Customer Service

Exceptional service helps to build trust between RSA and our customers, ensuring we continue to be recognised as a leading insurance company.

Treating Customers Fairly lies at the heart of our strategy to do the right thing for our customers. As well as being a key regulatory requirement, Treating Customers Fairly is a priority to ensure we offer the highest possible customer service and satisfaction.

To promote a culture of best practice, employees are encouraged to share examples of excellent customer service or instances where they think we could make improvements. Treating Customers Fairly learning days help employees understand fairness from the customer’s point of view and learn more about their responsibilities. We hold regular focus groups and customer surveys to understand our customers’ perceptions of our products and services and identify areas where we can improve.

We are constantly looking at ways to improve our levels of customer service and satisfaction. In Hong Kong, RSA piloted a document imaging service to improve customer response times by reducing the time employees spend filing and retrieving documents and increasing the ease at which documents can be passed between teams. The project was piloted in the policy issuance team for Manulife, one of the main document distribution centres for RSA Hong Kong. It will be extended throughout our policy and claims processes during 2009 and 2010.

In Canada, Johnson launched an improved website allowing customers access to electronic documentation and in Sweden customers can choose to receive all documents electronically. Also in Canada, we introduced ‘EZ-Docs’ for Personal Insurance brokers. Brokers can receive electronic copies of insurance documents, allowing them to provide a better and more efficient service, while saving paper. (See Environment). HYPERLINK

In the UK, we opened a new motor vehicle Quality Repair Centre (QRC) as part of our strategy to improve cost efficiencies and customer satisfaction levels by owning accident repair services. The centre is the first to open since 2000 and expands our dedicated repairer network to five across the UK. When fully operational, the centre will repair 3,500 cars a year which, along with our other sites, QRCs will handle over 10% of all RSA’s motor claims in the UK.

In Emerging Markets, our ‘Winning with the Customer’ initiative aims to involve employees in ways to improve customer service. Customer facing employees are encouraged to use their experience to identify issues that affect customer service and explore how to tackle them. Employees take part in problem-solving workshops to consider real-life issues affecting customer satisfaction and put forward their own ideas for improving the customer experience.

We continue to be recognised for our strong customer performance. In Canada, Johnson Inc. was ranked top in the Customer Management Assessment Tool (CMAT) benchmark of over 750 organisations from around the world, conducted by customer relationship management consultancy QCi. Johnson Inc. achieved a score of 75%, the first time any organisation has scored above 70%, while the average score was 36%.

Customer communication

We communicate clearly with our customers so they understand the costs of our products and know what will be covered by their insurance policy. This applies to all our advertising and marketing as well as our policy documents, in line with legal requirements in each of our markets.

Many of our products are sold through brokers. We work closely with them to ensure they are up to date with our current products so they can explain policies and coverage in detail to their clients. Material supplied to brokers is also reviewed through the same channels and sign-off processes as that supplied directly to our customers.

Customer management

Personal customer managers, available to all Johnson customers in Canada, provide a more tailored and personal service when responding to customer concerns and complaints. Customers can contact their manager by email or phone and are guaranteed a reply within 24 hours. The scheme has been extended to the UK, covering 300,000 customers.

Dealing with complaints

We aim to respond as quickly as possible to all complaints. Our approach is to ensure our employees have the necessary training and technical and administrative support to deal with customer complaints in a manner satisfactory to all parties.

In the UK, we overhauled and re-launched employee training for dealing with complaints. By reducing the number of minor complaints we can focus on more serious complaints that require formal action and recording.

We also centralised advice and guidance for dealing with complaints on our intranet site so we deal with them in a consistent manner. We reviewed our complaint management system and assigned a dedicated customer manager to each high-level complaint with a database ensuring all complaints are tracked, monitored and closed to the customer’s satisfaction.

In Scandinavia, we created a single database to log customer complaints to improve our understanding of the issues affecting our customers and how we can improve our response. Recent data shows our claims satisfaction rates are among the best in the region.

We continue to receive recognition for our complaints management performance. In the UK, RSA scored 16% above the industry average for its handling of complaints in the Association of British Insurers 2008 Good Practice Guide. The score puts us in the top quartile of insurance companies and recognises our Treating Customers Fairly strategy of removing barriers to making complaints, taking them seriously and learning from their causes. We also exceeded the industry average by a significant margin across four of the guide’s six categories with the guide highlighting our average response rate of 9 days compared to an industry average of 14 working days.

Protecting privacy

Protecting our customers’ privacy is essential to building and maintaining their trust. We take a rigorous approach to data protection and ensure that we have strong systems in place to govern the collection, use, storage and transfer of customer data.

RSA operates a Group-wide policy-based framework with a view to protecting customer data and meeting associated legal and regulatory requirements. This framework is subject to regular review and enables continuing assessment of requirements: providing employee awareness and managing emerging threats and risks.