It’s not often that you hear a company say straight out that it wanted to find out what brokers didn’t like about it, and then that it happily went public with that information.
But that’s what AXA did recently, when realising that it didn’t have a real understanding of where it was positioned in the broker space and what made it unique compared to other insurers. The company decided to go out and do some research to get an overview on what brokers thought of the company, from products to people.
Alasdair Stewart, marketing and broker development director, said that the exercise was important for the company to really understand why brokers recommend AXA to clients, and the factors that went into their decision making.
From AXA’s perspective, they want brokers to be recommending the company for the right reasons, so it was vital to understand what those were.
“It’s important that brokers have confidence in why they are recommending AXA to a client,” Stewart explained. “If a client said ‘so why are you recommending AXA to me?’, and their only answer is price, then that’s not a great position.
“If the only answer was ever price all would you see across the whole industry would be cost cutting at every opportunity.”
From this idea and holistic approach, the company decided to approach brokers all over the country.
“[We decided] let’s go and ask the brokers what they think of AXA,” Stewart said. “This wasn’t about ‘tell us how good we are’, this was about tell us what it is like to be a partner of AXA, what you like about it what you don’t like about it.”
The feedback was that AXA was known for their people and how helpful they were on a person-to-person relationship level, something Stewart is very proud of.
“Out of that work we got really strong feedback around different companies in the market. The thing that came out really strongly for us was our people, our relationship,” he said.
“We came out clearly as the leader with our relationships and our people, that we’re really flexible when we work with brokers to find a solution for their clients. Other companies were famous for other things. As a marketing director I’ll take what we got, because we’re a people business.”
The issue then became what to do with that information. AXA decided to put together a statement that summed up what they are, and where they are going - that they are always working towards something more.
Called Committed to Progress, it’s a summary of AXA’s value proposition, showing brokers what it means to partner with AXA.
“Committed to always pushing, provoking and learning. It’s a partnership built on trust, honesty and reliability. Underpinned by our industry-leading knowledge, tools and expertise that ensure you and your clients are always on the front foot. We’re Committed to Progress,” part of the pledge reads.
Stewart said that the pledge is now part of the core of AXA, and will be a focus for a long time.
“The committed to progress and pledge has to be a longer term thing, we can’t just say we’re going to do this for three months then we’ll move on to something sexier,” he explained. “It’s about demonstrating everything we do.”
Moving forward he said the pledge is also about continuing to work with brokers to prove the company is working on improving and focusing on relationships.
“We recognise that we’re not perfect, we’re a good, strong brand but we have the humility to recognise that sometimes we can get it wrong and then that’s where the committed to progress piece came from,” Stewart explained.
“We understand we’re really good at some stuff but we’re also trying to get better. The committed to progress piece is about being open to that and accepting that we do some stuff really, really well, and at the same time we need to do some stuff better.”
