Collaboration: The Key to Successful Client Partnerships

David James - February 25th, 2021

People working together around a table

At The Floow, we have always worked hard to ensure that we create, and continually nurture, true partnerships with our clients where both parties work together, and are free to voice ideas and opinions which will help to improve the solutions which we build together for the benefit of their customers. 

This approach has served us very well over the last nine years and in particular, the opportunity to obtain regular client feedback has become increasingly important as the needs of clients and customers of all businesses has changed dramatically.

For us, this opportunity comes twice a year when we undertake a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey with all of our clients. An event which becomes increasingly important in our calendar.

At its highest level, the NPS survey is a measure of whether a client would recommend us  to other organisations. They have the opportunity to score us between 1 and 10 (1-6 is negative, 7-8 passive and 9-10 is positive) and this score provides us with a snapshot of how they view us. NPS is a well known and highly regarded measure of Customer Satisfaction, and the feedback which we receive guides much of our client work for the following 6 months.

Therefore, this survey, and the results, means a lot to us.

Alongside this important recommendation question, we provide our clients with the  opportunity to let us know what they like about us and what they think we could do better.

Over the past year, one word has been called out time and time again: COLLABORATION. In fact 85% of survey respondents have confirmed that collaboration is a really positive part of working with us. This is something we are incredibly proud of, as collaboration is a fundamental value of our organisation, therefore it is critical for us to maintain and build on this reputation. In order to achieve this, we will need to understand how we work with clients now, and how we can improve on this to ensure we are a continually important partner for the future.

Collaborating with our clients is a key part of our DNA. As an independent organisation, we have always believed that our clients are effectively shareholders in The Floow, and we are committed to delivering a superb service to all of them at all times.

This begins by working at all levels within an organisation to establish an aligned vision and strategy for our relationship, enabling clarity in operational work and joint decisions. Our Client Development teams then work very closely with their opposite number in our clients’ organisation to lay out and execute development plans. These plans are designed to match the telematics strategies that have been agreed, whether they focus on delivering a new end-user mobile experience, working on a new crash and First-Notification-of-Loss (FNOL) end-user solution, or developing a range of new behavioural scores to improve an insurer’s risk management capability.

Over the past year, we have worked with various clients on each of these projects. In the UK, we recently launched a mobile-only smartphone solution to support a young driver proposition which was the culmination of extensive work between all parties involved. This is a unique solution in the UK market place and we are monitoring success very closely to see how this can be rolled out further.

We have also recently developed our data quality algorithms to such an extent that we can make decisions on driver behaviour from very short sections of individual journeys. This has enabled us to collaborate with another insurer to develop a very specific digital intervention strategy. Once again, although this solution has been launched, we will continue to develop the capabilities of the solution together, to meet the changing needs of our client, and their customers.

With some of our clients, we are jointly working within an Innovation Lab to continually develop products, services and insights by combining the best of both organisations to test the limits of what our combined data and analytics can produce. It is an incredibly exciting experience.

And all of this is really just the beginning. With all of the development that we see across sensors in devices, smartphones and integrated into vehicles, with the digital journeys that end-users are expected to take, and with the increasing requirements for insurers to use data to differentiate risk, we are only at the start of what can be achieved from the utilisation of data insights. It is also extremely clear to us that these insights are going to be even more valuable when they arise out of the collaboration between true partners. 

To be at the centre of this change with our clients, we will continue to develop and nurture true partnerships with our clients and listen to, as well as act on, the feedback provided by our clients in our NPS surveys. For us, the key to the success of telematics-based insurance policies doesn’t lie only with insurance grade scoring and state-of-the-art technology, but also with open and collaborative relationships between service provider and insurer to drive value for both parties, as well as the end customer.

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