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Eva Dudíková spent eleven years in a bank’s contact centre, first working directly with customers and later leading a team. Along the way, she noticed which problems kept coming up and what was really causing them. Her interest in preventing those problems gradually led her into customer experience.
She started working in CX at Česká spořitelna and now continues at Kooperativa, where she draws on everything she learnt from dealing with customers. She maps customer journeys, runs research and focuses on how the insurer communicates with its customers. She still enjoys talking to them. For her, these conversations are one of the best ways to understand their experiences and find out what would make dealing with an insurance company easier.
She also helped set up and grow two communities, Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Colleague, which bring together the perspectives of customers and employees. What she values about Kooperativa is that this feedback isn’t just collected and filed away. It’s actually used, helping teams across the company make better decisions.
Eva, you started out on a customer helpline, and to be honest, I’ve always seen helplines as something of a battlefield. People calling to complain, something’s not working and they want it fixed now, ideally yesterday. And yet you stuck with it for over ten years, it became your speciality, and today you work in customer experience at Kooperativa, a company with two million customers. When did you first feel that you’d actually mastered this game and were winning at it?
I ended up on the helpline almost by accident, while I was looking for a job to do alongside university. I was studying humanities and knew next to nothing about banking. At first it was a real adrenaline rush. You never knew who was going to call, what mood they’d be in or what they’d need.
Customers mostly got in touch when something wasn’t working, and they wanted it sorted quickly, because it was their money at stake. We often had to do a bit of detective work, reach out to colleagues in other teams and find a solution together. Over time, I realised I actually enjoyed tackling the more complex cases. It was satisfying when we managed to help someone and they ended the call happy.
At the same time, I could see that certain problems kept coming back. I thought we could prevent some of those calls altogether if we changed our processes or the way we communicated with customers. Back then, I had no idea there was a whole field dedicated to exactly that. When I later found out that companies have customer experience teams, I thought it was brilliant that someone was systematically looking at what bothers customers. Eventually, I moved into the field myself.
Your career has taken you from Expobank and Česká spořitelna to Kooperativa. In my view, bankers and insurers have very different nightmares. A bank just needs people to trust it with their money, but an insurer needs people to trust it on the worst day of their lives. How does that difference play out in the way you work with customers?
Whether it’s a bank or an insurer, people need to know they can rely on you. The main difference, as I see it, is how often they get to test that. Customers use their bank almost every day. With insurance, they usually take out a policy and then hope they’ll never need it.
That makes a claim the defining moment in a customer’s experience with an insurer. It’s when we show how well we can look after them. Speed matters, of course, but so does whether the customer knows what’s happening, what comes next and why we’ve made a particular decision. In CX, we look for the points where customers are missing information or don’t understand something, and we work with colleagues to improve both our communication and the claims process itself.
But we also need to build trust before anything goes wrong. Many customers don’t realise, for example, that we can send them a locksmith, a plumber or a repair technician, or arrange a phone consultation with a doctor. We want them to know what help is available, and we’re also looking for ways to help them prevent damage in the first place.
At the POSITIVE conference, “Connecting CX and EX as a Strategy for Business Success”, you talked about how the voice of employees helps shape the customer experience. Why is it so important for an insurer to understand its own employees’ perspective? And how can their experience benefit customers?
Colleagues who deal with customers every day know what they keep asking about and what they find confusing. They also know our processes inside out and can see where things are more complicated than they need to be. When we combine their experience with what customers tell us, we get a much clearer picture of what needs improving.
At Kooperativa, we’ve been running an online community called Voice of the Customer for more than three years. We ask customers about their experiences and test upcoming changes with them. Later, we also launched Voice of the Colleague, which now has over 500 volunteers from all over the Czech Republic, mainly from sales and the helpline, but from other teams too.
Whenever we’re developing a new product or updating a letter or digital service, we involve both customers and colleagues. Customers tell us whether they understand what we’re proposing. Colleagues point out anything that would be hard to explain to customers or tricky to use in practice. That way, we can spot problems before customers ever come across them.
Kooperativa has decades of history and more than two million customers. That’s a huge ship, and it turns slowly. Is it harder to push through any change in how you approach customers at such an established company, or would you prefer to start from scratch, without all the well-worn habits?
I can’t really compare, as I’ve only ever worked in large corporations 😊 First a big bank, now an insurer. I think I’d find it appealing to build something from the ground up without being tied to the way things have always been done.
What I really value at Kooperativa, though, is that customer experience already has its place in the company. We have years of research behind us, we gather feedback regularly, and there are plenty of colleagues who genuinely care about making things work better. We don’t have to keep explaining why it’s worth asking customers what they think. Instead, we can focus on what we’ve learnt and how to use it.
Of course, not every idea gets put into practice straight away. Changing a product, a piece of communication or a process usually involves several teams. Each has its own priorities, and sometimes we also need IT capacity. So our job isn’t just to bring the customer’s perspective to the table, but also to work with others to find a solution that can actually be implemented.
You spent almost nine years leading people in a bank’s contact centre. What did you learn there about people, meaning employees rather than customers, and what from that experience helps you in your customer experience work today?
If a change doesn’t make sense to the people who have to explain it to customers, it’s unlikely to make sense to the customers either. Whenever a process changed at the bank, we needed to know not just what we were supposed to do differently, but also why it was changing and what it would mean for our customers. Otherwise, it was really hard to explain the change to them.
That’s something we try to build on at Kooperativa, and it’s why we have Voice of the Colleague. When we’re preparing a change, we want to know whether the colleagues who deal with customers understand it too. They can flag questions customers might ask that we can’t yet answer clearly. That helps us shape our communication so customers know what’s changing, what they need to do and why.
When people hear “customer experience”, many of them still picture a nicely designed form or a friendly voice on the phone. What’s the most annoying CX myth you keep battling, even within your own company?
Probably the idea that customer experience is mainly a cost for the business. In insurance, there’s sometimes also a worry that the only way to make customers happy is to pay out more on their claims. The size of the payout obviously matters to customers. But so does how we communicate with them, whether they know what’s going to happen next and whether they understand our decision.
We focus mainly on things that make it easier for customers to deal with us. The benefits don’t always show up straight away in the number of new policies sold. But you can see them in other ways, for example when a customer understands what their policy covers, can easily find the information they need and knows what to do when they need something from us.
Can you think of a specific moment when a complaint or comment from a customer genuinely changed something, such as a product, a form or a process? I’d love to share that story with our readers, because those are always the most interesting things in CX.
One case that comes to mind is a customer whose car was written off. In the end, she felt the outcome was fair and was happy with how the claims handler had treated her. But getting there was quite a struggle. She spoke to several different people, was given conflicting information and had no idea what would happen next.
A colleague talked to her in detail about the whole experience and passed her story on to the team that handles car claims. They then adjusted their processes and launched a pilot called Hassle-Free Total Loss, designed to make similar situations easier for customers.
What really helped was that the team didn’t just hear, in general terms, that the process was complicated. They had a real case in front of them and could see exactly where the customer got lost and how she felt at each stage. That told them what needed to change.
And now one of our classic questions: how would you explain what you do for a living to your grandmother over Sunday lunch? “Customer experience” probably wouldn’t mean much to her.
I’d tell her that lots of people find insurance complicated and don’t want any unnecessary hassle with it. My job is to find out what they don’t understand and what we could make simpler. For example, when we need to send customers an important letter, we first ask some customers to read it. We want to know whether they understand it and know what they need to do. Then we work with colleagues to improve it based on what they tell us. We take a similar approach to how people take out insurance or make a claim.
How do you actually know whether CX is working? Do you put more faith in hard numbers like NPS and retention, or in what you pick up between the lines in calls and complaints?
I trust both, because each tells us something different. The numbers show where customers are less satisfied and which areas we need to focus on. But on their own, they don’t tell us why it’s happening or what exactly to change. For that, we need to hear what customers went through and what caused them problems.
My focus is mainly on that deeper understanding. I map customer journeys, carry out qualitative research with customers and work with the Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Colleague communities. This helps us understand what lies behind the numbers and gives colleagues solid evidence to support important decisions or changes. And once we’ve made a change, we check whether it’s reflected in customer satisfaction.
If you could send a message to yourself back when you were a young specialist handling your first complaints over the phone, what would you say?
An unhappy customer doesn’t necessarily mean we haven’t done our job well. With a complaint, sometimes we simply can’t change the decision. But we can listen to the customer, review their case again and explain clearly why we’ve done what we’ve done. They may still be unhappy afterwards. And even though that’s unpleasant, it’s important to learn not to take it personally.
And finally, where do you think CX in insurance will be in five years’ time? Will it be more about people or more about automation, and where would you personally like to draw the line?
I wouldn’t dare to predict exactly what AI and other technologies will change over the next five years. Automation can already speed up and simplify a lot of things. AI, for example, is helping our colleagues handle claims, and its capabilities will only keep growing.
I think it will remain important for customers to be able to reach a human easily when they’re dealing with a more complex situation or when an AI answer isn’t enough. After an incident, people are often stressed. They need to ask questions, explain their situation and feel reassured that someone understands them. The more common it becomes to communicate with AI, the more we’ll value human contact in moments like these.
