Just as background, Covéa Insurance offers products from home, car and pet insurance to specialist commercial, high net worth and trade products. If you’re thinking that you haven’t heard of the brand, it’s because they mostly sell through brokers and intermediaries. You will certainly have heard of some of the respected businesses they provide the insurance behind, like John Lewis, RSPCA and AA, you may even have one of their policies without realising it. Big brands trust them to look after their customers because, within the insurance world, Covéa is known to be a very customer-centric organisation:

“Everything we do centres around our customers, they're at the heart of every single decision that we make, everything we do. All our process reviews are centred around making things better and simpler for the customer. A lot of companies say this but for us it’s part of our culture.”

Longtime readers will know that, at TLF Research, we set great stall by the phrase “doing best what matters most to customers.” We believe that successful organisations are those which identify what’s important to customers, and consistently give it to them. Insurance is not something that most of us buy because we want to, but that doesn’t mean that customer attitudes are any less important in the sector.

It’s easy to say that employee engagement is something we want, but how do we go about actually creating it? Covéa Insurance believes the answer lies in making sure that you have a culture where coming to work is something you look forward to, where you have a clear purpose, a strong connection with the people you work with and where you can bring your ‘whole self’ to work.

“When you've got a business with over 1900 employees with a shared sense of purpose, it brings people together. We aim to give people the freedom to be creative about the way they do things so that solutions come from within, rather than a top down approach. You have to ask the people who you're trying to engage what excites them, rather than guessing, and involve them in the process.”

It can be difficult to “do culture” at scale, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Likewise, having a workforce that suddenly finds itself working remotely, and under new pressures from Covid-19 and the restrictions imposed, creates a whole new set of challenges that require creative thinking to overcome.

The Covéa Insurance “Doing what really matters” initiative is a customer experience community set up by the business to share and celebrate customer experience successes with colleagues through closed groups on the company’s networking platforms.

“It's a customer experience community, it’s a space for storytelling, it's a space for recognition.”

A Microsoft Slack channel that started as a space focused on customer experience, particularly around National Customer Service Week, has grown to become a companywide hub for people to engage with each other, recognise their colleagues, and interact.

“It started off as us wanting to tell the story about the customer, but it’s become so much more than that, it's now a customer experience community. This has really helped employee engagement through the pandemic. Every single person in our business makes a difference to the customer journey whether they are front line or working in our centralised functions, sharing these stories has kept people focused on doing what really matters for their customers, whatever their role.”

It’s evident, on LinkedIn in particular, that some organisations have sent boxes of sweets to their people at home, or organised quizzes and cocktail parties online. These are great ‘pick me ups’ that bring people together and show employers care, but it’s also important to engage people on matters of substance as well, especially as the pandemic has gone on for much longer than many people expected.

“Employees have been at home for a long time now and companies need to go beyond the fun stuff and ensure they support employee wellbeing, productivity, engagement, and things like that. This is all part of the ongoing challenge in finding creative ways to help people maintain their focus and energy.”

The Covéa Insurance Doing what really matters community is fun and engaging, but at its heart there’s a serious purpose, focused on driving a better customer experience.

So what can we conclude from Covéa’s experience? The principle, I think, is very simple: involve your people — they know best what’s engaging — and use that to build a community. The community needs to have a meaningful purpose that resonates with everyone for it to attract engaging content. Covéa chose Doing what really matters because it was a way to help employees to focus on all the good work being done right across the business that was until that point largely invisible, especially with people working remotely.