How Scandinavian insurance giant Tryg is taking its digital CX to the next level

How do you stand out in the crowded insurance market? It’s a question that brands across the world are asking themselves, including Scandinavian giant Tryg.

The rise of comparison sites in the last 5 years has seen the industry often reduced to a single number: how much are your premiums versus competitors?

However, the leading insurance providers are realizing that competing on price is just a race to the bottom. A sure-fire way to get lost among the pack and lose your brand identity.

It’s no surprise, then, that in a recent study the majority of financial organizations listed CX as the primary way they’d differentiate from competitors in the next 5 years.

Tryg is in that majority and has worked with Qualtrics for a number of years on its digital CX program. Most recently it trialed some of our new tools as part of our customer testing program.

Here’s its story and where it’s gone with Qualtrics since.

Why Tryg started on the Qualtrics journey

“Our entire journey to Qualtrics started with a simple idea: that it was probably interesting to ask our customers on the website what their experience was like,” says Kristian Brunnenberger Andersen, Director of Customer Insights at Tryg.

It was a timely idea, as Tryg runs its business in three-year strategy periods, during which time management defines certain KPIs for business units and marketing teams.

For an upcoming strategy period, one of those KPIs was Satisfaction with Contact – a form of transactional CSAT.

Kristian says, “The challenge from management was to find a way to bring the online and digital side of our business on board.

“Previously, we’ve only ever collected CSAT for our call center channels - but we wanted to understand digital customer touchpoints.”

Using website feedback to create breakthrough experiences

In June 2018, Tryg chose to roll out website feedback across two areas of its website: the product purchase flow and the claims process.

With the latter - where cases can pass through the processing engine automatically and be paid out in seconds - it had been difficult to pinpoint areas for improvement without actually asking customers for feedback.

So Tryg added in a new, fully responsive and customizable feedback tab.

“It has met and - in fact - exceeded my expectations,” says Kristian, “Mostly I’m impressed with the changes that have been made based on our feedback.”

“One particular example is that when submitting a travel claim, a lot of customers wanted to write a comment to explain certain aspects of that claim...and we [previously] didn’t give them that option.”

“As a result of gathering website feedback, we very quickly implemented it,” says Kristian.

A bonus for Tryg was finding that website feedback was also invaluable for highlighting problems with more technical aspects of the online experience.

When the team spotted an increase in negative scores on one customer journey, it reviewed AI-powered analysis of open text comments and found issues with page timeouts and other elements not loading correctly.

“A task group was then put in place to actually solve these problems,” says Kristian.

Turning insights into actions - across Tryg’s entire organization

Tryg uses a single Qualtrics dashboard for its digital business. All users - from engineer to exec - can log on and see the real-time customer data they’re permitted to see, based on role.

And Tryg’s busy management team uses the Qualtrics mobile app to track and look at reports.

“A lot of those people who use the dashboards at executive level, they’re the kind of people that normally only have the time to review those dashboards on the way to work,” adds Kristian.

“For them, the Qualtrics mobile app is perfect.”

Kristian’s goal now is to consolidate all customer feedback into a single Qualtrics dashboard - including call center, purchase and claims flow, and eventually post-chat function.

Measuring CX data for business impact

It’s all well and good for Tryg finding out about how satisfied customers are (or aren’t), but how does that translate into monetary value?

With transactional CSAT surveys from Tryg’s call centers, they can identify each customer and their lifetime value.

But online, strict GDPR rules mean that results are currently anonymous, and as such, harder to quantify.

Tryg, however, draws a link between CX improvements and visible purchase patterns, plus a sophisticated Return on Marketing Investment model that takes multiple factors - including online satisfaction - into account.

“These can essentially tell us which of those initiatives has a smaller or higher impact on our profitability online,” says Kristian.

Work in progress

Tryg’s strategy for tracking CX is not stopping at the purchase and claims flows. Currently, there’s a lot of push from their B2B lines for CX tracking in both Norway and Denmark, both of which have slightly different requirements.

“Essentially,” says Kristian, “a bad customer experience for a corporate client can have a greater impact than a bad customer experience with a single private client, because we can be talking tens of thousands of euros.”

And Tryg isn’t abandoning tried and tested delivery methods. SMS is hugely popular in Scandinavia, and shows no sign of dying out any time soon, so call center survey data is collected by Qualtrics’s follow-up SMS link.

“So far it has been hugely successful, and the biggest advantage is being able to ask multiple questions and not just a single question on a scale of 1 to 10.

“We can ask follow-up questions and ask for comments” says Kristian, “It’s been a huge driver for the managers.”

Racing to the top on digital experience

Tryg is ahead of a lot of customers and the insurance industry as a whole, both in thinking about their customer experience and implementing their CX data collection.

“When we went into it, we thought we were behind everyone else. Turns out we’re actually ahead of a lot of people, at least in the Nordic region,” concludes Kristian.