I have re-opened the dialogue with If Vahinkovakuutus

It is with very mixed feelings that i have reopened the dialogue with If vahinkovakuutus. If you have read my previous conclusions from my first attempt to engage them you will understand why.

In my opinion If vahinkovakuutus have publically shown themselves to be very untrustworthy, unethical and entirely non customer orientated. In any case as If vahinkovakuutus have still not given me the recording of the phone conversation that this whole experiment and engagement has been based upon then i have reopened the dialogue via their facebook pages to try and get it back.

I had not expected this course of events would be necessary but apparantly it is. Below is the screen shot of the new conversation. If vahinkovakuutus seem to be ignoring it currently. Again this can only serve to damage their public image further.

View the conversation on Facebook.

Social CRM Company Engagement Framework Part 2: Strategy

Once you have decided that you wish to engage a company in a dialogue via social media, the first thing to do is to think a little about your strategy. If you do this you will dramatically increase your chances of being succesful.

Formulate your Argument

You must have a clear concise reason for engaging the company in question. You must be able to communicate this in a very short concise way and as a few lines or bullet points. You must do this to succesfully engage your audience and the company alike. Whenever you discuss your arguments try and do it as shortly as possible.You will be more succesful when you activate your audience by describing how it impacts them personally so try and emphasise the impact on other customers in particular.

Make clear, short requests to what you expect the company to do. It is harder for the organisation to avoid short concise requests. By doing this you will be able to stop the dialogue becoming pages of boring marketing spin that your audience is not interested in.

Make sure that your arguments and requests are clearly summarised in all social medias you engage in.

Plan your use of social media

So as to be better able to plan this you need to do and think about two main things.

1. Search for all social media used by the company in question and decide how to use it for your own means.
2. Decide on which social media you will create for yourself and for which purposes you will use that.

Advantages to utilising the company's own Social Media

1. You can hold the conversation in a public forum in front of the company's own audience.
2. You can piggyback on the company's own popularity to bring traffic to your own site where you can tell your own story. (See post).
3. You can apply greater pressure to the company to act (note only when you have a valid argument) (See Rules of Engagement)
4. You can embarass the company publically in front of their own audience if they do not act in a professional and considerate way. (See my own conclusions for If Vahinkovakuutus)
5. You can disrupt the company's own marketing messaging through utilisation an interference strategy.

Advantatages in utilising your own Social Media

1. You can tell the story entirely in your own way
2. You can have full control of all content being produced
3. You can utilise your own marketing and promotion channels to generate further interest
4. You can provide a permanent record of the dialogue and the story. This can either be something the company is proud of or is a thorn in their side.

Based upon the above criteria for using either your own or your company's social media you can make a decision how best to utilise each channel. I will post my own thoughts about how to best utilise the main channels and the advantages and disadvantaged of each in subsequent posts.

Main Strategic Tools

For the most part you will find that companies will have a presence on these tools.

Facebook group or page
Twitter
Google + (new but will become important)
LinkedIn Company Profile
YouTube Channel
Blogs.

Company's will probably be present in other channels but for the most part 95% of their audience should be present on at least one of these medias. As such i would recommend focussing on these. This is as the return on your time spent on other channels probably means it is not worth you focussing your efforts on those. Generally if a company is present in these channels then you should strongly consider making your own presence felt there.

If they are not there maybe you should still be, especially for Google +. In this way then you need to set up your own corresponding channels. In later posts i will describe how these corresponding profiles on the same channel should interact with each other and how to utiise each to its best advantage.

Should you make your presence felt in all the company's Social Media in the beginning.

Choose one channel to hold the conversation in. Facebook is good as almost everyone has a profile and you are able to maintain the dialogue in a thread and link to it. In the beginning of the dialogue you do not need to be present in the other channels.

There may be an advantage in moving into these channels later as you need to increase pressure on the company.

However by being present in these channels immediately, you may have an advantage as you can apply maximum pressure to the company immediately. By doing this though you also increase the likelihood that the company will feel like they are being attacked.

In my opinion you are most likely to get your positive response in the first few replies. After this the probability of succes will drastically drop. As such you may consider expansion of your utilisation of Social Media later if you do not get replies that you are satisfied with.

You need to Raise Attention as Quickly as Possible

One thing is clear. To increase your chance of success, you need to get as many people involved and active in regard your story as quicky as possible. This of course is the main driving factor in deciding how to utilise the social media and other traditional marketing channels in question. This is also a major reason for planning your actions first!!! The relative strengths and weaknesses of each channel will be discussed in upcoming posts.

You will need to ensure that you yourself produce good content and attract a wider audience

If you want to attract large numbers of visitors and support then you need to expand the scope of the story. People are generally not all that interested in a sustained bad cusotmer service story. You need generate content that will be of interest to people outside of the company's existing stakeholders. If you can expand outside of this target group with large enough numbers then you can apply significantly more pressure to the company.

To be succesful in this you need to be creative and think outside of the box. For my own story i turned this experience into a social media experiment. In this way i was able to attract an audience based upon the company's own stakeholders and an audience interested in Social CRM, PR, Customer Service, Marketing and Social Media. In this experiment this effectively doubled the level of traffic i experienced to my blog for example.

Ensure the longevity of your story

As mentioned above if you add content to your story via media such as blogs you ensure that not only does the story survive but that it is also relevant for others. As such the fact that your story will continue to attract traffic will apply more pressure to the company in question. They are less likely to act unprofessionally if they know that their story will survive and be found and read long after the dialogue is over.

Where do you want to steer traffic?

This is a tricky issue. You obviously want your audience to be active and to participate and be visible to the company you are trying to have a dialogue with but you also want to be able to tell your own side of the story and activate your audience. As such.....

Do not attempt to drive all of your new traffic straight to the company's own social media.

This may seem contrary to your goals but remember, for audiences reached through channels other than the company in questions own social media, they have not heard your side of the story you have not been able to influence them so that thay may feel like they want to act. For example it is very difficult to get someone to act based upon 160 characters in Twitter. They need more information to act upon.

As such I recommend steering these new audience to a location where you can outline your own side of the story and a media that you can control. In this experiment i used a blog. Once they have read the story then they are more likely to be activated in the discussion. In this way you can then steer them to the company's own social media where ideally you would like them to make their presence known to the company.

Analyse your own Performance

Use tools that will help you get statistical data about traffic volumes, referring sites/urls and locations, shares, likes and retweets that will help you meausure the success of your own campaign and let you know how successful you are at generating interest. Blogger for example offers these as default functionality for all blogs. In this way you will also be able to measure how much interest you are able to generate from the company's own social media locations. All of my upcoming channel posts will give information about how to analyse these channels also.

Interlink your own blog to the company's social media at every opportunity.

Whenever you have an opportuntiy, use your blog to drive people to the company's social media and conversely ensure that your social media is at the top of the company's social media's feed. In this way you can ensure a good flow of traffic between the two and the probability of activating visitors increases. This will also undoubtedly add more pressure on the company to act positively to your requests.

Focus on Improving Numbers Visible to the Company

Blog stats are only of value to you in terms of improving your marketing efforts and channel performance!! That is unless you make them visible to the company. Numbers that may affect and influence the company's behaviour and response to you are for example, number of twitter followers you have, number of comments, likes, mentions on their own/your social media. Number of members of your facebook group. Traffic generated to their own website through your blog. These are things the company should be looking at through their own analytics and these are the things you should be attempting to influence. Bare this in mind when measuring your own performance. The company will measure the risk to them through data visible to them.


What if a company decides not to engage you?

This is a serious conern. In my own experiment If vahinkovakuutus broke contact for a period of several days. I think they believed that i would just disappear. As a strategy to force them to re-engage i expanded my use of their own social media so as to start to interfere directly with all of their messaging.

In practical terms i commented and added my own material to all of their social media posts. I kept to the rules of engagement however and did not write any negative comments but merely asked the audience had they heard bout my story and linked to the blog.

I also blogged about it and put it out on Twitter. After two days If vahinkovakuutus, Finland re-engaged me.

What if a company decides to block you from their social media?

As above if a company blocks you it will look bad upon them as long as you have followed the rules of engagement. The simple strategy is to create another profile and continue to post. Also write about it and post that information via your own social media. This negative publicity will hopefully result in the company returning to dialogue.

What if you start to lose your audience?

Unfortunately if you lose the support of your own and/or your company's audience then you are in serious trouble. The ony advice i can give is to try and stop doing anything that you may have done to alienate them and apologise publically. However if you continue to lose support and especially if the audience start to publish content against you then i am afraid it is over. This is the time to stop. It sucks for you but the probability of being successful if this happens is almost zero. This is because the company will believe the people are on their side.

Social CRM Company Engagement Framework Part 1.The rules of Engagement

The purpose of this framework is to guide individuals who wish to engage companies in a dialogue related to a particular conflict or service request. Usually this framework will be employed after conventional channels and dialogue has failed or broken down. This is due to the additional effort required by the customer to implement this framework over and above that required by the companies own conventional channels. The idea is that by moving the conversation to a public arena i.e. a social media run by the company then this will further empower the customer and increase the likelihood of a succesful outcome for the customer.

This framework has been constructed based upon lessons learned through the engagement with If vahinkovakuutus a Finnish insurance company in relationship to travel insurance claim that If refused to pay.

Part 1: The Rules of Engagement of Social CRM from the Customers Perspective

Operating in the Target Company's Own Social Media

When engaging a company on their own social media the following guidelines should be applied.

1. Only engage a company in this way when you have a valid argument. This is not a strategy for just venting your anger or trying to get some revenge.
2. Do not alienate your audience! Remember that when you are communicating with a company on their own social media, their audience is also your audience. You should be attempting to win them over with a valid argument. By gaining their support you will put additional pressure onto the company in question. As such do not do or say anything that may risk you having the audience turn against you.
3. Remain calm do not show your anger. Undoubtedly in this kind of situation you are experiencing feelings of anger and hostility. Displaying these will not help you at all. Do not post offensive or derrogatory comments about the company in question. If you do, you risk being percieved as an angry customer who justs wants to have a rant.
4. Try to avoid opinions and stick to the facts. When you add your opinion to much you increase the risk of alienating your audience. Let them make up their own minds. This is difficult i know.
5. Express how the experience has made you feel. This, if done in the correct way, will help garner support for your cause and generate sympathy from the audience. It makes it easier for them to empathise.
6. Express and highlight how the company's behaviour impacts their other customers and stakeholders. This adds weight to your own personal story and argument and further distances you from being perceived as an individual upset and angry customer.
7. Outline your arguments clearly and concisely. When you do this is it very difficult for the company not to answer you as this will reflect badly upon them if they refuse to engage you.
8. State clearly what you expect from the company and what actions you require for them. Numbering these helps (in a long thread for example). Ask them directly to respond to each. In this way you can avoid the conversation being taken of topic.
9. Attempt to control the conversation as if it were a debate. If a company does not directly answer your concerns, questions or requirements pull them up on it and request that they answer the questions directly and if pushed ask them to answer yes no.
10. Do not allow the company to steer the conversation away from your requirements. This is a diversionary and delay tactic. They know that at some point in time you will get tired.
11. Do not allow the company to steer you away from their social media and into hidden channels. You have failed already in these hidden channels. This is just a way for the company to get rid of you. If a company attempts this it will reflect badly upon them not you.
12. Do not give up until the dialogue is really at an end. Badly run companies or companies with something to hide will ultimately continue to avoid the questions. If you keep pulling them up on this you should be able to to garner more support form their audience and add additioal pressure to the company.
13. Be prepared that the company will not meet your expectations. In this case you still win. You have lost nothing but your time. As long as you had a valid argument, if the company does not resolve this issue for you then it is them who ultimately will come out of this worse. Even if you are financially out of pocket you still would have been even if you had not engaged them through social media. As a customer you had nothing to lose so try to think of it that way.
14. If the company does meet your expectations and resolve the case through social media let them know your gratitude. Post this publically. In this way it will help the company appreciate the value of serving cusotmers in this way and also let others know that this kind of strategy can be applied succesfully with this company.

Operating in your own social media

As part of this framework it is a strong advantage to adopt your own social media related to the engagement process. This is so as to tell your side of the story, preserve a record of the dialogue that you are in control of. In affect you are running your own campaign from where you can publicise your story and garner further support by leveraging your own socail media. More about this in a later post.

When utilising your own channels, it is more acceptable to be biased and slightly more opinionated. After all you are trying to push out your marketing message related to this story in the same way that a company uses their own media to push theirs. By being more oppinionated you will also generate more interest and discussion around the subject. This is also to your advantage.

As well as the rules of engagement from the aforementioned section, you should also be aware of the following.

1. Again avoid alienating your audience. How you behave in these channels is important you do not want to be seen to act in a way that is underhand, coercive or in a way similar to that of the company you are trying to engage. You should not profit financially from the engagement process other than for any compensation you are attempting to get from the company you are engaging. If you do this will damage your argument and own image.
2. Show gratitutude to all who participate and engage them in conversation. Anyone who comments or replies to you deserves a thankyou or a return comment if posting on a blog for example. Of course dependent upon the media you are using.
3. It is ok, not everyone has to agree with you. Do not attack people who disagree with you but engage them also you can learn about why they feel that way. By having an open dialogue with a real discussion you will actually draw more attention to your story. If you are receiving a lot of negative feedback you can use this to evaluate if you should continue your engagement process or not.
4. You need to behave in a the same way that you are expecting your engaged company to behave. Your actions need to be transparent and you need to be trusted. You must set an example.

Summary of My Dialogue with If Vahinkovakuutus

Discussion held on If's Facebook Page

So that future and new visitors to this blog can get a quick overview of the story and the dialogue that took place between If Vahinkovakuutusyhtiö in Finland and myself i have decided to write a summary of the discussion. Just the highlights.

This will also act as a sitemap of sorts and let you easily navigate to posts that you may want to read more about. So here are the highlights.

February 5th 2012. Malev go bankrupt, we are stuck in Turkey. We call If Vahinkovakuutus Emergency Customer Service

We travel to the airport discover that our flight has been cancelled. We call If vakuutus's emergency customer service and are led to beleive that everything is ok and that we are covered. We were told to pay the costs ourselves and claim when we get home. In response to this we buy very expensive flights home the next day in the belief that If vahinkoivakuutus will pay. See post.

February 6th 2012. We make our claim and If Vahinkovakuutus inform us that they will not pay.

We fly home and make the claim on If's web service. After a week or so we receive a large envelope from If vahinkovakuutus with a thick bundle of terms and conditions and a decision not to pay. See Post.

February 14th 2012. We visit the If Vahinkovakuuutus shop for personal customer service

We visit an If vahinkovakuutus shop to discover that we cannot get customer service related to claims there. If offices only sell insurance and they do not address your customer service needs as an existing customer other than to sell you more insurance. See Post.

February 15th 2012. We call If Vahinkovakuutus's customer service number

We call If vahinkovakuutus and they say that they will investigate and get back to us. They send us an email the next day saying they have heard the phone conversation and as they did not promise to pay and based upon their terms and conditions they will not pay. See post.

I also requested the copy of the phone call conversation on this day.

February 18th 2012. I start the blog and engage If Vahinkovakuutus on Facebook.

After feeling totally ripped off and having bought really expensive flights home at additional expense to myself. I decided to start this blog and engage If vahinkovakuutus on their own Facebook page This is deliberately in a public forum where If could not hide. This is also the first day that If respond but it is a "we will get back to you message" See Post. However i also see this as an opportunity for If Vahinkovakuutus and write a post describing that.

February 20th 2012. If vahinkovakuutus's First Real Response.

• If vahinkovakuutus admit that they failed in their communication (accepting liability in my eyes)
• If still refuse to pay as in their terms and conditions they do not pay travel insurance when companies go bankrupt (what is the point have travel insurance)
• If Vahinkovakuutus try and get me off their social media by directing me down other channels that they can control (Nice Social CRM)
• I respond by saying that i want to resolve the case in this public forum and ask, is it really the customer's responsibility to pay for their admitted mistakes. See post.

February 21st 2012. If still argue that their terms and conditions state that they can't pay

• If vahinkovakuutus stick to their terms and conditions argument
• They state that it would not be fair to pay this for their other customers.
• I reply with concrete demands of what i expect and re-emphasise that this is not about the terms and conditions. I expect payment because of the false and misleading information supplied to me and the resulting additional costs i incurred as a result of this..
• At this time i also write a post about Finnish culture with mention to adherence to rules and customer service. See Post.

• I supply If vahinkovakuutus with a concrete list of my expectations from them
• Change your terms and conditions so the If Vahinkovakuutus are liable for giving out false or misleading information. This is to protect their other customers.
• Review and publish the results on Facebook relating to not outsourcing their emergency customer phone service to an unqualified third party without detailed knowledge of their policies.
• Review and publish the results on Facebook relating to not offering personal face to face customer service relating to claims in their If vahinkovakuutus shops.
• Settle the claim and pay my personal costs incurred as a result of information supplied to me by them.

February 21st-23rd 2012 If Vahinkovakuutus are silent

• After no word from If vakuutus i believe that they are not going to answer me and are waiting for me to go away. (Again nice Social CRM).
• As a result of the silence I engage in a strategy of interference in their other Social Media conversations. See post
• I believe that If vakuutus have lost any opportunity they had to turn this into a social CRM success story. See Post.

February 23rd 2012 If Vahinkovakuutus re-engage me but don't answer my requests

• I will never know the reasons for why If vahinkovakuutus decided to re-engage but they did.
• They again try to get me off their social media saying they do not want to handle it there and wish to do it privately. (I bet you do). Again nice social CRM, isnt SCRM about the customers needs?
• They do not answer any of my questions but agree to pass the feedback forward.
• I again ask for a copy of the phone conversation which this discussion is based.
• I try to help them by also supplying a link demonstrating how to engage a customer through social media. See Link. See my post on the subject.

February 25th 2012 If vahinkovakuutus request that i stop linking to my Blog

• If vahinkovakuutus request that i should not publicise my story on their social media.
• Sorry no you cannot control a public forum. This is a place for customers to engage you on their terms. This is not your own private marketing channel. This is not your website. Very nice social CRM once again.
• I agree to stop interferring with their other marketing messaging on Facebook while they engage me in this conversation.See orignal post.

February 27th 2012 If Vahinkovakuutus can you please just answer the questions!

• After getting pretty tired of If vahinkovakuutus i start a new thread as the conversation was getting a bit long and congested.
• I simply reiterate the questions I asked to them on February 21st and request that they answer them Yes/No and with their justification. I want to bring this to an end i have wasted enough time on If.
• See post.

February 28th 2012 If Vahinovakuutus reply with an answer a politician would be proud of

• If vakuutus give a reply that is basically marketing drivel about your feedback being valuable. They do not answer any of the questions.
• I request again for them to answer them with simple yes/no answers.
• My post is not very flattering of If Vahinkovakuutus. I am getting quite tired of engaging If for over 2 weeks and getting no where.
• I notice on the same day that i have been blocked from If Insurance's other regional facebook pages. After posting on the subject my user rights are mysteriously returned. Again nice social CRM. As a reaction i post the story to If's competitor's Facebook pages. See my post on the subject.

February 29th 2012. If vahinkovakuutus's final response and Mine

• I receive a final response (see post) from If stating that they will not handle this in the public areena
• They do not answer any of my questions
• They again try to drive me off the social media to another channel they do not want to discuss with me anymore.
• I post my last comments to them in the dialogue. I am not very flattering of If unsurprisingly.
• If's silence and refusal to answer the genuine questions concerning not only me but their other customers tells me more about If Vahinkovakuutus than anything they have done so far. Their Social CRM behaviour has been of a very poor standard.

February 29th 2012 If Vahinkovakuutus have the last word

• Upon cancelling my insurances with If and moving them to Pohjola i discover If want to charge me 30 euros to do so. They claim that this is to stop people cancelling their insurance after only a few months. I have had my insurances with them for years. Nice customer service touch once again, well done.

I still have not had the recording of the conversation as is my legal right and cannot verify anything that If vahinkovakuutus have stated regarding that conversation.

View the original If Vahinkovakuutus conversation threads on Facebook.

Part 1 here
Part 2 here
What do you think about If Vahinkovakuutus? Find them on Facebook

Still Time for If Vahinkovakuutus to add insult to Injury

If Vahinkovakutus will even try and rip you off when you leave. You cannot trust If at all

Nice story relating to cancelling your matkavakuutus. Thanks again If Vahinkovakuutus. A nice touch to end my pain with you as a service provider.

View the feed on facebook

If Vahinkovakuutus charge you 30 euros to cancel your Travel Insurance with them even though you have had it for years. Nice Customer Service once again!

My Last Response: End of the Dialogue

Well as i just posted, If Vahinkovakuutus have given their last response to me. This is my final response to them on this subject. Pretty self explanatory so i won't comment any more but just leave it like this.

View the thread on Facebook.

If Vahinkovakuutus's Last Response: End of the Dialogue

Well this is it. It seems that If vahinkovakuutus have lived up to my previous experiences of Finnish customer service. If are not going to do anything.

If Vahinkovakuutus have not agreed to change their terms and conditions so that if they supply wrong or misleading information to a customer that they will take responsibility for this.

If Vahinkovakuutus have not agreed to publish on their Facebook group the results of their review regarding the use of a third party in their emergency call centre.

If Vahinkovakuutus have not agreed to publish on Facebook the results of their review into the lack of customer service other than for sales in their shops.

If Vahinkovakuutus will not pay the additional expenses incurred to me personally as a result of their self admitted failures in communication.

Do you want an insurance company who treats their customers like this? They refuse to engage me in the arena that i wish. Why are they on Facebook? They obviously have not heard of SCRM (Social Customer Relationship Management) and the main reasons people engage companies on facebook. Increasingly customer service is one of them.

View the conversation thread on Facebook.

Well it seems apparent from this If Vahinkovakuutus do not and never did want to engage me on facebook. With almost every response they have tried to eject me from their Facebook page. It is clear that this was something very new to them, they are not use to and do not like offerring customer service in a public forum. However the golden rule is if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about. It seems clear that If Vahinkovakuuts do have something to hide and they certainly do not want to share it on social media.  least in my eyes they have performed poorly.

See my final response to this and the summary of the entire conversation.

Adoption of Twitter in the Insurance Industry in Finland

As part of this story i first attempted to engage If vakuutus through Twitter. I discovered that If vahinkovakuutus had no twits and only a few followers and did not follow anyone except their Norwegian counterparts.

You can read more about If' Vahinkovakuutus's social media performance via the blog Post If Vahinkovakutus Social Marketing vs If Sweden Social Marketing.

In any case i decided to have a look at whether or not this pattern was reflected by other insurance companies in Finland.

So in short i took a look at the above. Finnish insurance company's presence on Twitter.

Good news, they were there!!! but..........

Pohjola

Well enough said a big company in Finland. There is no description, the default image, no following, only a few followers, not even a link to the website, no tweets. Well there was not any other. My Evaluation is POOR

Well enough said another large insurance provider in Finland. There is no description, the default image, no following, only a few followers, not even a link to the website, no tweets.  Well there was not any other. My Evaluation is POOR

I have never heard of this company but they seem to have at least added their website and a description but that is about it. Strategy seems simply to drive people to their site not to engage them via social media. Performance is also POOR

Maybe the largest insurance provider in Finland. Well just the same as the others sadly, no content, no following, no followers. Performance can only be described as POOR.

Well If vahinkovakuutus are the only insurance company i have heard of to have a link to their website at least. They also have the most followers but that is artificially high as i have drawn attention to thi sprofile through my actions. It was about 12 followers when i started. There are no twits and not even a description. They only follower their Norwegian colleagues. Performance is POOR.

 So what can be surmised from this. Well it is clear that Insurance companies in Finland have not understood Twitter. For the most part they see it as their own channel to drive traffic to their website which concidently is such a turn of the century strategy. They have not even tried to push out their own marketing content. BTW another prehistoric strategy. This indicates to me that they clearly and simply,

1. Insurance companies in Finland Do Not Get Twitter
2. Insurance companies in Finland do not have Twitter in any real social media strategy
3. Insurance companies have not attempted to engage customers through Twitter in Finland
4. Insurance companies in Finland are behind the rest of the world.

But Why?

Why would Insurance companies in Finland not be present actively here in this media?

Insurance companies in Finland do not value Twitter as a marketing and engagement channel.

But Why?

Well from my own experience during this experiment and when i consider my own twitter followers related to this experiement i see a trand.

Of the followers i have only around 5-10% of them are from Finland. This suggest that even though the content of this experiement was targeted at Finnish people in Finland, they did not follow me as often as people from other countries. Of course language may be a factor here but let's consider the average Twitter user.

The average Twitter user is under 40. In Finland pretty much everyone under this age can speak English despite what they may think themselves. Finns are pretty bashful when asked "can you speak English?" The usual answer is a little but then you proceed to have a fluent conversatipon.

In anycase we are left with the situation where perhaps the level of adoption of Twitter is low by both the companies and the population as a whole. In this case i will not enter into the "which came first the chicken or the egg" type conversation but will simply state that, perhaps Finlands reputation as an early adopter and innovator of new technologies is not justified based upon the populations behaviour regarding Twitter. Or perhaps it is just that Finns are not that "social" which is something that does fit the sterotype of a typical Finn.

Who knows why, but the pattern is clear and i believe is indicative of many Finnish companies performance regarding social media and Social CRM and in part explains If Vahinkovakuutus's slow and not very "customer orientated" response to my own Social Media Experiment.

Why Excellent Customer Service is Essential in the Insurance Industry

When we think of most companies they sell physical products and when i think back to my school day Geography classes something that we were drilled with then were the three main industry types, Primary (mining in particular), Secondary (manufacturing), Tertiary (Selling consumer products and the service industry).

Well for most of us as consuners we only ever have contact with the tertiary industry as part of our daily private lives.We buy, we use and we experience.

Most companies sell physical products. If i buy a TV i watch it, i use it, i experience it on a regular basis. The buying experience is a very small part of the overall equation and user experience. The products is used everyday or at least on a regular basis. For the most part, the manufacturer or the provider of the product is not involved in this at all. The only time that they may become involved is when something goes wrong. In many cases though this is the responsibility of the retailer to handle the end customers service request.  As such for Sony or Samsung or LG the most important thing is the daily function and performance of the product and not so much the customer service.

If we think about the service industry such as a reastaurant they are selling a produc,t the food but, also an experience which is strongly affected by imeasurable factors such as ambience or atmosphere in the restaurant. The customers themselves contribute to this. However the company are able to nurture this in the design of the restaurant and most importantly the customer service they offer. People come back to restuarants because of the experience. The product i.e. the food, the ambience and the customer service. In this case all three are important.

This brings us to the Insurance industry. Despite what they like to think they do not sell products. The policies and the insurances you purchase are not products in themselves. They are not physical they are not affected by ambience. What insurance companies sell is piece of mind. You know, believe and trust that when something goes wrong they are there for you.

In If vahinkovakuutus's slogan they state "don't worry, we help". This is the core of what they do.

Unlike in the other industries there needs to be trust for the "product to work". Without trust there is no product and no customers.

As a customer you only ever really experience your product personally when something goes wrong. Day to day you experience the insurance product simply as piece of mind. Why else would you contact the insurance company. As such the essence of what an insurance company does and when you experience their product is when you need to test that piece of mind. As such as an insurance company it is essential that this is recognised and that the absolute most effective service for the customer is provided. In order to serve their customers an insurance company should focus their resources on customer service and supplying the customer with a superb experience.

When a customer approaches an insurance company it is when something bad has happenned to them personnally. This is a very personal and often painful and stressful time for them. They need help and for them they are experiencing some kind of emergency. Granted this iswith differing degrees of scale. Someone has died, their house has had fire damage, they are stranded abroad or ar sick or injured or they have had a road accident. These are incredibly stresful and worrying times for a customer and this is when they NEED a very professional, accurate, caring and personal service experience to help ease their pain and certainly not to add to it.

Well here are some facts about If vahinkovakuutus's customer service.

1. You cannot get face to face service related to claims in an If Vahinkvakuutus office. In Finland (You can in Denmark)
2. If offices in Finland only sell insurance. At least o me this indicates they care more about sales than service.
3. When you call If's emergency number representative you may be speaking to a third party (Elisa)who do not know If's policies and can cannot give you accurate information even about whether or not you are covered.

Think about it when you have a car accident, if someone dies or gets injured or your house burns down. In these most important situations.

Do you not want to be able to speak to someone personally face to face, would this help you?
Don't you want to know that the information you receive is accurate and correct and you can act upon it.

This is the essence of experiencing the insurance product and as such,

An insurance company's product can be measured by their customer service experience. In fact NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.

When you do not get this you may find that you have been sold "piece of mind" but with this kind of service you may get home and discover that your television box is full of rocks or your restaurant food has come straight out of a garbage can.

Without a great customer service experience can you really trust an insurance company?

So as to help IF improve their customer service experience this is what i have asked for.

Read the full thread

Let me/If vahinkovkuutus know what you think. Post here or on their own wall.

If Vahinkovakuutus Respond: Sorry NO you Cannot Control Social Media

Well If Vahinkovakuutus have replied again and i think this time it seems even clearer to me that If vahinkovakuutus do not really understand the purpose of social media other than THEIR OWN marketing channel. Sorry Facebook is a forum and you cannot control it. It is not your website where you can control it.

You may have initiated the conversation but you are just a contributor! Here is their and my response.

What do you think? Feel free to post your comments on IF Vakuutusyhtiö's wall or here, wherever is appropriate for you!