Joy Adan
6 min read
As a leading travel insurance and assistance provider, the Cover-More Group takes pride in protecting the travel experience of millions of travellers worldwide. Earlier this month, Chloe Morley, Employee Experience Manager at Cover-More Australia, joined Reward Gateway on a live webinar to talk about why investing in the employee experience is key to providing an excellent level of support and service to its growing global customer base.
In this post, Chloe discusses the proactive approach that Cover-More has taken to provide a supportive and people-focussed culture where each employee can bring their best selves to work. Let’s dive in!
Q: Let’s start by talking about the Cover-More Group and the type of work employees are doing.
Chloe Morley (CM): As our name suggests, Cover-More Group is a group of global brands or businesses, with about 13 brands in 22 countries around the world. The business is mainly known for providing travel insurance and medical assistance. The largest departments include our contact centre and the claims department, and we also have nurses, doctors and case managers providing 24/7 care. When a traveller is overseas and loses a passport, or has had something stolen during their flight, or encounters a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, Cover-More is on call and available to assist those people.
The work our people do is very emotionally and mentally taxing, and they require much more than a transactional mindset – helping our customers in a time of need requires emotional intelligence, empathy and compassion.
Q: Your employees are really in the frontline, helping people in emergencies, which is why the customer experience is so important to your business. Can you tell us about how this drove your employee experience strategy?
CM: It wasn't so much the need to turn the culture around or because something wasn't performing. It was more about making sure that we deliver on the customer experience by focussing on delivering an employee experience that aligns really well to our brand values and promise.
We recognised that if we were to just tell people what to do, how to behave, or tell them what they ought to know, they would only go as far as listening to what they see as a set of instructions. But when it comes to delivering brand authenticity, and really aligning our employees with the customer experience, showing people how to we want them to feel, and how we want them as individuals to relate to Cover-More as a brand, is a more effective way of establishing a strong culture.
If we want our customers to feel valued and confident with us and understood, then we need to make sure that our employees feel that way as well so they can deliver on the brand promise.
Q: You’ve been on quite a journey, creating an environment where all your employees can have that positive experience themselves and deliver that for your customers. Can you talk about your workforce in particular, and what they want to be motivated and engaged at work?
CM: Because we're an insurance company, the environment people operate in is highly regulated. We follow set procedures, sequences and instructions; it's a very black and white environment where something is either in and covered by the policy, or not. But what we're asking our people to deliver often sits outside those policies.
We have a high proportion of millennials in our claims and customer service department and one of the millennial motivators that really stands out for us is the sense of purpose and the connection to our brand values and what we at Cover-More are here to deliver to our customers. Knowing this about our people really allowed us to be able to recognise the values and behaviours that perhaps sit outside of procedural manual; things like the emotional intelligence and intuition, looking at a holistic sort of mindset. We have an employee recognition platform where we can recognise those things so quickly, which is a really good motivator for our people.
The second motivator that stands out is the need for frequent feedback, and the transparency around that. So being able to give recognition in the moment, being able to send an eCard across geographies or across the business as soon as something happens as you see a good behaviour happening is really important.
The third thing would definitely be the mobility. I mentioned earlier Cover-More is across 22 countries, so giving our people the opportunity to connect with peers across geographies is really important. There’s also professional mobility, which is a key part of our Employee Value Proposition.
It was really important to us that the employee experience platform that we chose to deliver our programme was a proof point of the promise that we set up for our people when we brought them in to the business.
Q: One of the things that I'd love to hear more about is some of the things that got you really excited about what you could achieve with your chosen employee recognition platform. Can you tell me more?
CM: There were a lot of things we were excited about! But some of the stand out things were:
- The ability to communicate our values in a way that made it really clear that how our people behave is important, and also front and centre of people's minds.
- The flexibility of the platform to design pages to suit our brand and manipulate the pages based on the message we need to communicate.
- Being able to segment our audience. Because we’re a group of brands, it was important to recognise we had different motivators across the different groups and so having the freedom to put the most relevant and engaging information for specific groups of people on areas of the platform was exciting.
Q: Can you give an example of why it was so powerful for Cover-More to get the right message to the right people at the right time?
CM: I think it comes down to how the values are brought to life and the kind of stories that we wanted to highlight.
While it’s important to have company values, if we want employees to be able to live and deliver on those values, we need to provide examples and stories of how that value comes to life.
So, for example, if one of our values is "Be Bold," I'm pretty sure every company has the value in one shape or form, they might just express it in different language (innovation, challenge, bravery etc.). What “being bold” looks like in the sales environment might be different to what it looks like when you're in a medical emergency assistance environment, because the context is so different.
So for us, it was important that we were giving the right message to the right people, and the ability to segment posts and highlight certain messages on the platform was an exciting way of doing this.
That is a really critical question a lot of organisations need to ask when they’re looking at refreshing or creating company values – what are the behaviours that sit behind the word? For us, that means asking what does that look like in action, for someone working in your medical emergency team, or what does it mean for someone working in the claims team?
Being able to showcase and shine the spotlight on what those behaviours look like in action and, and having employees who understand what our values mean day to day, is a really great way to drive the mission at Cover-More forward.
Like this interview? Stay tuned for Part 2 of the interview, where Chloe talks about how Cover-More's proactive approach has improved employee engagement.
Want to find out how you can bring your company purpose, mission and values to life and enhance the customer experience through strategic reward and recognition? Talk to one of our consultants today.
