The Challenge

AXA needed to improve customer service quickly, against a backdrop of significant change: a newly appointed CEO, a new leadership team and a refreshed brand.

Research with customers had identified trust as the critical issue. But the challenge wasn’t simply to tell employees that AXA wanted to be more trusted. It was to translate trust into something tangible and behavioural.

AXA defined trust as demonstrating three things consistently:

• Care — showing customers that you understand and value them.
• Competence — giving customers confidence that you know what you’re doing.
• Reliability — doing what you say you will do, consistently.

The challenge for INVOLVE was to make those ideas real for every employee — including people who didn’t work directly with customers.

The Solution

INVOLVE designed and delivered a long-term brand and customer engagement programme centred on the Intensive Customer Experience: a one-day immersive experience delivered to all 13,000 AXA employees.

Rather than presenting people with the theory of customer centricity, we put them in situations where they had to experience, interpret and deliver trust for themselves.

Key elements included:

• Trust Trumps — using AXA’s real customer segments in a Top Trumps-style activity, helping employees understand customers as people rather than data points.
• Customer Invasion — an intensive 90-minute simulation in which teams had to respond to real customers making calls, sending letters and arriving unexpectedly for meetings. Employees experienced first-hand how different actions could build — or quickly destroy — Care, Competence and Reliability.
• Caught or Dropped — the experience culminated in a live customer press conference. Customers reflected openly on how they had been treated and whether the experience had strengthened their trust in AXA enough for them to remain a customer.

Taking it back into the business

The experience wasn’t designed as a one-off event. INVOLVE also created an “ICE in a Box” toolkit that enabled managers to continue the conversation with their own teams across the business.

It contained presentations, interactive materials, video content and Trust Trump activities, giving managers everything they needed to revisit the principles of trust and keep translating them into everyday behaviours after the live experience. The original material describes it specifically as a way for managers to continue the programme nationwide.

The Results

13,000 employees took part across 220 one-day experiences.

Annual employee engagement increased by 4% — two points above target.

The programme also generated enough ownership that employees went on to voluntarily use techniques from the experience to train new recruits, while the work received recognition from both the IoIC and CBI.