Bupa has announced it will move away from a traditional sales only framework with its customer-facing employees to principally focus on value-add conversations.
The insurer said the change coincides with the annual premium increase and the introduction of other reforms with the number of customers now reviewing their coverage at record levels.
According to Justin James, director of customer growth, Bupa started moving to a more customer focussed framework in 2014. He said recent findings from the Royal Commission into Banking Misconduct reinforced Bupa’s decision to adopt the new approach.
“There was a lot for banks and financial advisors to learn through the Royal Commission. Although we’d already started this change, those lessons gave us the assurance that we had made the right decision and our practices were in line to community expectations,” said Mr James.
“Our work in this space has been underway for almost five years. We’ve had external advice from PriceWaterhouseCoopers to shape our thinking, which, paired with the insights from the Royal Commission, is a major reason we feel we are ahead of the curve.
“We have moved away from a framework solely recognising and rewarding our people based on sales and our customer-focused reporting now aligns with our Fair Customer Practices and Value Conversations approach.
“There will be further improvements, but we believe we’re demonstrating change from a ‘sales’ reward culture to one that helps ensure that the customer's needs and choices are the only things that matter, regardless of financial value,” he said.
Bupa said its performance indicators are now set based on the quality of customers conversations regardless of whether there was a sales outcome.
“Our thinking is, if we reward customer-led behaviour, then we will grow an organic customer-led culture and that’s exactly what we have seen over the past few years,” said Mr James.
“We’re also evolving the way we recruit so that we appoint people with the right profile and motivations to reflect our culture, while also overhauling our training to help our people deliver valued conversations every time.”