Angelo Azar: The true test of a customer relationship

Vol 47: Issue 2 | July 2024

Ask Angelo Azar what his role is at Honey Insurance, and he’ll tell you: it’s to make people’s lives easier, “whether it’s our people or our customers”. However, Honey’s chief operating officer confesses he didn’t start out thinking that way.

Azar’s immigrant parents instilled in their son a strong work ethic and a clear message: study hard and work your way up the ladder to win.

“But winning is not the way that people think of it historically,” he says. “Lucky for us, to win doesn’t mean someone has to lose. The opportunities are so big, it’s not as if there’s one slice that everyone’s got to take from. So, in reality, everyone can win.”

It’s a view Azar has taken in his many leadership roles across insurance, banking and even manufacturing and engineering.

“Every person that you encounter is a person who you have the opportunity to make a difference for,” he says. “Some days you get it right, and some days you reflect on it and know that you could have done a little bit better. But you should be trying, rather than passively watching what happens.”

From us, to you

With his extensive experience on the front line of customer interactions, Azar says that insurance has not changed fundamentally over the past 20 or so years — but customers have changed a lot.

“Essentially, insurance is a promise, and customers want to know that they’ve got that ticket to cash in on the promise if something were to go wrong,” he says.

“In the past, insurance companies offered a one-size-fits-all solution. When customers needed to engage with their insurer, they did it in a way that suited the insurance company. Now, customers want a personalised experience, and that’s the main reason they no longer make decisions purely based on the brand name.”

Azar says it’s about treating customers as individuals: taking advantage of technology, so they can engage with you wherever they want to, and using data, so you can make things easier for them.

“You should be taking something complex and making it simple: [if I’m a customer] I don’t want to have to rely on a 100-page document alone to understand what I’m covered for. I want it to be simple and easy. And if I’ve been with you for a number of years, the least you can do is acknowledge our relationship.”

Azar says there has been a shift with insurers from what the company needs to what the customer wants. He acknowledges that it becomes more difficult with increasing regulatory obligations, more complex technology and associated costs. “But it’s around how you do the simplest things customers want, listen to them and deliver for them,” he says.

“I find that even just apologising to a customer and looking to remedy anything that’s gone wrong is appreciated.”

Changing frequencies

Honey Insurance is backed and underwritten by RACQ, and counts AGL, McGrath, Mirvac and Gallatin Point Capital in the United States as some of its investors. When customers sign up for insurance, they receive smart sensors to help detect issues such as flood or fire and limit the damage.

Azar says risk mitigation is, in some ways, secondary to the role technology plays in the
customer relationship.

“Insurance is, by default, a reactive service because of the payment for promises to be delivered when something goes wrong,” he explains. “We take that, and we say, ‘Through the use of technology, we can help you better manage the risks in your home. And if you do, we’ll reward you through a lower premium.”

As well as helping to mitigate claims, Azar says a major benefit of the technology is the number of customers who come to the business saying their sensor just went off and that they appreciate that connectedness.

And that changes Honey’s customer relationships at a very fundamental level.

“The number one thing that customers tell insurance companies they want is more frequent and meaningful engagement, but insurance communications are very low frequency and very high impact,” says Azar.

“If you think about your relationship with your local grocery store, it’s high frequency, low impact. If you go to your local supermarket every week, one mediocre experience is not necessarily going to change your mind about shopping there.

“When we look at insurance, we want to try to increase the frequency of interactions with the customer, so that we have a better relationship. And I want to make it so that when we do engage in those high-impact situations, they are pleasant and positive.”

Azar says that every time a customer gets a notification through their smart sensors that something may be amiss at their property, they associate this with Honey Insurance and that the company cares about their wellbeing.

“Meanwhile, competitors are silent throughout that entire experience” he says. “They speak to you when you buy something and when it’s time to renew, while we might have engaged with you dozens of times in that period.”

He points out that what Honey does is not new thinking. “It’s not that insurers haven’t thought about these things; it’s just that they haven’t done them. It’s an execution piece.”

By changing to higher customer interaction frequencies, the company has more opportunities to shine.

And it’s working.

Honey has a year-to-date Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 91 in an industry that has had single-digit NPS for some time.

All on board

As everyone in customer service knows, the true test of the relationship is not when things are going right; it’s when they go wrong.

“We don’t argue against customer feedback,” says Azar. “We tell customers that we would love to hear what we could have done better.

“We reinforce this internally to our people, because our staff get very passionate about the work they do, which is great. But we reinforce that this is not about them. This is about the process and how the procedure can be improved. They have to remove themselves from being emotionally attached and see customer feedback as an opportunity to do things better, and then they are more interested in trying to improve the experience.”

Through the customer’s eyes

Azar proudly wears his Honey-branded T-shirt and gets lots of impromptu customer responses and interactions. His dad’s advice still rings true: everyone is of equal importance, and everybody deserves equal respect.

“I’ve got two boys and when my 11-year-old was in kindy, parents were invited to come and talk about the work they do,” says Azar. “There was stiff competition, because one parent was a firefighter, and another was a professional football player. I’m like, ‘How do I compete with this?’.

“I said to my son: ‘Think about when someone’s house burns down or floods. I’m the person who helps fix it all up. We make sure that the house they call home is built again.’

“It’s funny. Talking to my four-year-old helped me pivot the way I think about this entire industry.”

Read this article and all the other articles from the latest issue of the Journal e-magazine.

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