Transforming CX at Zurich Insurance Group

When Conny Kalcher joined Zurich Insurance Group as chief customer officer she was tasked with improving CX across the organization. But rather than continuing to analyze Voice of the Customer surveys and NPS ratings in isolation, Kalcher (pictured below) started with the brand.

“We needed to start with who we are, why we are here and what we stand for,” she tells CX Network. “In some companies you already have that fleshed out, so you can then go directly to customer experience. But in the case of Zurich, we have been around for 150 years, we have survived wars, we have survived economic crises, but we needed to flesh out the customer value proposition and our approach, in order to be relevant for today's customers.”

Appointed in 2019, Kalcher’s first task was to “build a brand house” internally and validate it with customers. This saw Zurich’s top teams look at the disruption occurring across the insurance industry from a new generation of providers – the digitally native insurtechs – as well as the tech companies providing innovative experiences outside of insurance.

“Customer expectations were changing. You can receive an Amazon order the day after placing it, but at Zurich, a customer couldn’t change their own address. That didn’t really work anymore and we needed to react to it,” Kalcher says.

As the project developed the transformation covered everything from Zurich’s visual identity to the language of insurance, switching to what can go right rather than what can go wrong.

This process didn’t just engage customers; it set the scene for how a focus on CX would transform the culture of the organization, something which as a former head of HR, Kalcher had broad experience of. Kalcher says the changes at Zurich generated a buzz among staff who were suddenly bought into what the brand was and what it could become.

With the foundations in place, it was time to work on CX and a similar approach was taken. “We first defined what our mission was for CX, and that was to create a meaningful relationship with our customers and move away from being transactional. In insurance, you don't have many direct interactions with customers because it's an intermediary industry” she says. “You may not speak to as many as 40 percent of your customers during the year, so when we do talk and engage with them, even if it's just reaching out to ask if they're okay, that is a key moment.”

Defining what good CX looks like

When it was time to tackle CX Kalcher, her team and colleagues mined the insights they held on individual retail customers and used them to define 33 CX standards, which focused on what customers are looking for and where could Zurich could support them. Adopting human-centered design and processes, this ranged from making contact details easier to find to creating “integrated customer experience journeys” and rolling out empathy training for front-line teams.

“In totality, the 33 standards add up to what good looks like, what we want to stand for in the industry and how we want to differentiate from other companies,” Kalcher says. “We launched them, then we asked all our markets to make plans to achieve them. It's not something you can change overnight, it’s a much longer journey, but we didn’t prescribe the solutions. We simply said, ‘this is where you need to get to’, and they had to find out locally what made sense for them.”

This localized and Zurich-specific means by which to measure CX is already proving where gains are being made. In retail, Kalcher says the organization is “on market or above” for 75 percent of the standards. Proof of this is also evident in the transactional net promoter score (tNPS), which improved by an average of seven points between 2022 and 2024, with some touch points achieving 20-30 point gains.

“This journey will never end because the world is changing. Needs are evolving. Demands are changing. We are on a continuous improvement journey,” she says.

Using net revenue retention to measure CX

As expected, transactional NPS isn’t the only metric Kalcher uses to measure and communicate the benefits of CX. While tNPS can communicate customer satisfaction gains, Kalcher also needs to quantify being “the preferred insurer of choice by earning our customers' loyalty”. This depends on the relevance of the Zurich Insurance brand and is measured alongside NPS, which is compared to the NPS or other insurers, but not used to set KPIs.

However, there’s another metric now coming into play: net revenue retention (NRR). “I'm really excited about introducing NRR because that's when we, for the first time, link the impact of the customer strategy to our financial performance. Over time, we can measure the loyalization, how much have we loyalized our customers and the impact of that on our financials. That’s a game changer; because the business reacts to that and will deliver on that.”

In his book, Do B2B Better, Jim Tincher explores NRR in detail, and speaking to CX Network in November 2024, he said NRR is a means by which CX can realign its goals with the wider business strategy, allowing those in experience management to talk the same language as the CFO and CEO. In short, he says NRR can prevent CX from becoming irrelevant and at some point, obsolete.

“I see that as well, because otherwise we get fluffy,” Kalcher says. “It's like saying ‘we changed this journey. What did it mean?’ The impact on sales could come from other areas as well, but here you get a much clearer look into how the impact is working.”

She adds: “We've talked for years now about how CX should work more closely with the CIO or IT leaders. The future is also how we team up with the CFO. We need to be much more literate about how to team up with finance in order to make the impact of what we do visible.”

In the context of her organization-wide CX strategy, Kalcher’s next focus is to “make NRR successful”.

“I am very, very keen that we can demonstrate the value of the work we're doing. We need to be able to talk to different people and achieve results in different ways, and this metric is not so well known at the moment. I was part of rolling out NPS when that was new, and I was part of a global group that really supported that and drove NPS. I would love for Zurich to be part of how we evolve NRR and how we prove to the world that it can be done. It is hard work, but this is the fun work.”

The future of CX in retail insurance

As Kalcher outlined at the start of the interview, traditional insurers today face competition both within and beyond their industry, thanks to the customer expectations set by digital-first experiences within and beyond insurance. Addressing this requires organization-wide efforts to ensure every customer touch point and back-end process are focused on customer outcomes. It’s just part of why Kalcher would like to see CX become the glue that holds all jobs and business functions together, rather than its own department or function.

“I would love to see CX become something we all have in us, so that, no matter what, just being a professional within a business means that you need to understand customers and how CX can work for you,” she says.

Before her 2019 appointment as CCO for Zurich Insurance Group, Kalcher held several senior roles at LEGO group, among them VP of people, culture and corporate communications. She says this HR-related experience strongly influenced the success of her CX initiatives with Zurich, particularly around instilling customer centricity and motivating an entire company to make CX the focal point of its work.

On how others can emulate some of this success, she says: “To change a company culture, you need to work with various levers. One thing to know, is what you measure is what you get. Therefore, if you have customer KPIs and everybody is measured on the improvements you want to see with customers, they get done. The other thing is that you can’t just instruct people to be customer-focused, because they don’t always know what good looks like. You need to create strategies, frameworks, processes and structures that make people act in the new way of working,” she explains.

The case in point is Kalcher’s 33 CX standards. “We were not telling people this is how you need to do it, we were saying, ‘this is what good looks like’.”

She adds: “It's about finding out how you speak to the emotions of your internal people and to their aspirations, then showing what good looks like. There is something in the human character that if you want to do the right thing, it motivates us to do the right thing, and that then becomes a tsunami of change. That doesn't mean that there is no resistance, there is always resistance to change, but the more you can enable that change to be seen as a positive thing and add value to people's job, the more change you will see.”

As Kalcher’s approach to metrics and journey management shapes the future of CX for Zurich Insurance, the case for others to follow becomes even stronger. With the ability to use NRR to measure and communicate the links between the customer experience, operations and the financial benefits of CX, the future of CX will definitely bring change, but it is undoubtedly bright.

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