Customer-Led Impact: Porto Seguro's Engine for Growth

What you'll read here

• How to change the organisation's mindset and improve customer experience
• The importance of continuous learning for building a digital operation
• How to overcome the challenges of digital transformation and deliver positive business results.

It's no secret that consumer centrality lies at the heart of the new digital marketplace. However, this principle takes on even greater significance in the realm of services. In this sector, customer service is the essence of businesses, making it crucial to focus on the customer in all decision-making processes.

In fact, most service-providing companies have developed strong practices for engaging with their consumers, which leads them to believe that their efforts are not only appropriate but also adequate for delivering positive experiences at the end of the chain. Nevertheless, the results do not always align with customer expectations. So, can we enhance our approach to deliver greater value and higher efficiency?
 
This was the focus of a discussion between Claudia Mattedi, Financial Director, and Sonia Rica, Director of Customer Service at Porto Seguro, along with Solange Sobral, our EVP & Partner, during HSM EXPO at the CI&T Arena - Driven by Impact. Under the theme "Customer Experience: The True Protagonist of Generating Impact," the trio explored how companies can broaden their horizons and genuinely position the consumer as the guiding force behind their strategies. The backdrop of their conversation was Porto Seguro's journey towards digital transformation, which was led in collaboration with CI&T.

In this piece, we will share insights from this ongoing journey, highlighting initial learnings, results, and successful strategies for navigating the numerous challenges of digital transformation. All of this is aimed at delivering the best possible experience for your consumer.

The first challenges of the journey

Speaking about the beginning of the collaboration with Porto Seguro, Solange Sobral drew attention to the biggest challenge of the first three months of the transformation processes for all companies: the deconstruction of traditional ways of thinking. From a company primarily focused on internal results and heavily divided by corporate silos, it was necessary to build one that thought without borders, that worked collaboratively, end-to-end, with multidisciplinary and autonomous teams divided by value streams.

Solange explains that, at this stage, considerable discomfort and uncertainty frequently surface due to the significant shifts in the company’s traditional methods of operation and value creation. At Porto Seguro, it was no different.

Indeed, Sonia Rica explains that Porto Seguro did not have a clear vision of what the company’s journey towards digital transformation would look like. However, there were numerous urgent improvement opportunities, particularly the need to genuinely listen to and keep pace with their customers' changes. 

Thus, trusting in the discipline of work and the Lean Digital methodology developed by CI&T, Porto Seguro decided to fully engage in the process, genuinely believing in the potential for rapid results for both the company and the end customer.

Lean Digital is a powerful corporate transformation model that combines concepts from Agile and Design with a strong foundation in Lean management philosophy. With the capacity to deeply, solidly, and sustainably transform companies across any sector of the economy, the methodology's fundamental premise is to deliver impactful results for businesses and customers from the outset of the process.

However, to achieve this, it is essential to map out customers' primary pain points and prioritise those that will yield quicker returns and greater impact for the company when addressed.

For Porto Seguro, the main pain point was the payment journey, which still involved significant friction and generated numerous customer complaints. The time had come to muster the courage to gradually tackle the challenges of breaking down barriers, integrating data, granting autonomy to teams, and building a culture that encourages experimentation. According to the adopted methodology, it is possible to access what we refer to as collective intelligence, enabling the company to innovate and create ever-increasing value for consumers and businesses alike, as it brings together all participants in a value stream to collaboratively develop the best solutions in a much more agile manner. 

Learn by doing

The company, particularly the leaders directly involved, such as Claudia and Sonia, were so committed to genuinely "diving into" the process that the transformations occurred more swiftly than Porto Seguro had anticipated. Motivated by the new way of working, which offered more effective and agile solutions, the teams managed to learn at an impressive pace. This was all thanks to the new mindset of planning and execution that the company embraced.

The first step in witnessing the new methodology in action was to understand the significance of one of the foundations of CI&T's approach: learning by doing. This is essential because, in the digital realm, there is no predetermined path. Each company's unique characteristics, along with the volatility of customers and the market, mean that every journey is distinct and subject to change.

This was a significant change for Porto Seguro, which, like most companies, had a default process of identifying a problem and immediately jumping to planning a solution without delving into its root causes. This approach leads to temporary fixes that inevitably result in waste and further issues down the line. 

The idea of spotting a problem and immediately jumping to ideation for a solution was eliminated. It became essential to learn by doing, to be willing to constantly validate ideas and hypotheses through data, and to maintain an open attitude towards errors, successes, and rapid learning.

It was time to tackle another common issue faced by companies: the data generated by the company and the consumer was scattered across various departments, each serving different needs. This separation of information from the old structure not only no longer made sense but also wasted the potential for generating intelligence across the organisation. With the support of CI&T, the data was organised to correlate information and analyse it in a correct and effective manner.

This agile learning, the establishment of goals, and the monitoring of results through data from a process of experimentation and continuous improvement had significant impacts on the company. The first goal set by the company was to enhance customer service and reduce the number of daily calls from 8,000 to 5,000, which were related to customer queries and dissatisfaction. Addressing this issue was crucial for the company, as it already represented a significant cost, and they had been searching for less expensive solutions to satisfy customers without much success.

The first multidisciplinary and autonomous team, the first squad, was formed around this value stream. The open environment for sharing ideas imposed no limits on creativity, and every professional present in the room was heard, regardless of their position within the organisation. The leadership took on new roles, including that of active listening and collaboration. They were not there to dictate and impose solutions but to support the development of ideas. With accurate data, the emerging solutions were tested through short delivery cycles.

As a result, the first experiments that the company implemented began to roll out in just 20 days, fulfilling the objective of bringing viable ideas to life and learning by doing. After the first solution was tested and delivered to consumers, the initial results, which were surprising, started to emerge. Within six months, the company had reached its target for the entire year of 2019: the call centre had reduced the number of calls from 8,000 to 5,000. By the end of October, the figures had dropped even further, reaching 4,500 calls. 

New challenges and business results

The company greatly enhanced its capacity for development and experimentation with a strong focus on the consumer. New teams were established to tackle various pain points and explore additional value streams.

Another pain point addressed related to insurance brokers. Porto Seguro recognised the need to enhance the routines of professionals who were directly interacting with policyholders. Many of these professionals faced challenges in providing quality service due to operational fatigue. There was a mix of both traditional and highly digitalised brokers, making it crucial to find a balance that addressed the needs of both groups.

Over six months of squad journeys, 35 experiments were conducted, 20 involving insurance brokers and 15 with policyholders, fostering a culture of experimentation that led to impressive business results. There was a 66% increase in the digitalisation rate among the more analogue brokers and an 85% retention rate among those who were already highly digitalised.

Additionally, improvements in communications resulted in greater clarity for clients who previously entered and exited the company's portal without taking any action, which caused the conversion rate for using the payment slip to rise from 22% to 33% within four weeks of work.

According to the company’s executives, it required courage to dare to change the organisation’s mindset step by step. However, it is now possible to see the impact that Lean Digital transformation can bring to the company. So far, there have been numerous very positive changes aimed at a single objective: truly generating the best experience for the consumer.

Sonia noted that the shelf life of a solution is becoming shorter, making it no longer feasible to dedicate long periods to designing and launching something innovative in the market, let alone suppress simple ideas and solutions to address customer pain points. “How many diamonds do we have within our organisations that need the right environment, encouragement, and direction to shine?” she said. Thus, the organisation is gradually modifying its processes, shifting its operational mindset, and genuinely embracing digital transformation.

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