AXA PPP Healthcare
Finalists in the UK Employee Experience Awards 2015
The Need
AXAPPP Healthcare frontline teams were delivering to target, yet very much on auto-pilot. It was fair to say, they had reached a plateau, in both their motivation and commitment to the role and in their activity and sales results. It was clear that a monumental shift – culturally and literally in terms of enhanced performance and results – would need to be set and realised in the coming year, to drive the business forward. The SME Intermediary Teams all recognised the opportunity to push out of their comfort zone, knowing that a win-win could be achieved given the long-term loyalty they all had to the business and each other and so a programme of skills-development and behavioural change began…..
The Solution
Having partnered with the FIT team, AXAPPP Healthcare embarked on a learning & development initiative that would help them achieve their business objectives and people-development goals, building on the skills they already had, to develop a ‘selling through service’ culture that would enhance their success, both professionally and personally. The look, sound and feel of their frontline operation changed almost overnight – due only to the fact that their people coming out of the training room had changed virtually overnight too! Almost without exception, everyone appeared to have renewed motivation, eager to test out their new skills and behaviours. They commented about how they felt so positive and enthusiastic about their role and responsibilities and how they’d started to see the impact of the learning they were putting into practice in their daily conversations with customers and prospects – and employee engagements levels increased immediately as a result.
The Results
Extract from client feedback: “Concentrating on the ‘Selling through Service Excellence’ philosophy has made a vast, positive difference to our interactions with our customers and prospects, giving our frontline teams the confidence to focus on building & developing relationships with their customers before attempting to sell to them. We’ve found it’s enabled us to build rapport and trust more quickly than ever before.
The rate of our ‘one and done’ calls has shot up. If we compare the first 6 months of the year, before we made the changes, to the subsequent 4 months since, we’ve already exceeded what we achieved by 196% with 2 months to spare!
As well as bringing on business more quickly it means less follow-up calls are required to attempt to close business; so we’re saving time for both our customers and ourselves.
The amount of time we’ve spent talking with our customers has increased month on month too, and we’re currently spending 27% more time talking with them than we were before the change, which shows we’re achieving what we set out to through creating greater customer engagement!
Testimonials
“We’ve had so much positive feedback from our customers which is highly motivating for our frontline teams and speaks volumes in terms of what we’ve achieved. The fact that the FIT Team have worked tirelessly to help us embed the learning and our new culture on the frontline is proof of their own level of engagement with us as their client. They’ve worked with the internal coaching teams and training community to deliver support that is entirely congruent with the new skills and behaviours introduced, so that workshop content has been absorbed into our business as usual induction training, ensuring the culture and “voice of the brand” are maintained and developed going forward.
We are now embarking on another change management project with FIT with our recent acquisition of SimplyHealth, where the FIT team will be designing and delivering another wholly bespoke programme for us that will enhance the service culture and help us to meet our ambitious sales targets for this new book of business we’ve acquired – and we’re delighted with the partnership we have with Marie and her team”
Brian Gilfillan, Head of AXAPPP Intermediary Sales
