Introduction
At Simplyhealth, we believe that we are increasingly being viewed as an employer of choice in Bristol and that getting recruitment and induction right is one of the most important deliverables which will make our people feel special and valued, leading to them delivering fantastic service to our customers and enjoying long and varied careers with us.
Candidate search
Prospective candidates are sourced from a diverse range of backgrounds (with many applying directly using the simplyhealth website) but regardless of their experience, they must possess a passion for serving our customers. This is revealed in our recruitment assessment centres, where all candidates (after passing a telephone interview) are invited to our Bristol headquarters to compete a series of activities, including a group exercise, competency interview and role play.
Selection
These activities are co-ordinated by our Team Leaders, who themselves are accredited to recruit successfully upon completion of an internal two day course. We believe that our Team Leaders should be responsible personally for selecting the people they will be managing and that this also affords them the opportunity to give candidates the very best possible first impressions of Simplyhealth as their future employer.
The assessment centres are designed to put candidates at ease, encouraging and allowing key competencies to be displayed. Even when candidates don’t make the required standard, we receive lots of enquiries for personal feedback, and a request that we keep them in mind for future vacancies.
Team leaders keep in touch with new starters during their period of notice with their current employer, as we recognise that this is a time of great change for the individual when they juggle many different emotions and get to grips with the challenges of starting a new role with a new company. A simple phone call and a friendly voice help calm nerves and build the relationship between advisor and team leader.
Induction
Upon arrival, new starters enter our training academy, where over a four week period they are inducted into the basics of the role, so they can serve our private medical insurance customers, initially over the telephone.
Throughout the duration of academy, trainees are given the highest levels of support, with a wide ranging mix of product, systems and medical information shared in our dedicated training room ‘evolve’, which is only bookable for training purposes.
Much of the training is delivered class-room style, but also includes more dedicated and personal tuition and support, especially as trainees get closer to being released from their academy onto their new teams. All trainees also have a weekly one to one with their team leader, during which they review their ‘new starter checklist’, a document personal to them which charts their progress and highlights all the crucial information they need to know about life in Simplyhealth over their first few months with us.
Welcome-days
We recognise that it’s very challenging for new starters to build up their understanding on how such a diverse and ever expanding organisation like Simplyhealth operates, so after forty-five days in their new position, groups of new starters are invited to attend a welcome day, which is hosted by two Senior Managers.
This is a superb opportunity for people to build their internal network, find out more about how the organisation is structured, learn about the rich history of Simplyhealth, and to express how their first few weeks in the business have progressed. We call this the ‘feedback loop’ and recognise it’s a vital way of capturing both positive and negative comments, when the opportunity to shape all important first impressions is still possible. Our promise is to act upon problems immediately, and at the follow-up workshop, around day ninety, a further review of the feedback loop is completed.
Training
Throughout the new starter academy, individuals receive industry leading training, delivered by our dedicated training team. This support continues when the trainee leaves the academy and is delivered through a mixture of classroom sessions, informal groups and one to one dedicated support. We recognise that most new starters have a limited medical background and that it’s crucial they build up a working understanding of common medical conditions so they can fully emphasise with our customers, when they start to discuss their health and wellbeing during their telephone contact with us.
Support
Each operational team is headed up by a team leader whose responsibility is to support, nurture and champion the new starter, so that we realise their full potential. When appropriate, more technical queries from customers are supported by our Seniors Advisors, who have exceptional knowledge of our products and systems.
As private medical insurance covers a multitude of conditions, we also provide access to dedicated support in the form of our Nurse Case Managers. These are individuals who have come to Simplyhealth from a nursing background, and provide a rich source of general medical information, which advisors can refer to, and in certain cases, take on and case manage personally. The Nurse Case Managers also take pride in delivering training to their colleagues, something which advisors find incredibly useful, given the Nurses front line experience of working in practice.
Office environment
Simplyhealth believe their new regional headquarters for Private Medical insurance in Bristol provide advisors with a working environment that befits an organisation that encourages its people to bring the best of themselves to work each day, so they can support our customers make the most of life. Our office, ‘Simplyhealth House’ features:
· Modern desk and seating arrangements, with full ‘roaming profile availability’, where advisors can choose where they wish to sit-in daily, or team leaders can allocate specific space, dependant on circumstances.
· Informal breakout spaces, designed to help our employees have plenty of collaborative discussion and debate.
· Dedicated meeting and training venues, many fully equipped with telephone and video conferencing facilities.
· A theatre style auditorium, where over one hundred people can be briefed in comfort, perfect for large style briefings or conferences.
· Fully equipped kitchen areas, where staff are encouraged to break during their day with other colleagues, with a simple no-eating rule at desks enforced to ensure people do take quality time away from work and come back refreshed and refocused.
Benefits and progression
In addition, Simplyhealth provide a benefits package that is competitive and a promise to help people enjoy a rewarding career in customer services. Our student loan scheme, First home scheme, Cycle to work scheme and Car Share are just a few examples of the progressive benefits we believe is market leading.
One of the ways we demonstrate this is through our internal ‘advisor levels’ programme, which is our progression scheme that affords new starters the opportunity to grow within their role, by proving their knowledge and competency through a series of quarterly written and observational competency assessments.
In doing so, advisors can move from entry, through to developing level, then through to experienced, and receive step pay increases to reflect this progress. However, as we continue to strive for excellence in our people, all new starters are expected to achieve experienced competency status within two years of joining us.
When the quarterly competency assessments are not being held, advisors receive monthly coaching with their team leader and the performance team, which is a perfect opportunity to reflect on current performance and discuss ways of driving for improved customer satisfaction.
Reward and recognition is important to us, and we operate local schemes throughout the year where team leaders own their own reward budget, and are empowered to make personal decisions to recognise great performance in their teams. We also hold a gala awards ceremony, held at @Bristol for the past two years, where over two hundred customer services colleagues are invited to attend a celebration of the best of the best, filled with fantastic food and entertainment, as a huge thank you for everyone’s efforts over the previous twelve months.
Continuous improvement
Our culture is one of ‘challenging the norm’ by always looking to reduce customer effort and increase internal effectiveness. We all have responsibility for this and express ourselves through the better today programme, which promotes operational excellence. There are many ways we demonstrate this including:
· A dedicated space for bringing individuals and teams together, called Create. This unique environment has been deliberately designed by external consultants to be different, so that when you enter the space, you take a different view on how you can contribute to system, process and policy re-engineering. We recognise that a special individual is required to make Create come to life, so we have recruited an internal new ways of working specialist to do just that.
· On the outside of the Create space, a writeable wall has been created, where anyone can make a comment, which is then reviewed and taken forward. It’s become incredibly positive since the space was launched in March 2014 and the ideas on the wall have helped us make decisions on a range of policy and system developments. Crucially, staff are engaged because they can see their opinions, driven from their experiences of supporting our customers, really matter.
· Better Today ambassadors have been created, and are individuals dedicated to promoting and supporting operational excellence in our teams. Their remit is simple. Work closely with operational teams and managers to ensure that we move forward with a range of initiatives, and help give clarity, where it’s required, to new suggestions and JDI’s, which sometimes need a little help to implement and make a difference. Efficiency savings are tracked closely and individuals and teams supporting better today are championed at our quarterly better today excellence awards.
· We’ve been embarking on a series of Demand Capture initiatives, whereby teams have been recorded value and failure customer transactions. This has helped give clarity and substance to known issues, but also crucially, helped identify new areas of concern that we might not have fully known about. In one instance, we learnt that seventy percent of customer failure in our membership team could be attributed to calls from other Simplyhealth teams being handled in error, and we’ve since implemented a simple call routing solution to resolve this.
· The launch of ‘chatter’, an internal communication tool, has been transformational in encouraging colleagues to share and collaborate. We know that most people have knowledge of social media, and chatter is a great way of communicating quickly and widely to individuals and groups of people. Many new initiatives have been ‘born’ on chatter, which effortlessly supports the ethos of ‘Better today’.
Service
Our customers are at the heart of everything we do. Our objective is to provide them all with a personal service and by working in partnership with suppliers of healthcare to deliver better outcomes and better value, we believe this is what differentiates us from the rest of market.
Simplyhealth’s customer facing teams are focused on not only “what” we can deliver, but “how” we provide the exceptional products, levels of service and choice our customers have come to expect. We truly believe that providing excellent personal service to all our customers and clients will enhance our customer service proposition and reinforce “we can be bothered”.
We do not impose time limits on calls. Our teams are measured on how good the caller felt after speaking with us. Equally, we will not offer services that we do not believe bring value to our customers - cost will not be saved at the expense of the right clinical care or at the expense of member experience.
Customers tell us that we deliver the highest levels of service through a partnership ethos. This is the reason why corporate clients stay with Simplyhealth on average for 10 years and often longer. We will worry about our customers, one call and one claim at a time.
Evidence of success
‘World Class’ customer service accreditation - The Institute of Customer Services has recognised that our customer service team is world class, and have awarded us it’s sought after ServiceMark accreditation. This means our people are trained within a one to one coaching environment which helps to ensure they deliver consistent and excellent personal customer service.
Industry leading Satmetrix scores - In the recent Satmetrix European Net Promoter Score Survey, Simplyhealth achieved the highest score of +63 in the health insurance sector, compared to an industry average of +5. Scores are based on summary of 10,995 UK consumers.
Customer satisfaction survey results
We run regular customer satisfaction surveys where members are the judge of our performance. At times of ill health that little human touch of empathy and understanding goes a long way.