By: Prashant Bhat, Director, CIGNA Healthcare
Recognized as one of the nation’s leading providers of health benefits and related services, Cigna is dedicated to helping the people we serve improve their health, well-being and sense of security.
We’re on a journey to become truly customer- centric. A company that puts the customer front and center of every decision, discussion, and discovery we make as a company. Cigna has a worldwide reach with sales capabilities in 30 countries and jurisdictions. Cigna headquarters are located in Bloomfield, CT and we generate $32.4 Billion in revenue with 35,000 employees.
Our Cigna brand promise stated below guides everything we do as we work together to serve our customers.
“We understand our customer’s needs and work together to help them achieve healthier, more secure lives.”
In order to support customer centricity, we developed a talent strategy to help leaders and people managers build their coaching capability. As coaches, they can influence their teams to produce repeatable and high quality customer experiences. They can also motivate their team members to innovate and take ownership of new solutions that help us meet the evolving needs of our 85 Million customer relationships worldwide.
Earlier this year, we partnered with the NeuroLeadership Group to develop a virtual learning series to help improve the Coaching and Customer Focus capabilities of our Leaders and People Managers. This comprehensive learning program consists of three phone-only modules spaced two weeks apart. The objectives of this comprehensive learning series are to:
· Improve everyday interactions with quality conversations that help engage teams in customer-centric behaviors, build morale and support their efforts.
· Grow and develop others with a focus on letting the team do all the thinking as well as modeling frequent, timely, and effective coaching behaviors.
· Facilitate behavior change that enables people managers to motivate employees and develop a growth-mindset.
Each of the phone-only modules is designed to be very engaging and promotes good dialogue through frequent activities and questions. In between the sessions, the training participants are assigned a partner to discuss how they can operationalize the learnings to become more effective coaches.
We are seeing great initial results for the participants that attended the training in 2014. For example, levels of employee feedback and conversations generating good ideas have increased. We consider this approach a best practice in being effective at improving our coaching skills which are ultimately changing the mindset of our employees to enable them to deliver on our brand promise. In order to capitalize on this momentum we are planning to have all our leaders and people managers across the Enterprise participate in this program in 2015.
We anticipate that collectively this will drive improvements in customer centricity for all of Cigna and the customers we serve.