By Mary Currier, Vice President, Relationship Management,Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America

Through his Dilbert comic strip, cartoonist Scott Adams has vilified this area for more than 10 years. An important company department, it generally controls the largest budgets. At the same time, its projects are communicated in technical and abstract language that daze and confuse the audience. It routinely has company executives giving up trying to understand what really goes on there. Yes, we all love to disparage our IT departments.That's why, when Tom Bauer accepted the position as CIO one year ago at Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America (Allianz), one of his first priorities was to improve the reputation of the company's IT department. Customer satisfaction was at an all-time low, as was employee morale within the 200-plus person department. Bauer took the challenge head on by attacking it from two different angles.

Building a positive reputation meant overcoming a number of challenges, including education and transparency, managing customer expectations, aligning customers needs with IT priorities and building trust with internal partners. As revealed by Gallup research, morale and employee engagement are directly correlated to customer satisfaction and company success. The goal was to increase customer satisfaction by 25 percent and employee morale by 10 percent.

As he worked at numerous levels to build the engagement of the IT team employees, Bauer established an IT Relationship Management team to focus on the customer experience. The team of six includes three directors aligned to the business areas of Sales & Marketing, Operations and Administration. They work to build understanding and championing their customers' experience while driving service improvements.

The first order of business for the newly formed Relationship Management team was to align their goals to the improvement of customer satisfaction. This became the number one priority for the team. The next step was to collect and evaluate information to determine the root cause of customer dissatisfaction.

To understand the dissatisfaction we conducted multiple surveys, interviewed dozens of customers based on the survey data, received feedback on IT from regularly scheduled lunches with the CEO and utilized focus groups to listen to our customers. We consolidated the feedback into themes and action items were identified. We shared the plan for improvement with our customers to make sure we heard them correctly and were focused on the right things.

It was clear from the feedback that there were key service improvement initiatives we needed to focus on, and a formal customer satisfaction program was launched.

The program consisted of project teams forming around each key area. The teams were tasked to define and prioritize action plans that would quickly improve service. The key areas of focus were:

• Business-facing communications • Project solution and delivery • Help Desk improvement • Production support • Ease of doing business with IT

The key area that most scientifically improved the customer satisfaction scores was Help Desk improvement. Customers wanted better service from the IT Help Desk than we were currently providing, including:

• More knowledgeable staff, • Ability to order services quickly and easily, • Staying informed on progress related to projects and service tickets, • Completing requests correctly the first time, and • Timely delivery.

A plan was developed to address these issues. First, the team reviewed proposed the action Items to address immediate needs and identify quick fix items. Next, they defined the end-state customer experience and built a plan to deliver the overall solution.

While numerous changes were being made within the Help Desk, both large and small, one major decision based on this work was recently implemented. From the late 1990s through recent times, companies outsourced significant IT functions, especially transactional activities, such as the help desk. Allianz began outsourcing its Help Desk in 2008.

After significant research, analysis and discussion, it was determined that bringing part of the help desk calls during core business hours back in house would better serve the organization. From funding to service delivery, cost estimates to service levels, the team evaluated all aspects of their processes. The hybrid in-source model was selected, and the help desk functions were brought back in during the past several months. An outside vendor continues to handle calls after-hours and weekends. Since this change was completed in June 2010, customers' feedback has been extremely positive. The NPS (Net Promoter Score) has improved by 89 percent for the Help Desk.

Relationship Management also focused on improving the reputation of IT with its internal partners in addition to the customer experience program through the following efforts:

Relationship Directors spent 30 percent more time with their customers to continually monitor their customers' needs and concerns: The Relationship Directors initially were in a continuous fire-fighting mode to resolve hot issues for their customers. While important, it was not helping us achieve the value we were looking for of being a strategic partner vs. an order taker. We accomplished this in a two-fold approach. First, we created a Customer Care group in IT that would work directly with the business on the daily hot issues around service. This allowed the Relationship Director to back out of production issues, unless otherwise requested to be involved. Second, we created a "2 in a box" model where each Relationship Director is paired up with a Business Architect. This allowed them to focus on their customers' strategies, capabilities, project prioritization and building relationships

IT Strategy was socialized with customers: The IT strategy was created and communicated in a manner in which it had meaning to the IT Employees as well as the business. It did have data points for measurement, best practice goals, etc., however it also focused on business strategies. When the Relationship Directors communicated the IT Strategy to their customers, they were able to walk away with how the IT Strategy affects their business unit. IT is focused on behaviors and expectations around customer satisfaction as well as focused on delivery.

IT collaborated with business partners to develop key business strategies: By working across all business units, the Relationship Directors quickly determined that customers had similar agendas, yet different definitions of strategies. For example, CRM (customer relationship management) was a hot topic for distribution lines of business and marketing. Instead of working independently on initiatives, the Relationship Director along with the Business Architect brought the lines of business together and created a unified strategy around CRM.

Improved marketing of IT's accomplishments: Typically, IT did not do a great job of marketing all the good work we do. We put a focus on communicating our accomplishments to our customers. Today, we have quarterly dashboards, utilize corporate communications to distribute our message to the large organization, created a one-page visual marketing slide around 2010 first half of the year accomplishments and focused on the ones that would mean the most to the customer. We also have an annual IT showcase in December where we highlight our employees with our vendor partners. At the event, we demonstrate our technology, display high-level projects from a business point of view, give out door prizes, and give our customers ideas on the current in "whiz bang" technology available for the holidays.

IT offered education sessions on exploring new capabilities with customers and key vendors: The Relationship Directors understand what is important to their customers through spending more time with them and reaching out to vendor partners to provide educational sessions on new capabilities. For example, telephony strategy is currently being developed. We brought in all call center business leaders and vendor partners to discuss what technology and capabilities are available that will meet our customers' business objectives. This is a win for IT as a strategic partner, but also helps build out the business roadmaps and annual budget planning.

Since the customer experience project began, including numerous employee engagement initiatives launched by the CIO, employee morale has improved from 65 percent to 85 percent, and in direct correlation, customer satisfaction scores based on Net Promoter Score have improved 61 percent. Allianz reported record 2009 results in a difficult environment, and has been honored with not one, but two "Best Places to Work" awards.Since Allianz Life's customer experience project began, including numerous employee engagement initiatives launched by the CIO, employee morale has improved from 65 percent to 85 percent, and customer satisfaction scores have improved 61 percent.