View this article online: https://www.carriermanagement.com/features/2017/04/09/166031.htm
Sister Margaret Mary: Innovation’s Sine Qua Nun of Customer Service Rankings
Decades and decades later, you still remember the shadow and swish of nuns. I also remember verbatim, like the pop song to which you first fell in love, the Goethe and Schiller of Sister Margaret Mary’s German poetry class, indelibly tattooed on my memory.
Executive Summary
Carriers enthralled with KPIs and other measures of best-in-class service to their preferred customers are missing the lessons that Innovation Consultant Karen Morris draws from her childhood—when a nun teaching German literature delivered her lessons discriminately and coincidentally set boundaries on possible student questions.
Like a wimple-clad teacher, insurers blinded by rules and performance metrics may miss—or purposefully dismiss—signs of disruptive influence, paying homage to their own truths built around the products they have designed to sell.
Turning to a different German teacher, Peter Drucker, Morris invokes his sine qua non for business success—attracting and retaining customers—and suggests that insurers in pursuit of truly customer-centric models start thinking about customer problems instead of devising enticements around the features of existing products.Executive SummaryCarriers enthralled with KPIs and other measures of best-in-class service to their preferred customers are missing the lessons that Innovation Consultant Karen Morris draws from her childhood—when a nun teaching German literature delivered her lessons discriminately and coincidentally set boundaries on possible student questions.Like a wimple-clad teacher, insurers blinded by rules and performance metrics may miss—or purposefully dismiss—signs of disruptive influence, paying homage to their own truths built around the products they have designed to sell.
Turning to a different German teacher, Peter Drucker, Morris invokes his sine qua non for business success—attracting and retaining customers—and suggests that insurers in pursuit of truly customer-centric models start thinking about customer problems instead of devising enticements around the features of existing products.
Her God-given mission was to get her riff-raff scholarship students fixed on culture; she was a prose pusher, a poetry pimp, a genius locked in her holy habit determined to get us hooked on habits beyond our own or anyone’s expectations of us. (The vocations of youngest unmarried daughters of impoverished Catholic aristocrats may have been more social than sacred.)
