If Vahinkovakuutus Social CRM and Customer Service Conclusions

I am slightly cutting with tradition here and skipping the analysis and jumping straight to the conclusion. I will add stats and analysis later along with my Social CRM Customer orientated Engagement Framework (i may need to come up with a shorter name). I will base this upon what i have learnt in this experiment and with an eye to enabling other customers out there to learn from my mistakes and engage companies through social media successfully. This will be added to the blog in installments during the upcoming weeks.

IF Vahinkovakuutus Customer Service Conclusions

One of the goals of this experiment was of course to get customer service via social media and Facebook in particular. I will start by summarising my thoughts with regard to this.

How did this score as a customer service experience in terms of technology?

Well in terms of my own experience of having to wait for responses it is no different than any other chanel a company may have you operate in. You write your question and wait for your response so in this respect it is the same as email, phone, web portal or even face to face conversation. This is as almost always the response is, "we will get back to you". This means that actually the experience is not so much affected by the technology but more by the company in questions own practices. However for me personally, it is a more than acceptable form of communication and fits with my own online presence. It is convenient and more so than having to remember passwords or logging in securely to a dedicated service which in itself causes added pain. Not really a good place for passing secure documents but a nice place to have the conversation.

How did the experience score in terms of  the service i received from If Vahinkovakuutus?

As i will discuss this in terms of SCRM in the next section i will just approach this in terms of general customer service.

With If vahinkovakuutus's responses i was annoyed in the delay in responses to my questions. Particularly where at one point they disengaged for two days and then still did not answer my questions. This made me feel like they were just ignoring my concerns and they were just hoping i would go away. This gave me the impression that they were childish. I was not attacking them i was not slandering them i was attempting to engage them in dialogue and discussion with what i felt was a valid argument.

I was also frustrated by If vahinkovakuutus's almost constant effort to get me off Facebook and force me back into their conventional channels. If vahinkovakuutus seem to only want to use Facebook as a marketing channel. They do not really want to engage me as a customer and they certainly do not want anything that could be perceived negatively there. What they do not understand they themselves can affect this perception by their own behaviour and how they react to the content that is placed there.

I was particularly disappointed that If Vahinkovakuutus did not want to publish results publically with regard their review into using a third party for their emergency customer service or for their lack of customer service in their shops. This just made me feel like they were not actually going to do anything and their promise to investigate this was just PR. I believe that they were not listening at all and i am left with the feeling that nothing will happen. I always felt like If vahinkovakutus had something to hide.

I was also very disapointed that, even though If admitted that they made mistakes, they still refused to compensate me for the costs that their miscommunication had caused me. This is something i just cannot get my head around to be honest. Basically the message i received is too bad we do not care!

Also the they refuse to even discuss any changes to their terms and conditions. I requested that they should,  accept liability in the case if incorrect or misleading information supplied by them. This just makes me feel sorry for their other customers.

Finally, two weeks ago i asked for a copy of the phone call that If based their decision not to pay on, this has still not reached me. This suggests to me that they have something to hide or are afraid that i will publish it. This gives me the impression that If vahinkovakuutus are not a morale company and you cannot trust them.

Social CRM Conclusions

The main goal in this experiment was to engage a company through their own social media and to see, if by doing so, the customer has gained more power in the conversation than through conventional channels.

In this respect i think that although my own personal goals of changing If vahinkkovakuutus's behaviour for the benefit of their other customers and gaining compensation for myself were not succesful i believe the experiment has been. This is why.

Having engaged If vahinkovakuutus through their own private channels i was unsuccesful in achieving my personal goals. I was not going to get my money back anyway, so in this respect nothing ventured nothing gained applies. All that this has cost me is my time.

More importantly by engaging If vahinkovakuutus in this public space i brought awareness to my cause. By gaining support i was able to apply pressure to If vahinkovakuutus above that that i could have through their own channels. From this factor alone the probability of success must rise even with the real danger of annoying them. This is because all of the advantages are the customers. The cusotmer has nothing to lose That is as long as they do not alienate their audience.

This strategy also has the power to benefit the company through excellent customer service (as so often  has been demonstrated) and has added value as a marketing tool. However the strategy also allows for the company to be embarassed publically and to devalue their own brand and disrupt their messaging. This has additional potency of course as the conversation is held on the company's own social media and infront of their own stakeholders. This is the worst case scenario for the company and involves the largest risk and cost for them. This of course depends upon how the company themselves behave and the ingenuity of the customer. Unfortunately for If vahinkovakuutus i feel that they fall firmly into the second category. If vahinkovakuutus have embarassed themselves and eroded their brand equity. This is why.

If' vahinkovakuutus's poor performance is not only about the poor customer service experience that i received (as discussed above) but also from their own attitude towards the use of social media. At all turns they attempted to get me off their Facebook group. They did not want to engage me there.

For some time, the fact that they tried to ignore me and hoped i would go away, is also a very immature attitude to this kind of dialogue. However in this situation i was able to diversify my strategy on their facebook page and other social media to interfere with their own marketing messaging. I believe that, this was the only reason that after two days they did re-engage me. In the social media world there is nowhere for them to hide and in this way the customer is empowered when they act in a civilised way. Again this must always be in a dialogue and never slanderous or you will lose your support and alienate your own audience. It is hard to do sometimes but, it essential to avoid losing your temper. You must always consider how you are perceived as an individual.

If vahinkovakuutus were aware of the risks of blocking me on the Finnish Facebook group. I had forseen that this may happen and had a backup plan but did not have to use it. I was however temporarily blocked from the other If Insurance local social media Facebook pages. I do not know where this decision came from but it says something about If's corporate culture with regard social media. Rights however were returned when i noticed and blogged about it. This again indicates a degree of empowerment. In terms of appearing as a caring socially responsible company this is of course totally unacceptable behaviour. The content that i added was of course not explicit or offensive to any of If's audience.

If vahinkovakuutus clearly only see social media as a way of pushing out their own message and they wish to control it at all cost. They even asked me not to post content related to my blog.

Sorry no you cannot control social media.

Facebook is a public forum, you may start the conversation but you should not try to control it. If vahinkovakuutus seem not at all interested in engaging customers in dialogue especially things that relate to their poor performance or things that are painful for them. Actually i believe this is a Finnish trait generally. This type of engagement is of course one of the mantras of Social CRM. I wonder if If vahinkovakuutus had ever heard of social CRM before this experience. One thing is for sure, they have now.

Additional benefit gained from engaging If vahinkovakuutus in the social media world is also in terms of the company's own costs related to the claim. By prolonging this claim i increased If's own financial costs for this claim dramatically and in all likelihood substantially more than the value of the original claim. This is another factor that empowers the customer. In traditional channels it is easy to diengage a customer when you have had enough of them. In the social media world it "looks bad" so it is harder for a company to do so. This means that as a customer you can continue to force the company to incur additional cost in handling your grievances and increase the pressure on them.

What was the ROI for If vahinkovakuutus?

How have If vahinkovakuutus come out of this experience? Financially the actual costs for handling the claim must be way above what they would have been had they just paid the claim in the beginning. They have also had a lot of negative publicity targeted at their own stakeholders and a permanent reminder of their poor performance preserved in this blog for all time and thanks to my SEO efforts this should be visible to people who search for If Vahinkovakuutus for the foreseeable future.

On top of this i can see from the stats that about 30 people visiting the site clicked an insurance related advertisement. Statistically and based upon the source of my traffic at least half of these were If customers or stakeholders as they came from If's own Facebook pages.  I would love to know if even one of these customers switched from IF to a competitor as a result of this. This is a cost to If i cannot measure and only guess at.

Furthermore as half half of my traffic came from the UK and US and none of these are If countries this is probably the first that those people have ever heard of If vahinkovakuutus. As such this is the first impression that will affect their image of If vahinkovakuutus as a brand. You know what they say about first impressions. This becomes even more pertanent if If vahinkovakuutus decide to venture into those markets.

Really it beggars belief that a company could be this stubborn, childish and damn stupid. As a manager i would have settled in the beginning taken the opportunity and sold the marketing story. I would have eliminated all risk from this. Especially as the customers case is a valid one and the original value of the claim was only 500 euros. I thought insurance companies were big on assessing risk and ROI.

Well it just shows me that even in the face of a valid argument (by their own admission) they will not put their customers first even when it is in their interest to do so. I just cannot understand this, it makes no sense at all.

What was my own ROI for this Experiment?

Well personally i did not do well, i was unable to turn over the claim decision and admittedly i spent a lot of time on this. However i have learned alot about how to engage a company and i can share that with others and i will. This blog is an enduring testament to that.

In the upcoming weeks i will add new content here that will outline a Social CRM engagement model/framework from the customers perspective. The purpose of which is to show customers how to succesfully engage a company in dialogue pertaining in particular to Social CRM. I will also add more content related to analysis of channels and statistics. In this way customer's everywhere will be able to learn from my mistakes and successes to engage with their own service and product providers.
Perhaps then the ROI for me is in terms of legacy. I hope that others can learn from this experience and apply some of the techniques. I also hope that companies themselves will learn from this and learn how to and how not to engage customers. At least everyone (including me) should learn something about Social Customer Relationship Management.

Conclusion

During this process i tried to find other examples of someone trying this kind of engagement and was unable to do so. All of the literature seems to have been written from the company's perspective in terms of their marketing successes. As far as i know this is the first time a customer has deliberately attempted to engage a company in an organised dialogue and not a rant and as part of a wider self organised social media campaign. Of this i can be proud.

As a final note, i managed to gain 50% of my traffic through If vahinkovakuutus's own social media. This meant i was able to target their own audience, on my site, with insurance advertisements from If's competitors. Originally this was to increase the pain to If vahinkovakuutus. Although the revenues are small from this endeavour (a few cents so far) and profitiability was not the point of this experiment, in about 100 years i should have recouped the losses originally caused to me by If vahinkovakuutus. In this respect on a long enough time scale this endeavour will not have cost me anything. This means the only costs were incurred solely by If vahinkovakuutus.

Well done If, we salute you! Sometimes when you win you lose and sometimes when you lose you win. Given a long enough time scale of course.

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