Prudential Financial is a 40,000+ person Global 500 company whose subsidiaries provide insurance, retirement planning, investment management, and other products to both retail and institutional customers in the US and 40 other countries. As we saw during our work with them, a great insurance company like Prudential can be the difference between additional misery and welcome relief during some of the hardest moments of your life.
The Challenge
Prudential's 2,000-person customer service operation was experiencing a backlog of customer support issues, high attrition, and low levels of motivation.
Their executive leaders wanted to simultaneously solve for improving the customer experience, business performance, and the employee experience.
Prudential partnered with Vega Factor to create a 12-week pilot before scaling to the broader customer service operation. The pilot launched with a multi-day off-site -then Covid came. On a dime, the program shifted to fully virtual.
The Impact
As a result of our work, Prudential realized:
- 2-day reduction in Cycle Time (representing a significant increase in productivity)
- 17% reduction "not in good order" designation for customer accounts (representing a massive reduction in waste and improvement of customer experience)
- 50% more people experiencing "clarity on priorities"
- 40% more people experiencing "effective problem solving"
- 33% of participants reporting a "reduction in waste"
- 26% of participants reporting an improvement in "directness"
- 16 point increase in Net Promoter Score
- 11 point increase in motivation
The Solution
Our team's approach focused on leveraging leaders' weekly team routines to:
- Help teams transparently set priorities so that senior leaders could ensure alignment
- Regularly generate ideas to solve core business challenges
- Identify the experiments the team wanted to try each week to improve a mix of the customer experience, business performance, and the employee experience
- Regularly learn from experiments and scale the most impactful ones
- Coach directors and managers on leadership skills
Even with the headwinds of Covid, the initial impact was so clear during the pilot that Prudential decided to scale to the rest of their customer service operation.
The approach proved effective because:
- Digitally-enabled transparency increased alignment and inclusion across a distributed, remote workforce
- Middle managers and senior leaders had full visibility into the experiments that teams wanted to implement and could coach without bureaucracy
- The focus was on bite-sized, weekly, controllable experiments, which built confidence and credibility that local teams had control for improving how their work was done
As a result, teams executed with greater intensity, velocity, and customer impact. Experiments that worked well were scaled throughout the organization.
