uh, the driver for this is that we work with a section of the insurance industry, which is nonstandard auto insurance to relate for relatable terms. Right. It is the equivalent of the subprime industry. Right. So what we’ve done is we tried to get into that space and provide that service across the board to customers and make sure that they are able to, um, have all the options the way other industries are. So that’s what got us into this.
Sara:00:03:22
Nice. And then specifically it was the website redesign and sort of the functionality of your website and the ease of the experience that that led to this award and innovation, which I think is probably a hard category to be included in. But what kind of set the stage for needing to explore a redesign of your site’s functionality…
Rajesh:00:03:44
Yeah,
Sara:00:03:44
…when thinking about your customers?
Rajesh:00:03:46
Yeah. So our company has been around for 20 plus years. We are a primarily brick and mortar company. Um, we have about 250 stores between Texas and California, and our desire was to grow beyond that and go digital. And also there is a section of the market currently that is I mean, we did have a website and we did have a little bit of presence on the internet and customers were able to communicate with us. But the market is trending towards and the industry is trending towards the experiences they are looking for from the Starbucks and Netflix of the world. So for our customers to engage with us and transact with us digitally and more than transact, actually engage with a seamlessly across all the channels, including the web channel, the chat, the IVR and all that fun stuff. We needed a platform that was out there that was able to provide that service. So that’s what led to the, um, led to this project and led to the innovations that we came upon.
Sara:00:04:55
Yeah. And I think that that’s very true for a lot of probably the CX leaders who are listening to today’s podcast. No matter the industry that you’re in as human beings in this world, we’re all customers of the Starbucks, the Amazons of the world. And consumer preferences change. And they they tend to think that if Amazon or Starbucks can do it, why can’t my insurance company make it easier for me to purchase my policy? So I know that that’s probably something that resonates with a lot of people listening today. But I think the challenge there is sometimes you’re having to unwind a lot of old ways of thinking within your organization or potentially, you know, operational challenges that have to be navigated to really become digital first as a channel. So what was that experience like for you when you were looking to implement this change at at A-MAX Auto? Was that a challenge that you had to eclipse?
Rajesh:00:05:50
Yes. First. So organizationally, there were some challenges before that. I do want to touch on something slightly more sensitive, right? Which is that we serve that population which is vulnerable and slightly underserved. That’s one part of it. And it feels like there is a lack of motivation across the board, from a carrier perspective, to give them the tools to be able to do some of these things digitally, um, and be able to purchase policies without interacting with an agent, albeit the customer…
Sara:00:06:20
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:06:20
…may say, hey, I really do want to talk to an agent, but there…
Sara:00:06:23
Right.
Rajesh:00:06:23
…are people that want to purchase a policy without interaction, and we want to be able to give them the opportunity and fill that gap with our, um…
Sara:00:06:32
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:06:32
…offering. That’s one of the biggest reasons why we went down this path. And the company had already started down this path three years ago, which was or four years ago and three years now I’ve been here. We started making small progress, but in the last 12 to 18 months we’ve come a long way in providing that offering and showing the customers that there is a way to do this and the carriers that we sell for. We are an agency and a broker, right? So we…
Sara:00:07:01
Sure.
Rajesh:00:07:02
…work with 30 to 50 carriers, and we show them the confidence that, hey, technically we have no gaps. And functionally and legally we serve the population in different channels but still take ownership of the entire transaction. And operationally, we are still as sound as we have been for the 20 years.
Sara:00:07:22
Right. You’re just fulfilling a a channel that maybe didn’t exist. But you’re proving that the need was there with, I assume, kind of the the response that you’ve had from your customer base in terms of leveraging the website?
Rajesh:00:07:35
Absolutely, yes. The customers are certainly leveraging the website. We have lots of visitors, lots of quotes. Um, we drive phone calls, text messages, chat. And now we’re again, thankfully to AI and conversational AI, and we’re able to actually digitize quite a bit of those interactions. And we are providing…
Sara:00:07:54
Right.
Rajesh:00:07:55
…the not only the sales part of it, but we’re able to provide some level of post-sale customer service. Hey, we can collect your payments, we can do some of the other things through the digital channels as well.
Sara:00:08:06
Yeah. And so you know I think that is really interesting how you, you know, made sure to focus in on the fact that this the subset of customers that you serve really didn’t have much of this option, this channel option before. So when thinking about that and maybe it’s a subset of, of customers who didn’t necessarily know what they were looking for with a digital channel, how did you go about designing or knowing what to design as far as what the optimal digital experience looked like? Or is that has that been, you know, kind of a constant learning that you’ve done over the last 3 or 4 years that you’ve been on this path?
Rajesh:00:08:43
Yeah. If you ask my leadership team or my my team. They’ll say there is no end to this guys wants…
Sara:00:08:50
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:08:50
…and needs. There is always things that we learn and grow with. But the fundamental basis of this was the learning that we had from our 20 plus years of brick and mortar experience, right? The customer walks in, they have a particular thing in mind as I’m comfortable walking in talking to Joe Schmo, the agent, and Joe now explains to them what insurance is, why you need this particular coverage, and why you think you’re thinking about it, but you need to buy the policy right now, right? It’s the same process.
Sara:00:09:24
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:09:25
It’s a online store. You land on my website, you have a understanding of, I think I need insurance, but I don’t know what coverage I want to select whatever. So we’re able to provide that experience in a way that’s super clear to the customer. And they’re able to walk away with, okay, I get it now I’m comfortable buying or I can actually transition seamlessly from seeing the quotes here to click a button. And I’m chatting with an agent, either through SMS or through an online chat, and I’m able to fulfill my transaction and get covered and protected for my me and my family. So that’s the iterative. That’s the starting process. Now, how do we get slick now we can’t be satisfied with the first version of anything, right? So now we want…
Sara:00:10:09
Right. Right.
Rajesh:00:10:09
…to change the change this flow that flow. How do we interact better with them if they um, as a CX professional, we should all know when to take somebody out of a journey that we think they are stuck in. And that’s where we…
Sara:00:10:24
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:10:24
…are starting to become more personalized. Understand how they struggle with a particular set of questions or a screen, and you take them out of the journey and move them into the next journey. Give it give them away to the agent then.
Sara:00:10:38
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:10:39
So those are the types of iterative changes we continue to make, keep making.
Sara:00:10:43
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that’s one of the things that makes the the digital experience just so fascinating as well, is that you can perceive that a customer is becoming stuck in the journey a lot easier than you can in a lot of other channels, in terms of watching their behavior, gathering data points as far as how they’re working through your website. You know, you you hear the terms like rage clicking, getting kicked around or page reloading, um, you know, time and time again. And was that integral to your strategy? And you talk about kind of the iterative process and it’s never finished. Like maybe help our listeners understand how how some of that data influences your redesign.
Rajesh:00:11:26
Yeah, absolutely. I wasn’t going to go into rage clicking, but because we never have rage click on our website. Right. Uh, but rage clicking definitely heat maps. So we analyzed we…
Sara:00:11:39
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:11:39
…use tools like Hotjar and any of those, um, CX professionals would know a lot of there’s not promoting hardware by any means, but all the tools that we use…
Sara:00:11:50
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:11:50
…allow us to collect the data and make informed decisions of, okay, customer is struggling here. One example recently is customers were struggling for some odd reason to click a button to change your password forgot password. Click a button here. But they were something was not right in that. So then we looked at the experience and how we generate the email, how they go back and authorize themselves. So there are little things that we watch. And that’s what I’m saying. It’s not a big overhaul any given time, which we are also doing. But those minor nuggets of information and feedback we get from customers and hey, this truly we moved one button of interaction from the top right corner to just 12in over a ten inches over on the screen. Man, it looks amazing. Now the interaction there, The CTA engagement is…
Sara:00:12:42
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:12:42
…super important. So we the from the minutest to the big changes are all through feedback we collect and how we understand the process.
Sara:00:13:04
Circling back to the fact that you all were, you know, awarded the bronze in the innovation category. What do you think… What’s your personal opinion as to as to why you achieved that designation? Because you talk about moving a button on a page, and that doesn’t necessarily feel like the most. Um, and I mean that with no disrespect, but the most innovative solution. But then you talk about the way in which the experience and the friction has been removed, like maybe just help us understand kind of what about how you went about things with your website redesign? You know…
Rajesh:00:13:39
Yeah.
Sara:00:13:40
…really gave it the term and the designation…
Rajesh:00:13:43
Yeah.
Sara:00:13:43
…as innovative.
Rajesh:00:13:43
The approach we took was in my I think the simplicity of it is what I think got us that the approach that we took was, hey, how do I as a consumer, when I log when I come on to the A-Max’s website, what am I looking for? I’m looking for the quickest way to get and find my cheapest options to get insurance. Right. So you touched on it just a second ago. How frictionless can I make that journey? But at the same time, collect all the relevant information from the consumer to be able to give them an actual quote that they can actually look at and say, yep, this feels right, I’m going to purchase this. And that’s the most important. And in certain cases, customers, when they land on the website, they’re not entirely sure of what they want. Being able to guide them also and in a simplest way, and not burden them with a million questions, but ask them the right amount of questions and in the right way, and get that information from them and and make them understand there are these are your options. And here is how you go about it in the least frictional way. That’s what I think…
Sara:00:14:53
Yep.
Rajesh:00:14:53
…made us, uh, in my opinion, get to where we did.
Sara:00:14:57
Yeah. And, you know, I asked that question a little bit facetiously because I think every leader who’s listening strives to have the most straightforward, you know, easiest, frictionless customer experience possible. But because different functions within the organization are responsible for different parts of the customer journey, because different groups within the team maybe have certain priorities. And I think that’s something that every CX leader could empathize with is, you know, it’s it’s one thing to say that you want to be all about the customer, but then to get things to orchestrate in a way that truly keeps the customer first is is not the simplest of tasks. So it’s it’s definitely something that people are striving for. But I think it can certainly help when you get the the return on, you know, what those improvements make from the business standpoint as well, which I know you’ve touched on a little bit, particularly with just your market being underserved in this channel from…
Rajesh:00:15:53
Yeah.
Sara:00:15:54
…the jump.
Rajesh:00:15:54
And one thing to add, the website in itself is great, but the the interaction and the overall business and the feedback we collect from the field with our offices, we have a lot of 1000 agents that interact with all the customers on a regular basis. So we do receive the feedback, hey, how did you. If a customer got a quote online and walks into a store or tried to make a payment online didn’t go through, go to the store. So there is all that feedback that we collect from the customers, not only from the website but from the field. And…
Sara:00:16:29
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:16:29
…we send emails, marketing, communications. So all that combined, it’s it’s the philosophy of the customer, and the desire for that experience that they get is what drives us to be… I don’t know if uniquely innovative is a is a cool term or it truly that’s what we’ve been doing.
Sara:00:16:51
Yeah. And I think that that’s again, not always the easiest thing to accomplish. It’s maybe the goal that a lot of CX leaders and CX professionals set out to achieve, but it’s the reality of being able to to do that is not always the easiest of tasks. So you know, when when you were speaking earlier about just kind of how you decided as an organization to get into offering, um, your customers the digital channel. But you’d been in business, I think you said 20 some years before then, so was and were primarily brick and mortar based. Was was the changing of attitudes as far as how e-commerce and a digital channel would play into the broader um company goals and initiatives going forward, something that was difficult to overcome. Or how did how did you get to this point where you’re at today, where you’re kind of seamlessly working and sharing between, um, channels within the organization?
Rajesh:00:17:49
So, I can’t lie. But it was not an easy process to make believers out of the organization. It took me probably a good 6 to 12 months to see the vision of the company and the company, to see the vision that I had laid out for the e-commerce expansion. One of the things was that we were doing business primarily in Texas. So growing out of Texas and doing just, um, e-commerce growth without brick and mortar has been a desire for the company. So that’s one part of it. And when we had, um, conversations, our CEO is very futuristic, right? He wants to have the new cool things that we execute, but there has to be a way to get there, and it took me several iterations to get everybody to the point of, hey, e-commerce website is not just a cool set of screens, it’s actually a revenue generator. And here is why.
Sara:00:18:44
Right?
Rajesh:00:18:45
The investment we put in will help us not only grow the Texas business, but sets us up for growth beyond Texas. So now when I started, we worked only in Texas. Now we’re in five states. We are regional and we are continuing to expand into other, um, markets. Will we be specifically running across the country? No. Maybe we’ll be in different states that make sense for us. But the turning point was that we went from being a platform just because we needed a website to it’s a platform of engagement and it’s a platform that can generate revenue. And that was the turning…
Sara:00:19:25
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:19:25
…point for all the alignment within the organization.
Sara:00:19:29
Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. And of course, when you have good results, it becomes easier for for buy in and acceptance. I’m curious, as you were going through this evolution, you know, certainly once you can start seeing the revenue and how it impacts the bottom line of the business, of course, that’s the the ultimate win of any good customer experience is to to make the company that much better. But outside of revenue, what were ways in which you were able to share maybe customer experience feedback with other teams or other functions within the organization that helped in those same efforts as far as changing attitudes and getting people on board?
Rajesh:00:20:08
Yeah. We collect feedback from customers that engage with us. Right? Um, we collect good. And, uh, not so great feedback.
Sara:00:20:16
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:20:16
In addition to Google reviews as an example, customers leave us feedback on the website on, hey, you’re we went into this office service was poor. We went into this office, great customer service. We were on the phone. We got amazing service. We actually have customers naming names of agents that serve…
Sara:00:20:33
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:20:34
…them great, and we were able to actually take that feedback, share it with the individual leaders and managers that the feedback gets down to the agent level. So the agents are happy. They understand the interactions they have with the customers. Actually, um, is valuable. That’s one part of it. The other part of it is the actual customer service we’re able to offer. Even after the stores are closed. We have the ability for them to go do stuff. They can buy stuff, they can make a payment, they can say, hey, my policy expires tomorrow morning. I haven’t made a payment. The store is closed. Guess what?
Sara:00:21:10
Right,
Rajesh:00:21:10
You can go online and make a payment, right?
Sara:00:21:12
Right.
Rajesh:00:21:12
So there are things of that nature, um, pre and post service. And then we have a whole glossary knowledge center we share with the customers, um, that they can learn and understand. Hey, what does this mean. What why do I need this coverage? Why do I need this? And there are lots of teen drivers that come through. There are lots of drivers with special needs that come through that can understand what they’re buying from our knowledge center and learn. So there is a lot of things that we offer, um, on our platform.
Sara:00:21:44
Yeah. And that kind of circles back to a little bit of what you shared earlier as far as the the digital platform being, um, an initial landing point for customers to discover and then being able to be transitioned to the agent or to somebody in customer service when a more pointed question is needed, or a broken piece of the journey where we really need that human interaction. And so I think that that’s really, um, an important thing to keep in mind for any of our, our CX practitioners listening today as far as just how digital fits into your overall experience and and thinking about not not replacing the human element, but, um, maybe letting the human element of your of your brand and your organization be a little bit more specialized and take some of the initial legwork that really we see consumers wanting to handle more themselves anyways off their plates. So I think that’s a very interesting perspective. And, you know, hindsight of of some of the success you’ve had.
Rajesh:00:22:46
Absolutely.
Sara:00:22:48
So you’ve mentioned that you’re always tweaking, always iterating. Is there anything specific that you plan to tackle next now that you’ve had this, this really overhaul of kind of the way your business has gone about, um, digital channel in particular?
Rajesh:00:23:03
You have social proof is in the pudding. We’ve had several requests for, hey, are you launching a mobile app? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? So some of those types…
Sara:00:23:14
Yeah.
Rajesh:00:23:14
…of things are enhancing certain key functionalities. Definitely adding more carriers where they can do online interaction. Uh, maybe a mobile app is in the future. So those are some of the things that are in the roadmap for the next, uh, in the coming future. Oh, and we actually launched a rewards program. I think it’s one of a kind loyalty rewards platform on the website, which is Uber successful right now. And it’s, uh, that will also get get a overhaul in the coming months.
Sara:00:23:50
Exciting stuff. Well, Rajesh, we’re kind of at that point in the episode where we try to distill all of the great tips that you’ve already given our listeners today when just thinking about digital as a channel and the website and how that reflects your brand. Um, if you had to reinforce maybe something that’s already been mentioned today or give us a net new tip, what is that one piece of what we call take home value that you would recommend the CX leaders listening today, think about in terms of how it can be applied to their own programs within their own organizations.
Rajesh:00:24:26
Yeah. I think, uh, take home value for me would be it’s it’s either digital or non-digital. Right. But what I say, I say this to our folks all the time. Take the transaction out of the interaction. Um, what I mean by that is if you don’t deal with your customers, your prospects as a transaction, and the users are not going to remember what rates they saw or what they purchased or didn’t purchase, but the experience they had, either talking to a person or chatting with a person, or going through the flow of the website and understanding, oh, I really liked their website. I actually will bookmark it and come back to this for a future reference. I think that’s what is going to be the leave behind with the customers and what their registers are. If it’s a straight up single line, maybe the easiest flow, but it’s Its transactional website. That’s not going to stick with the customer.
Sara:00:25:25
Yeah. A great piece of advice. And I think especially important trap not to fall into when you think of digital too in terms of yeah, it might be the goal might be for the transaction to be easy, but you need to think about the broader experience and the implication of that…
Rajesh:00:25:38
Yeah.
Sara:00:25:38
…for your customers going forward.
Rajesh:00:25:40
Overall interation.
Sara:00:25:40
A great tip.
Rajesh:00:25:42
Yep.
Sara:00:25:42
Yeah, absolutely. Rajesh Sankaran is the senior VP of e-commerce for A-max Auto Insurance. Rajesh, thank you again for being on The CX Leader Podcast. If any of our listeners today want to follow up with you specifically, maybe about a question, they have something they heard. Is there a way in which folks could get in touch with you?
Rajesh:00:26:01
I think LinkedIn is the best way. I’m very active. Feel free to message me. It will be LinkedIn.com/rajeshsank I think. But you should be able to find me and A-MAX online and that’s the best way to reach out.
Sara:00:26:16
Excellent. And if you want to discuss this topic with any of our Walker experts, or if you have a great idea for a topic on a future episode, please email us at podcast@walkerinfo.com. We’d love to hear from you! Be sure to rate The CX Leader Podcast through your podcast service and leave us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com. From there, you can follow the show and find all our previous episodes as well as the link to our blog, which we update regularly. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker, where an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and remember, it’s a great time to be a CX leader. We’ll see you next time.
Tags: Rajesh Sankaran A-Max Auto Insurance website innovation Sara Walker awards