Today’s interview is with Deborah (Deb) Battaglia, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience at Assurant, Inc, a global B2B2C Fortune 300 company that provides risk management and insurance products to leading automotive, housing, and mobile technology companies. Deb joins me today to talk about the ‘why’ & vision for their transformation, how long the programme has been running, what they have achieved in terms of outcomes, how the pandemic impacted things, the outlook for the future and how they aim to leverage new technologies as well as some key learnings & top tips for others on their own journey.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Developing empathy within ourselves and the machines that we build – Interview with Minter Dial – and is number 470 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Deb:

• Assurant currently serves 15 of the top 50 most valuable brands in the world and has over 300 million customers around the world.
• They have a 125 year plus history and are one of those rare companies that continually reinvents itself.
• To differentiate ourselves through the experience we were providing to end consumers, we really doubled down, we invested, we built a center of excellence and then we we established our vision.
• The vision for Assurant and my team is we are customer obsessed and our passion drives us to deliver differentiated experiences, supported by purposeful design and execution.
• Purposefully designed experiences don’t happen by accident.
• Taking a purposeful approach to designing experiences means stepping out of our shoes and out of an internal lens as the business person and stepping into the customer’s shoes and saying, what are they going through, what’s happening in their life that even requires that they’re going to need something from us.
• Build what they need rather than build what you want to sell.
• Convergence of the viewpoints (customer and business) that’s where the magic is.
• When I think about our transformation when it comes to CX, it’s really evolution, not revolution.
• It’s like it’s a continuous process evolution rather than transformation.
• Customer experience in Assurant has become almost like a shared service model with embedded kind champions within each line of business e.g. a hub and spoke model.
• The driving force of Assurant’s transformation is its culture and their commitment to the development of their people, knowledge and their capabilities.
• We use RPA (robotic process automation), artificial intelligence and machine learning to take out the things that are super easy. But, the stuff that’s complex has gotten even more complex and consumer pressure has increased for how quickly they expect us to respond.
• My believe that, in the main, Chat GPT and gen AI will help us accelerate things in our business but won’t fundamentally change our outlook.
• Like the use of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, AI and ML, gen AI will require a heavy human touch at the beginning of their use and also throughout their maturity to make sure they stay on track.
• We have to make sure that we’re putting the proper controls and guardrails around it to reduce things like intentional bias or negative side effects that could come out of those kinds of technologies.
• Deb’s best advice: First and foremost, you have to document the case for change. What’s peoples reason to believe? Why are we even taking this on in the first place?
• Deb’s Punk CX word(s): Not boring.
• Deb’s Punk XL brand: Disney.
• The thing that made Deb smile in the last week was that the Governor of Minnesota, signed a bill dedicating a seven-mile stretch of highway after Prince. It is now known as the Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway. And, what makes the announcement really interesting was that the governor signed it in purple ink.

About Deb

Deborah (Deb) Battaglia is Senior Vice President, Customer Experience at Assurant, Inc, a global B2B2C Fortune 300 company that provides risk management and insurance products to leading automotive, housing, and mobile technology companies. As the SVP of Customer Experience (CX), Deb drives CX strategy throughout the global Assurant enterprise by leveraging strong talent, cutting-edge CX methodologies and human-centered design. Prior to Assurant, she spent 18 years at USAA in a broad range of disciplines, including Operations, Product Management, DE&I, HR, Agile and Strategic Business Transformations. Deb has long held a passion for the development of women and girls and a strong drive to make an impact in her community. She is an avid hiker and world traveler and takes off from Atlanta, Georgia, where she resides with her family.

Check out Assurant, say Hi to them on Twitter @Assurant and feel free to connect with Deb on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Erich Westendarp from Pixabay