Santa Fe — A Missed Opportunity

My recent experience with Santa Fe’s insurance arm highlighted a sector ripe for disruption. Current regulations make it hard for new entrants to differentiate themselves from their competitor, nor is there much need for them to do so. But when you have a customer obsessed company like Amazon rubbing shoulders with a U.S. administration bent on deregulation, I’d take a close look as an insurer. 

Values Have Consequences

Personally, I also took a look at Santa Fe as a systemic coach and I found a company which has not yet understood the difference between just posting a value statement online and the actual consequences it would have for customer interactions, product design and operations if they actually thought it through. 

On that front, I am prepared to give Santa Fe one out of three. The way they communicated with me was quick, polite and to the point. The trouble was “the point” which went directly against the idea that stated values should also reflect and organization’s product and operations. 

Straight forward Insurance Claim

By way of background, during our recent move, some of our stuff had minor damage. The process to submit claims was relatively straight forward and easy. However, I made a mistake by submitting a claim before making sure I had included every single item which was damaged during our recent move.

I asked Santa Fe to either amend the existing claim or to open up a second claim under the same file. And, full disclosure, I did hit the button asking me whether I was really sure I wanted to submit as there wouldn’t be any way to make changes to my claim.

About ten emails later involving four people as I went up the pecking order from director level to the c-suite, I finally received this response to my question whether there was no way for them to take into consideration human error. After all, one of their value statements includes the phrase “human and digital”.

“We understand that mistakes can happen, but […] there is no rooms (sp.) for errors unfortunately,.(sp.)” Director level employee of Santa Fe.

Contrast this with Santa Fe’s claim to “have a passionate focus on our client’s […] relocating […] experience, which goes way beyond the practical aspects of relocating.”

Never mind the irony (two typos, or errors, in that sentence), this is inherently contradictory. You cannot understand mistakes happen and then leave no room for errors, except for maybe your own typos. More importantly, it goes against their own stated values, is geared towards internal processes, not the client and lets Santa Fe become a cliché insurance organization.

Missing an Opportunity

It deprives them of an opportunity to distinguish themselves from their competition by making their processes follow their stated values. It also deprived them from having me tell a very different story about how they solved my problem even though I made a mistake. But perhaps they don’t need to. Sante Fe is a moving company and on the front of it looks like they also offer the insurance for the goods you want shipped across continents. I was part of a captured audience.

And that brings me to my last point, the threat of a competitor who disrupts the market. Santa Fe saw no need to fight for me an admittedly lowly customer. But a company like Amazon does. That’s why “customer obsession” not the generic “customer focus” is the first of the four principles on which the company is built. 

Your Competitor Could be Around the Corner

Say what you want about their dominant position but as a normal consumer I can only sing their praises when it comes to staying true to being obsessed about their customers. When a recent package was not delivered even though it had been marked as delivered, I was able to sort the entire situation within two minutes by texting with a bot. At the end of that, I had an email with new delivery information and instructions for how to return the original package for free in case it should still show up. Keep in mind, they deliver over 16 million packages a day in the United States alone. Now, just imagine Amazon decided to go into insurance. Santa Fe and the likes would be toast. 

So, Santa Fe, if you want to make it up to me, I can do a couple of coaching sessions with you, although that could be interpreted as a conflict of interest.