Venture Platform Support: Enhancing Customer Experience With Turaco
Part of Mercy Corps Ventures’ approach to scaling high-impact startups is the suite of services offered through our Venture Platform. This is where we go beyond capital to provide high-touch support well-attuned to the needs of entrepreneurs in our portfolio operating at early-stage and in frontier markets.
Turaco is a Mercy Corps Ventures (MCV) portfolio company providing affordable health and life insurance to low-income workers, many of whom are climate-induced urban migrants. We worked together on a Customer Experience Engagement through our Venture Platform.
Written by Lance Okeyo, Marketing Team, and Joanne Ndung’u, CX Lead, both at Turaco.
Historically, insurance has been inaccessible to the mass market in Africa. Turaco was founded with the goal to change that by providing simple, quality health and life insurance coverage for groups living on less than $5 a day in urban and rural communities.
Turaco’s B2B2C insurance model leverages digital technology and partnerships with companies to reach the mass market. We white-label insurance products, enabling companies such as microfinance institutions and fintechs to easily add medical and life insurance products as an added fee to their existing products. However, the B2B2C model adds complexity to how the “customer experience” is defined and managed. This approach creates two customers for the company: the distribution partners and the end users, two groups who often have very different needs and perspectives. Additionally, with the partner as an intermediary, the model establishes distance between Turaco and our end users, with the risk of making feedback loops less direct. Since customer-centricity is one of Turaco’s seven elements of organizational culture, it has always been critical to us to effectively navigate these dynamics and keep the experience of both our partners and end users front of mind.
As an early-stage startup, we have developed ways to keep the customer central to our work and we want to retain this as we scale. Our rapid growth means that we not only have more end users, but our customer base is increasingly diverse. We want to ensure that feedback received isn’t skewed towards specific sub-groups (e.g. end users that have phones and are therefore easier to reach). Additionally, growth means that senior leadership and individuals in support functions (e.g. finance, people operations, etc.) are more likely to be distanced from the day-to-day interactions with customers. We aim to ensure the voice of the customer stays front and center as we grow, a goal shared by Mercy Corps Ventures (MCV), who invested in our seed round in 2020.
Earlier this year, we recognized that for this to happen, we would need to invest team resources into customer experience work.
As Turaco did not have formal customer experience (CX) expertise internally, MCV provided post-investment support as part of their Venture Platform to set up a scalable CX function. During an initial light-touch engagement with members of the Venture Platform team in 2021, we workshopped a first iteration of a customer journey map, including key touchpoints and some proposed customer survey questions. This formed the foundation for the in-depth review and strategy work that our newly-hired CX lead, Joanne Ndung’u, undertook when she joined Turaco in 2022.
As we continued to build this CX capacity in-house, MCV sourced expertise from Circle Innovation to provide our CX Lead with thought partnership and guidance in identifying and adapting CX best practices to Turaco, and co-develop a CX dashboard to give the team customer insights and data in one view.
This engagement, running over the course of 10 months, focused on building out three key tools that now provide the basis of the Turaco CX structure:
Customer segmentation — We built out a framework to classify different types of partners and end users and establish a common lexicon. This makes it easier to tailor offerings and share learnings across the company.
Customer journey — We standardized the base customer journey map to make it easier to identify and track key metrics at different stages of the journey.
‘Voice of the Customer’ program — We developed and launched a program which conducts regular customer feedback surveys by our call centers in each country. Typically surveys are done for a different partner each week with a random sample of customers.
Turaco customer representative engages with a potential customer to explain the benefits of insurance. Image courtesy of Turaco.
An essential element of the engagement was developing strategies to encourage and drive adoption of these tools by all of Turaco’s employees. Joanne noted that having an expert at Circle Innovation as a thought partner:
“brought a level of expertise, advice, and external perspective that helped me consolidate and articulate my ideas in a way that the rest of the Turaco team could engage with.”
Together, they were able to align the frequency and method of reporting with norms at Turaco to support dissemination of the tools. For example, Joanne reports customer survey feedback in a digestible format to partner-specific Slack channels (Turaco’s preferred internal communication tool), which can then be immediately utilized by team members. Quarterly, the CX team consolidates all the feedback and sends a report to the entire company and a summary to the board showing metrics for different stages of the customer journey, to which we are gradually adding more detail — such as customer segments. Synthesization of feedback enables everyone a bird’s eye view of key trends and learnings to inform strategic and operational decisions.
As a result of the MCV Venture Platform engagement tailored to Turaco, partner and end user experience have been able to stay top of mind for all team members and valuable new initiatives have been launched.
These new initiatives include things such as an annual ‘customer service week’ (for example, this week we’re reaching out to all partners and personally thanking them for all they do) and customer visits as part of the Leadership Team’s quarterly Key Results. Evelyn Atim, a Turaco Partnership Manager, stated that:
“the CX programs have built a feedback and accountability loop that strengthens our relationships with stakeholders by consistently identifying gaps to drive service improvement.”
While there is still more to be done, MCV and Turaco have built tools and ways of working that have provided us a foundation on which to build. And we’ve learned a lot! Reflecting on the engagement, our key learnings for other growth-stage companies looking to build out their CX function are:
Set measurable goals for the customers’ experience and track progress regularly. A standard customer journey framework with common touchpoints makes it easier to have actionable learnings across groups.
Be intentional about maintaining clear and open lines of communication with customers. As you grow and your customer base diversifies, make sure to revisit if new or different ways to communicate are needed to receive (and action) feedback from all types of customers.
Don’t overlook CX as a change management process. While frameworks, data, and feedback are all critical, at the end of the day, customer centricity is about embedding accountability for all team members to utilize them as tools to inform their work.
We have already seen the important impact this work has had on how we speak about customer engagement and how it informs decision making internally. We’re excited about our next phase of CX work to leverage our growing database on customer satisfaction and retention to test the effectiveness of new CX initiatives and measure their return on investment. We’re confident that the CX skills the post-investment support provided us will enable us to keep the customer front and center in this next phase of growth!
If you’re an impact investor building a Venture Platform, explore Mercy Corps Ventures Venture Platform overview and toolkit for hints and tips that could help you replicate this.
