Dan Barnhart is Lead CX Consultant at Transamerica Corporation, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based company which is part of Aegon, a group of various companies and investment firms operating around the world, offering life and supplemental health insurance, investment, employee benefits, and retirement services. Barnhart was in a Georgia-based band briefly before becoming a technologist in marketing at Coca-Cola. In the 1990s, Barnhart joined his father’s advertising agency in Denver, where he started the digital division of the company. He shifted direction after the 9/11 attacks and started his own agency, Malenke|Barnhart, landing a succession of clients—Qwest Communications, Disney, Ford, and Quiznos. After a successful decade, he sold his company and opened a recording studio and started working on sound design and music for gaming firm Ubisoft, The Voice, and other clients. Barnhart also provided consulting services for a period of time before he was recruited to join Transamerica.

For Transamerica and its almost 30,000-strong workforce, its biggest CX challenge is the technology integration of the company’s many legacy systems, including decades-old mainframes like the IBM AS400s and other systems. Transamerica as a company dates back as far as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. “It’s really deep, and broad, and old,” Barnhart says, of the wide variety of systems that can be found serving the company’s 30 million customers spread across its multiple lines of business.

Transamerica also knows that it needs to improve its Net Promoter Score (NPS), the metric that measures customer loyalty. Among financial services companies, Transamerica ranks sixth or seventh, according to Barnhart, with the firm’s highest detractor score occurring in the area of customer payment experience. At present, checks and EFT/ACH are the only way for customers to make monthly recurring payments—an antiquated and inconvenient process for most consumers—even though Transamerica has indicated it is “moving” into debit and credit card acceptance. Transamerica also plans to soon unveil a new payments portal that was three years in the making, and the company says it is working to bring in payment networks like Zelle and peer-to-peer payment apps like Venmo.

CX Success Stories

Transamerica switched to Qualtrics three years ago in a major implementation move that Barnhart qualifies as a CX success story, especially when Transamerica’s size and heft are considered. Barnhart and his teammates can also claim success in simplifying and revamping the company’s payment forms. Working with thousands of pages of paper forms across multiple business lines, Barnhart condensed some forms from an unwieldy tome of 10 pages to a shorter, more manageable document of 3 pages. And working across operations, finance, marketing, and other groups, Barnhart and team racked up another CX win when they created the Transamerica Employee Panel (TEP), an in-house team consisting of approximately 1,000 employees that Transamerica can leverage as a knowledgeable resource to serve as survey respondents or subjects of inquiry in the company’s research initiatives.

Internal Barriers

Barriers and obstacles in various forms exist in all enterprise organizations. At Transamerica, accessing data is a layered, circuitous process, requiring approval from the IT department. And a single line of business may have 10 to 15 databases associated with it. “You get under the hood and things are much more spaghetti-like than you imagined,” Barnhart notes. Getting systems to “talk to each other” is a constant, going concern, and human barriers are “always an issue, as well,” he adds. “There’s a lot of great energy,” Barnhart declares.

Key Technologies

Despite “some pain” that Barnhart said was experienced by Transamerica during the Qualtrics implementation, the move to a new solution made a significant difference, with Qualtrics succeeding in pushing Transamerica capabilities forward rapidly through product development and the acquisitions that were made during the past few years. At the same time, a place continues to exist for traditional research technologies and methodologies, including good old qualitative research that Barnhart conducts with customers around the country.

A Transamerica goal in the future is to broaden the areas where Qualtrics tools can be used, Barnhart says. Qualtrics Text iQ, for instance, uses advanced statistical techniques, automation, and machine learning (ML) to analyze large quantities of text-based data at scale and to understand what matters most to customers or employees, based on an analysis of their own words. Transamerica should also go beyond surveys and gather more information in other ways. “Everybody is in survey overload.”

Predictions for CX Market Development

Over the next few years, Barnhart believes that predictive analytics—and the deeper insights springing from that process—will become even more important and useful for CX. ML and AI will be bigger forces in CX as well, thanks to their increased and more pervasive use in CX and call center solutions. Barnhart also believes in reciprocity: Although CX needs to evolve as a practice toward better integration with marketing and technology groups, practitioners in the two camps must likewise do their part and attempt to increase their understanding and appreciation of CX.

Above all, the focus must be on the customer journey, to be used “as a map, rather than a pet project,” Barnhart says. “The journey is the winner.”

About the CX Innovator Series

The CX Innovator Series is an actionable and educational industry initiative that showcases the best practices that leading end-user executives are using within their organizations to shape their community’s experience. The series is a collaborative effort between Dash Network, Sleeping Giant Labs, and Team Wakabayashi. Dash Network originally published this article here. Using expertly curated executive interviews combined with quantitative research from consumer surveys, the CX Innovator Series provides tangible insights and a deeper understanding of how successful companies are utilizing CX programs resulting in positive business outcomes.

The CX Innovator Series is made possible by support from our lead sponsors: Concentrix, eGain, Tealium, and QuestionPro. If you would be interested in participating in the CX Innovator initiative, either as part of an end-user interview or as a supporting sponsor, please contact us at: sales@sleepinggiantsales.com.

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