Transformation to the core at Southern Cross Travel Insurance

On flexibility: When you’re doing a transformation, the hardest thing to do is get started. I think because the scale of it looks so enormous, it’s really difficult to know how and where to start. So our biggest challenge was actually breaking it down into bite sizes and figuring it out. Once we started, things began to flow. But another thing that transformations do is you can’t assume what you knew at the start is what you’re going to know at the end. And as we’ve gone down this transformation journey, we’ve learned a lot. For example, we constructed our teams one way at the start of the transformation, and during the process, we reorganized ourselves about four times as we moved through and learned things, and ran into different obstacles and broke through obstacles, refining our scope. As we’ve progressed, we’ve had to be open to change. I think that’s been a big challenge for the team. A technologist likes certainty and what they’re doing. They’re basically engineers at heart, so having to build in a flexible mindset has been challenging, but it’s been good for us. Diversity is essential as well, not just relevant. We have a really diverse team, and when you have that, you get a lot of debate, but debate with the right culture ends up with really amazing outcomes, which enables you to tackle big problems. It’s actually the only way you can do a truly successful transformation. So we have a lot of healthy conflict in our team because of the diversity, but what we don’t have is group think.

On staying the course: What often happens in a transformation process, because they tend to go on for a long time, is the business gets bored and they want to get on with doing other things. They want this transformation thing to be over so they can go back to doing the exciting things they want to do, and there’s a real temptation to be distracted to divert into something else. I think that keeping the main thing the main thing has been the other reason why we’ve been able to do this in such a short period of time. So remember the problem you’re trying to solve, be single-minded about it, and choose the simplest path to get there. Don’t try and add everything all at once. There’s plenty of time later to improve it. And once you do that, once you form that path, then you can understand what capabilities you’re going to need, and you can assemble a small group of people highly skilled in those capabilities to form a lead team. And that core team is essential for the success of delivering a transformation. I’d also say that team can’t be people from outside your business because nobody loves your business like people who work in it. That core team is essential, but you’re never going to get enough people for a transformation from your internal team. You need to scale up by bringing in resources you can scale down later. And that’s easy to do once you have that real core team that has ownership, is highly capable, and understands the simple path you’ve laid out.

On being digital first: Just about every business is digital first, even if they don’t think they are. Everything involved in every transaction you do in your business is underpinned by some kind of technology. So even if you don’t sell anything online, you’re still a digital business. But what’s changed is the expectation of the experience from both internal customers and those external ones you’re selling products to. They expect digital and in-person experiences to be equally good, and people want to have the option to choose which way to go. For businesses, that’s a big challenge transforming things that you’ve been doing over the phone or through a human into a digital environment. It’s not easy to scale, so that’s where I think the emergence of new technologies like AI is changing the game, and so we’re using it. For instance, we used to do sentiment analysis manually by reviewing call recordings. But now we have continuous AI monitoring of customer sentiment, and it can alert your contact center team leaders when something’s going off track. What that does is it helps us immediately provide a better experience for our customers. Now we know instantly how well we’re doing, and it can also help us pick up on where sentiment might be falling. It might be a particular product design or something they’re finding they can’t do on a website. So this is where AI is accelerating those experiences and helping businesses move faster. We’re very open to adopting that. And I think because we’re a small business and quite agile, it’s probably easier for us to adopt some of those changes and test them.