The economic crisis hit Greece hard, and the financial services industry was caught in its wake. But ING, one of the country’s biggest insurance firms, saw the tough climate as a chance to find new opportunities, strengthening its customer focus and paving the way for innovation.
Rene Scholten, ING’s Chief Financial Officer, spoke to World Finance about how the insurance industry is changing, what ING is doing to step up to the challenges and why impeccable customer service is so important if companies want to succeed in the current economic environment.
How difficult has it been to run a financial services company during the financial crisis?
I would prefer to use the word challenging. Running an insurance company during a financial crisis was and still is a big challenge, especially when the overriding priority for a lot of people is to support their families through basic provisions such as food, clothing and education, rather than buying insurance policies. That’s even more evident in Greece, where private insurance is less of a priority than in other northern European countries.
In periods of financial turmoil people change their purchasing habits, and their buying power is much lower. The environment it creates isn’t conducive to helping the industry grow and doesn’t enable insurance companies to provide all of the products they offer. That’s partly as a result of lower interest rates; pension products, for example, don’t appeal to customers because they can’t offer high returns when they mature, even though pension schemes would be the right move for a lot of people, ensuring they have enough money when they retire. The crisis made people realise the importance of having those sufficient funds when they retire, so ING adapted to that, understanding the need to offer relevant insurance plans to customers.
In periods of financial turmoil people change their purchasing habits, and their buying power is
much lower
What have the biggest challenges been for ING in Greece during the last few years?
What we tried to do at ING was improve our offering to customers. We saw that Greek families were struggling to cope and wanted insurance cover for more basic needs. The challenge for us was to adapt to those changes and become more customer-orientated. We focused on improving our services and offering potential customers new products with lower premiums, and we helped existing customers change to new insurance plans that offered better cover at a lower price. We also implemented a corporate social responsibility programme in order to help the community, because ultimately our aim is to take care of people and ensure they can depend on us when they most need our help.
What opportunities have emerged from the crisis?
With every crisis come new opportunities. At ING we witnessed that, and instead of holding back as many other insurance companies did when the crisis struck, we saw the opportunity and changed our strategy. We focused on becoming more customer-focused and making the company more ‘lean and mean’. We underwent a big transformation with regard to our product portfolio, customer service channels and internal procedures.
With the aim of improving our customer service, we developed an online portal in order to give existing clients direct access to our services. That was a huge leap given that Greek insurance companies don’t tend to offer much in the way of online services. We’re separating ING’s insurance and banking sectors so the online approach is also good preparation for that. ING Insurance International is planning a rebranding and we will become NN Group, embracing our heritage by returning to the brand name used prior to becoming ING. That’s good news for us, as NN is still strongly associated with the brand and its values.
How do you see the next few years progressing for Greece’s financial sector?The Greek financial sector will continue to struggle for some time, but it will eventually become healthy and strong again (see Fig. 1). Financial companies and the state are working very hard to bring the sector back and are determined to see it succeed. Although some individual companies may struggle to survive, there’s no doubt ING will recover.
As for any upcoming innovations in the market, I would say that online sales and services are very hot at the moment. Despite direct channels having been present in some countries for a decade, it’s new to Greece but we are catching up quickly.
ING Greece was recently named a National Champion for its customer service in the European Business Awards, which involved 24,000 participants from 28 European countries. That alone shows there is a future for companies in Greece, especially in the financial sector, as long as the next steps are well thought out. That’s important because, despite the fact I’m convinced the worst part has passed, there is still a way to go and we can’t let our guard down now. We need to be extremely careful regarding our next moves, because there are still a lot of challenges ahead of us.
One such challenge is Solvency II, which is fast approaching and which is going to have a direct impact on insurance companies’ reserves. Companies will need to be extremely healthy and have a strong capital base. It will change the market a lot and we expect to see a significant number of consolidations and take-overs, because there are a lot of small companies that won’t be able to adapt quickly enough to the new environment. We think the banking sector is somewhat ahead of the insurance sector in that respect. At ING we have already worked hard and prepared the company for this in order to ensure that we remain strong and healthy for our customers.
Why is ING leading the way in Greece’s insurance industry?
We are customer-driven and our strategy is to invest in creating better services for that customer. There are several projects running at ING Greece and all of them share a common goal – to keep our customer happy and enable us to listen to their needs. There are a lot of controls in place, such as a quality of sales procedure, to ensure that what we offer is of the highest standard.
In our first point of contact with a customer we use the Needs Analysis Form in order to understand the needs of the prospective customer, so that we can then offer the relevant insurance product according to those specific needs. In addition to that we conduct a satisfaction survey using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) tool, which is a survey that we email out to any customer who has made a transaction with ING Greece, whether that’s buying a new policy, modifying an existing one or even contacting us to make a complaint. The tool enables us to check whether our service is meeting the standards both we and our customers want. ING Greece isn’t just about selling as much as possible – it’s about providing excellent customer service.
How can companies like ING change customers’ perceptions of financial institutions?
Like every big multinational company, we have a set of business principles that require us to be open, clear and transparent towards our customers. In all our communication and marketing materials we try to be as clear as possible. The best example of that is our new policy book of general terms and conditions, which we made as clear and user-friendly as possible. It has an innovative design and is easy to read through and understand, enabling our customers to quickly find what they’re looking for. As we’re a financial institute that wants to earn the trust of our customers, we’re strict – but not unfairly so.
How is ING engaging with customers?
We take pride from the fact that as a company we have several touch points where our customers can reach us. They can get in touch with us through our customer contact centre, located on the ground floor of our head office in Athens. For those who don’t live in Athens we have more than 50 offices across Greece with over 1,100 sales advisors servicing the clients, and of course our call centre, which is available 24/7.
We also have a big social media presence, with a large community following our Facebook page. We received a Best Practice Award for our contact with customers, and we take a fresh and informative approach that centres on our live well philosophy. We are always quick to respond to customers, with social media providing a constant source of contact.
