CASE STUDIES

Face-to-face customer sessions

Through our retail brands, we encourage our local branches to invite their customers to attend a face-to-face session with our people. These sessions are held outside of branch hours in a separate venue, where a minimum of two and a maximum of four customers talk with each IAG employee in attendance. They explain what they expect from us and discuss some of their past experiences with the company.

The face-to-face sessions are designed to bring our people close to customers and provide employees with feedback on their performance. The sessions have also been used to inform members of the community about our social responsibility initiatives. In the 2005 financial year, we held 37 customer face-to-face sessions nationwide.

Our people are empowered to act locally on the feedback from customers and communicate findings that may have broad application.

In May 2005, NRMA Insurance's branch in Orange, regional New South Wales, organised an event that was held at the local CareFlight helicopter hangar. At the event, the CareFlight Managing Director spoke about our support for its community activities.

Ian, NRMA Insurance's Bathurst and Orange Branch Manager, explains, "The greatest benefit we get from these sessions is the feedback we receive from customers. We can use this to put local action plans in place and share the information from customers with our Customer Strategy team in head office and other stakeholders in the business to make continual improvements to our products and the service we provide."

"It was particularly valuable for us to tie our session in with one of our community partners. It helped our customers understand why we support certain community groups. That's when it makes sense to them. It's powerful for them to see the value of what we're doing, it's particularly powerful for those customers who are also shareholders."