Although Zurich, like its competitors, has historically used a network of financial advisors to manage its pensions products, changes to UK legislation and millennial demographics open up the opportunity to engage with the majority of people who haven’t accessed expert financial advice in the past: it was time to start working with its end customers to help them take greater control.

“The pensions business is traditionally mired in jargon, making it impenetrable to 80% of the population,” said Russell Fisher, Head of Customer and Digital Strategy at Zurich UK. “Zurich FutureYou is different. It provides customers with a secure dashboard from which they can access loads of relevant and straightforward information that matches their life stage and recent experiences. This helps them understand their options and make informed financial decisions that are relevant to their life today.”

For Zurich FutureYou to be a success, Fisher and the Zurich FutureYou team needed to bring together four key factors: service design, integrated customer data, intelligent CRM, and built-in analytics. “With Salesforce, we get the whole package,” said Fisher. “We have a single view of our customers, which means we can provide an increasingly personalised experience that helps our customers respond to both the planned and the unplanned, good and bad, things that will happen throughout their life’s journey.

Unique experience

Launched in May 2016, FutureYou creates a personal journey for each customer from the moment he or she engages via the company’s website. “The idea of traditional marketing segmentation is dead,” said Fisher. “We want to provide every customer with a completely unique experience in response to their own needs, and Marketing Cloud is key to this."

With Marketing Cloud, customer-facing content can be created, tested, and measured quickly and easily. For example, instead of spending weeks on customer newsletters, the marketing team can distribute timely content in a matter of hours — and see results immediately. “With Marketing Cloud, we can test content to see what’s working well and what’s not. This prevents us from wasting time and money,” said Fisher. “Our only limit is our imagination.”

Zurich is already achieving great click-through rates with its FutureYou newsletters. For example, its third monthly newsletter achieved a click-through rate of 22% compared to the industry average of 2.14%. And as services become more personalised, results are only likely to improve.

The customer onboarding process has also been streamlined and personalised with Marketing Cloud. When it launches to employees of a new corporate pension scheme, the Zurich FutureYou team sends a series of tailored welcome emails to every individual in the scheme. “We’re starting to reach a whole new set of customers — people who have never engaged with their financial futures before. They are now reading our articles and realising how empowering it is to take more control of this aspect of their lives,” said Fisher.

As Zurich gets closer to its customers, Zurich FutureYou’s social presence will become increasingly important. Fisher plans to use Marketing Cloud for social listening and to extend its social capabilities to both service and sales by 2017. “Social is how we will grow,” he said.

Navigating the future

Service excellence is an important aspect of the Zurich FutureYou proposition. The aim of customer support staff – called navigators – is not to resolve problems, but prevent them. “We’re not interested in traditional call centre metrics, such as resolution times,” said Fisher. “We encourage our navigators to spend as much time as they need with our customers to provide the best possible experience.”

With Service Cloud, navigators can immediately identify a customer, explore how he or she has engaged via the Zurich FutureYou site, and understand any issues that customer has had in the past. Navigators can quickly tap into a wide range of knowledge articles on topics as diverse as lifestyle events, such as how to plan a budget for your child’s life at university, to regulatory needs, such as standard operating procedures to ensure process consistency and compliance. “Service Cloud helps us deliver a prompt yet personal service. Our navigators really enjoy using it,” said Fisher.

To provide customers with more choice about how and when they engage, navigators use Service Cloud Live Agent to participate in web chats. This approach allows navigators to help customers in real time while they are using the Zurich FutureYou site. “Financial services providers traditionally engage with customers by telephone and email, but studies show that it is the least popular channel for digital customers,” said Fisher. “Web chat provides our customers and navigators with greater flexibility to help complete the online journey.”

With Zurich FutureYou growing in popularity — it is already achieving a Net Promoter Score well above industry averages — Zurich is now looking to expand the service internationally. “This is a model that we can replicate in other markets,” said Fisher. “Salesforce is enabling a technical blueprint that will change culturally how consumers engage with their financial futures across the globe.”