A solitary peak on the insurance market.

How the insurance company CSS leads the Swiss health insurance market with a combination of transparency and a seamless customer journey.

Founded:

1899

Employees: 2,700
Head office: Lucerne, Switzerland
www.css.ch

+570 per cent

insurance policies taken out online

Products:

Objective

The insurance market is very competitive. High-quality content, in the right place at the right time, will make a crucial difference here.

Global players set the bar high when it comes to customer experience. No company can afford to fall short of these standards today.

Insurance companies protect their customers in the event of a claim. Transparency and a personal connection are vital to build up trust in the company and product.

Results

The insurance company CSS uses Adobe Target to segment its customers into meaningful target groups, and can offer them bespoke content through Adobe Campaign.

With informative content and modern tools such as the premium calculator, which allows potential customers to compare prices and take out their new insurance policies directly online, CSS offers its customers a seamless customer experience.

CSS always sends confirmation emails to ensure that each processing step is documented for customers. These emails can be generated automatically with Adobe Campaign while still maintaining a personal touch.

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“First-class customer experiences aren’t just a nice extra, they make a key contribution to sales. If customers have a seamless customer journey, it creates a sense of trust and convinces them that you know what you’re doing!”

Marcel Engelberger

Head of Digital Marketing & E-Business, CSS

CSS seeks to ensure consistent customer experiences

A seasoned mountain climber knows that experience, good preparation and the right equipment will make all the difference on the way to the summit. So it’s no surprise that the insurance company CSS has reached the summit of the Swiss market. But the company, which was founded in 1899 and has its head office in Lucerne, Switzerland, would never think of resting on its laurels.

It’s easy to sell trendy lifestyle products. The latest tech innovations and most popular must-have fashion items are in high demand with consumers—insurance less so. CSS says: Challenge accepted! Through modern, consistent customer experiences and absolute transparency, the company is making insurance feel less like something boring—and complicated! —that “has to be done” and turning insurance cover into a real “must-have”. Who said that a trendy lifestyle and security were mutually exclusive?

Making insurance fun

The insurance market in particular is a highly competitive industry in which expertise and trust are vital. If you want to impress customers here, you need to focus on relevance and first-class customer experiences, to ensure you stand out from the competition. “We focus on high-quality content, to offer our customers a reliable source of information,” says Marcel Engelberger, Head of Digital Marketing & E-Business at CSS. “First of all, we analyse which questions and issues consumers are particularly concerned about when it comes to health, then we provide relevant content. That means we’re offering valid information and generating traffic to our website.”

The journey continues directly from there. As well as informative and relevant content, potential customers can, of course, also find out about products and insurance tariffs on CSS’ website and can use the premium calculator to calculate their personal costs and benefits quickly and easily—and can even take out a new insurance policy directly online. However, it’s also clear that customers sometimes need time to think before deciding on a new health or home insurance policy. Prospective customers therefore always have a night to sleep on it before making a decision and can pick up exactly where they left off the next day—regardless of which device they’re using. This works because the current status is saved and sent to them via email. “We’re aiming for the kind of customer experience that the likes of Netflix offer their customers,” says Marcel Engelberger. “With the streaming providers’ apps, users can always start watching again where they left off. Consumers are increasingly expecting this standard from other providers too—and that’s exactly where we’ve put our benchmark.”

Seamless customer experiences drive sales

This pays off: last year, CSS saw a 570 per cent increase in insurance policies taken out online—without the need for a customer adviser, as the process of obtaining a policy is fully automated. Adobe Campaign helps to ensure that automation doesn’t make the process feel sterile or impersonal at all. Instead of receiving a generic email after taking out a policy, customers receive a confirmation email with a personal greeting from their contact—including a photo. In addition, policyholders receive a confirmation email each time they contact the company, whether it’s because they have contacted customer service or updated their address online in their user profile. “The whole process, from using the premium calculator to taking out a policy, is precisely tailored to the customer’s needs,” says Stefanie Bucher, Online Marketing Specialist at CSS. “All the relevant information is provided in a way that is compact and transparent and is adapted to each individual step for the customer. While this seamless customer journey is convenient for customers, it’s equally important for them to feel certain that their personal needs are being taken into account, even though the process of taking out the policy is fully digital.”

It’s precisely this feeling of security and personal support that is one of the secrets to CSS’ success. Instead of marketing to target groups, the company segments potential customers by audience and shows tailored content on the channels that are relevant to them—always at exactly the right time, of course. Because being there when it matters is key, both in the event of an insurance claim and in marketing. Every person in Switzerland needs health insurance. With Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign, CSS has gained a strong partner that enables it to analyse this homogeneous target group, segment it and talk to it at precisely the right time. “There are moments when something just clicks—and suddenly everything comes together,” says Marcel Engelberger. “For us, it was when we introduced Adobe Campaign. Now we can contact each individual person in a targeted way at exactly the right time with information that is completely relevant to them, based on ‘zero moment of truth’ events. And the best thing is, it actually takes less time, because the process is fully automated.”

“There are moments when something just clicks—and suddenly everything comes together. For us, it was when we introduced Adobe Campaign. Now we can contact each individual person in a targeted way at exactly the right time with information that is completely relevant to them, based on ‘zero moment of truth’ events. And the best thing is, it actually takes less time, because the process is fully automated.”

Marcel Engelberger

Head of Digital Marketing & E-Business, CSS

While it used to take a whole working day to put together an email newsletter, the amount of time involved has been reduced to just one hour since Adobe Campaign was introduced in 2020. Not least, this is due to seamless integration into Adobe Experience Manager. “Putting together images and logos on the server while always bearing in mind CI used to cost us valuable time. With Adobe Experience Manager, we have a central location that all employees can access, where we can manage all our assets. That allows us to create emails in Adobe Campaign more quickly and efficiently based on predefined content,” says Marcel Engelberger.

This is particularly crucial in times of crisis. “We were in a very good position digitally even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which naturally helped us a great deal with regard to the restrictions imposed due to the crisis,” Marcel Engelberger adds. “First-class customer experiences aren’t just a nice extra, they make a key contribution to sales. If customers have a seamless customer journey, it creates a sense of trust and convinces them that you know what you’re doing!”

On to new summits

The customer journey runs like clockwork, but CSS has already set its sights on the next summit. The company wants to make customer profiles more comprehensive in order to gain an overall view of customers, and also plans to expand automated trigger emails further, to make the customer experience even more individual.