From heritage to innovation: IAG’s Michelle Klein on revamping customer experience

Ahead of her appearance at the ADMA Global Forum, Michelle Klein, Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at IAG, discusses the importance of mastering the basics, leveraging almost 100 years of heritage, and how the 'Help' brand platform is redefining NRMA Insurance’s commitment to customer-centricity.

‘Help’ can be such a simple word, but it’s something that’s taken on a new and impactful meaning for Michelle Klein. As IAG’s Chief Customer and Marketing Officer, Klein has taken on the mantle of responsibility for overseeing the many touchpoints IAG’s customers have with the company's various brands, including NRMA Insurance.

As Klein explains, the brand platform of ‘Help’ has been central for NRMA Insurance for many years, and now, they’re doubling down. And while people may buy insurance just once a year, if they ever need to rely on their insurance provider beyond that touchpoint, it’s often during an emotionally-heightened event.

“You have to think about the customer first, all the time, because ultimately, we’re here to help people. It’s who we are and what we stand for,” she says.

For Klein, it all comes down to what truly helps customers navigate their lives. That means anything from providing Australians with education around how to prepare for an extreme weather emergency, to launching a campaign in partnership with News Corp to advocate  to improve the much-beleaguered Bruce Highway in Queensland.

Klein explains: “We knew that the Bruce Highway is notorious for accidents and fatalities on the road, and has been for a very long time. So we partnered with News Corp to advocate to help fix the highway, and it very quickly contributed to nearly half a billion dollars of funding from the state and federal government.

“That’s a real example of the platform idea of ‘Help’. It's the intersection of customer, community and country,” she says.

But Klein also takes a laser focus on how this brand platform translates to the smaller interactions Australians have with the NRMA Insurance brand. When Klein accepted her new role, she knew that focusing on customer experience was going to be central to her position.

“I had an epiphany a little while ago. Even though there’s tech transformation, there’s AI, there’s all this new, incredible stuff, I realised - you know what transformation really is? It’s doing the basics brilliantly for customers,” Klein says.

This is something Klein says she hopes guests of the ADMA Global Forum will take away from her panel - a focus on doing the basics brilliantly, and ensuring that their customer experience is “seamless”.

“With AI, the metaverse and virtual reality, it can all be very exciting and don’t get me wrong, there’s huge amounts of potential there. But I think as marketers, sometimes it’s the simple things that make the biggest difference,” she says.

“What we actually should do is look at what customers need. If they're looking for something and they come to your website and they have to spend more than five minutes to find what they’re looking for, perhaps that’s not a good experience. Depending on what business you're in, I would say a good metric is helping customers get in, find what they need and get out of your website or app within a few minutes.”

This was a unique challenge and opportunity for Klein, who had just finished an almost 10-year period working in global marketing for Meta. The two companies couldn’t be more different - Meta being a relatively new company where every single one of its customers interacted with the product in different ways, versus NRMA Insurance being almost 100 years old, where having a one-to-one experience is crucial for its customers.

“We're an authentic brand with a huge amount of heritage and 100 years of data,” Klein says. “That means we can look back and say, ‘Okay, what have we learned in 100 years that will inform the next 100?’ We’re trying to adopt a mindset of adaptation, change and speed, and trying to anticipate where people will be.

“The key has been finding that sweet spot between both building on the tremendous legacy, history and data we have, and then moving quickly into the next century,” she adds.

Recently, Klein has employed Accenture Song to help support NRMA Insurance’s end-to-end transformation. Klein’s goal, as she explains, was to find a model that could deliver a seamless experience for customers whether they were in a branch, on the website or even in an emergency situation.

The partnership has already started to flourish, most notably with the launch of NRMA Insurance as a premium broadcast partner of Nine’s coverage of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

“The opportunity to partner with Nine as part of the broadcast partnership was a great way for us to bring our story of ‘Help’ to the nation, at a time when the nation is engaging with this beautiful, international sporting experience. We wanted to use this moment to explain what we stand for, our story, and connect with our customers.

“Plus, it’s internally created a galvanising sense of pride to see our insurance company show up in this way during a global event, which we haven't done before,” she adds.

This partnership with Nine is more than just a marketing initiative - it’s a sign of Klein’s forward-thinking approach that aims to bring NRMA Insurance into its next century of business. She deeply believes that for brands to be successful, they need to move at the speed their consumers are moving at, and be open to change.

“That’s what I love about the ADMA Global Forum theme, ‘Elevate for the Future’ - it’s talking about the future, but also about the now, because the future is now,” Klein says.

Michelle Klein will be appearing at the ADMA Global Forum on August 20, alongside industry luminaries including futurist consultant Tom Goodwin, Uber’s Lucinda Barlow, The Iconic’s Joanna Robinson, MC Holly Ransom, and Professors Scott Galloway and Mark Ritson. Michelle will be speaking on a panel about the importance of customer experience alongside Nine’s Liana Dubois and Medibank’s Milosh Milisavljevic. See the full lineup and get tickets here.