Rebecca, Head of Customer Care – Getsafe People
What I like most about my job is making customers happy
Getsafe has more than 60.000 customers but only four full time employees. How do you do it?
We are a well-functioning team and have a modern infrastructure and lean processes that allow us to integrate new team members quickly and easily. This way, we can answer 80 percent of initial enquiries within just one hour. The main factor, however, is our self-service strategy: we allow our users to change all details of their insurance at any time and independently in our app. Our chatbot Carla is available 24 hours a day to answer our customers‘ questions. With Carla, our customers can change or cancel their insurance coverage in real time. And what’s special is that 99 percent of our customers also use this service.
Do you get a lot of calls or do most requests come via email or app?
Our customers don’t call very often. Nearly 20 percent of all inquiries come by phone – most of our customers prefer a digital solution. We can explain many things very quickly and easily by email. And we answer every ticket – even if a child plays with their parents‘ cell phone and sends us cryptic messages.
How would you describe the customer service tasks?
We are in direct contact with the customer and cover a bit of every area. That’s exactly why I think customer service is so exciting: we explain to people how they use a cell phone; we are bumper and emotional support; we test the app and all insurance products; we sell them; we give feedback on campaigns; we are the face of Getsafe to the outside world, and much more.
What is the biggest challenge?
To be patient. Sometimes customers ask us about basic difficulties with their mobile phones. Sometimes this has nothing to do with insurance or our app. It is not always easy to concentrate on this person, even though there is a lot going on all around.
What is the most fun?
To make customers happy and getting positive feedback that you’re doing a good job. The best thing is when a customer likes our customer service, even though we had to refuse his damage due to contract reasons.
How do you deal with delivering this kind of bad news to customers?
Everyone has two roles: We have a pair of customer glasses and a pair of insurance glasses. We can almost always empathize with our customers. And yet there are conditions to which we are bound to. We cannot cover all losses, even if we would like to help on a personal level. It is therefore important to separate these two roles. If we make these two levels clear to the customer – by telephone or e-mail, most of them are nevertheless satisfied with an insurance decision that is not always positive.
Do you ever get insulted by angry customers on the phone?
Yes, that happens, but thank God it’s very rare. We are happy to accept any feedback as long as it is factual. There is a clear rule: we believe that the customer is king, but he must also behave like a king. Of course we try to talk to angry customers, very often we succeed and then the customer can tell us about his anger or grief. Should a conversation break down and the customer’s tone becomes too harsh or even abusive, every Getsafe employee has the right to end the conversation politely.
What do you do with customer feedback?
We evaluate this together. We read all the good but of course also the bad ratings – this is the only way we can improve. Apart from that, we also analyse difficult conversations in a supervised team and conduct training courses.
What are the next steps?
Of course, we want to continue to improve our customer service. We have a lot of ideas, but unfortunately we can’t implement them all at the same time. Of course Carla can help her customers around the clock, but she can’t answer everything yet. At the moment, we are considering extending our telephone availability to Saturday or the evening. We are available for our customers 12 hours a day, but about 30 percent of the inquiries reach us outside of opening hours. We also want to offer a chat function.
Will Carla or a robot one day replace humans on the phone?
No. I’m sure it won’t. Insurance is something very personal, private. It’s not just about money, it’s about emotions and human destinies. In this respect, intelligent machines will be able to supplement and relieve customer service for standard questions very well. But they will not replace people.
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