Fortune 500 Insurance Services Company Collaborates & Innovates for Success

Situation

Our client, faced with mounting pressure from new competitors and subsequent eroding brand value, felt it was the critical point in time to reinvent themselves from a customer and employee perspective. The charge was to become more customer centric and to collaborate more effectively, across the organization, in bringing customers value-add solutions (vs. the silo’ed way it has been done in the past). The company, along with Roberts Golden and our strategy firm alliance partner, Catalyst Strategies, embarked on a strategic Product Integration initiative to implement new ways of working, incenting employees and building customer-centric products as an organization.

Action

Some of the activities we completed included:

Executive alignment - conducted 1:1 interviews, facilitated roadmapping session, facilitated aligned objectives for executives

Extensive communications for impacted audiences including intranet newsletter, roadshows, town halls and product fairs

Process development – developing process for how multiple product divisions will collaborate to generate new customer solutions and take the appropriate ones to market

Enterprise social networking - Helped to implement and gain adoption for an idea portal /social networking tool to give all employees a platform to contribute, improve upon and rate ideas as well as have the transparency to where their ideas are in the process

Governance structure – implementing new governance structure for how the company makes decisions on new product development – designed governance and chartered the new Customer Solutions council body

Training on the new process, how we collaborate and what it means to be customer centric

New rewards platform - worked with HR to develop new rewards and recognition platform for the organization that would reward and recognize innovation and cross-functional project team collaboration

Comprehensive measurement strategy – develop and track metrics to measure adoption and business results

Results

Their first customer offer, using this process, was a raging success and exceeded expectations by a large percentage. The executive team and employees in surveys and group interviews have lauded this as the most successful cross-functional effort that has been done to date and has built a foundation for effective collaboration across the enterprise.