Begin with the End in Mind

By Stacey Vogler

According to consumers, the most important part of their experience with your brand comes after they purchase the product. It’s one thing for a consumer to purchase a product and bring it home. It’s quite another for that consumer to continue to use and love that product for years afterward. By ensuring that your customers enjoy their product long after the sale, you make it more likely for them to return and choose your brand in the future – the customer that has a positive ownership experience will remember, and will want to experience that again.

Having a window into your customers’ post-purchase experience is an extremely effective way to evaluate your product and service offering, and make the necessary adjustments that will build customer loyalty. That’s where we come in. We don’t just help you offer the right protection products and services. We don’t just help you to communicate the importance of protection to your customers. We go beyond the sale by ensuring that your customers’ entire experience is positive, particularly the part they value the most – the post-purchase experience.

In its simplest form, we do this by helping your customers when something goes wrong with the product they purchased. But our assistance doesn’t stop there. We work with our clients to provide education about which products are failing and why, helping them make better inventory and pricing decisions. We help our clients reach out-of-warranty customers who don’t have a service contract to ensure they get the most out of their products long after the purchase. And we make it easy for our client’s customers to access our services however they want – be it phone, chat, web or mobile.

At Assurant, we begin with the end in mind and we’re not done when the customer makes the purchase. We’re not done when the customer’s service contract is up. Our work never stops. The end we want is a happy customer who returns to you again and again, year after year, and we’ve built our extended protection business around that goal. If you’re not seeing the entire customer experience, talk to us. Assurant Solutions can help shine some light into your customer’s world.

Differentiating Value in the Post-Purchase Experience

After the sale, customer needs are similar whether they purchase online or in-store

By Joe Erdeman

In 2012, online sales hit $226 billion, up 16 percent from the previous year. The rapid increase in online shopping has raised a number of questions, including significant ones regarding state and local taxation of online sales. In May, the US Senate passed the Marketplace Fairness Act, which proposes to level the playing field for the taxation of online purchases.

Today, retailers determine necessary taxation based on a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that dictates that a state cannot force retailers to collect sales tax unless they have a physical presence in the state. Given the push-pull taking place between bricks-and-mortar and online shopping, it’s easy to see how the ability of online retailers to provide tax-free purchases to customers could be an advantage over bricks-and-mortar competitors. The Marketplace Fairness Act would require retailers with over $1 million in sales to collect state and local taxes for online purchases, eliminating one potential advantage in the battle for wallet-share.

With the Marketplace Fairness Act potentially eliminating a key advantage for e-tailers, both online and bricks-and-mortar retailers need to develop new ideas about how to differentiate themselves to consumers. The best place to start is the customer experience.

Your customer’s experience goes so much further than the moment of purchase, and everything that leads up to it. Yet most companies focus all of their efforts on the pre-purchase and point-of-sale. The best way to differentiate your brand to customers is to deliver an exceptional experience after the sale. Delivery and installation, tech support, service and repair all represent opportunities to reconnect with customers post-purchase and give them a reason to remain loyal to your brand. If you can add value to the customer experience after the purchase has been made, you’re ahead of the curve in standing out from your competitors.

And when you focus on the entire customer experience – pre-purchase, point-of-sale and post-purchase – you uncover new ways to build loyalty, gain efficiencies, improve performance and grow revenue. When you choose Assurant Solutions as your protection partner, you are choosing a partner that is focused on ensuring a world-class experience for your customers for the life of their product and a partner that shines new light onto the entire customer experience. This enables you to make better, smarter and more enlightened decisions that will build loyalty and drive growth.

In this age of shrinking profit margins and growing customer expectations, the best differentiator for any retailer – online or off – is to deliver a positive experience to your customer for the life of their product. And that’s what Assurant Solutions is all about.

The Culture of Giving at Assurant

By Jeff Unterreiner

Within our corporate community at Assurant, we have a longstanding commitment to charitable organizations, and in particular, programs that benefit children. It is with great joy and excitement that we have recently begun to work with Jewelers for Children, the jewelry industry’s charitable organization. The details are available by clicking here.

Without a doubt, we are a part of the industries we serve. When we embark on a relationship with a client, we understand that we have the ability to play a much larger role than simply extended warranty provider; our corporate culture of giving at Assurant can make an even greater impact by assisting our clients in their giving efforts as well.

The knowledge that Assurant exists as just one part of a much larger community is reflective of one of our premier core values, “Acting as a good neighbor within our communities”. This dedication to giving doesn’t cease at our office doors, but instead spills over into the incredible efforts of our employees. Assurant actively encourages employees to volunteer their time to the charities of their choice by providing paid time off to volunteer for charitable causes. Additionally, the Assurant Employee Matching Gifts Program matches employee’s charitable donations to qualifying charitable organizations. From there, we continue to enhance our employees’ great works through the charitable giving programs of the Assurant Foundation. In 2012, the Assurant Foundation and our employees provided over $4.2 million through charitable grants, matching gifts, and other giving.

At Assurant, we are committed to giving back to the communities we serve, through our employees, our clients, and their customers.

New Technology Launches Place Greater Importance on Underwriting Expertise

By Joe Erdeman

2013 is proving to be the year of the new product launch in consumer electronics. New gaming systems, innovative Smartphones, 4K TV (Ultra HD), connected cars – the list is growing and will surely be enticing to consumers as each of these new products enter the marketplace. This is great news for consumers, retailers and manufacturers, but it also brings risk – the risk of the unknown.

For consumers, especially early adopters, how can they be sure the product will work as promised?

For retailers and manufacturers, the questions start piling up quickly. How can they entice consumers to take the risk? How can they be sure their protection plans are priced appropriately? How can they manage the risks of defects or other problems? And will their extended protection partner be able to help them navigate the process successfully?

The truth is that with new technology you really need a protection partner that is a proven underwriting expert and has strong financial backing to properly manage risk. Whether retailers or OEMs, our clients benefit from the decades of experience Assurant Solutions has in protecting consumer electronics. They benefit from our actuarial database that includes 80 million active ESC contracts and the largest actuarial team in the industry. And they benefit from knowing that we are backed by the financial power of a 120-year old Fortune 500 company with more than $28 billion in assets.

Simply put, we’re better able to help you mitigate the risk related to new technology than anyone else in the industry, and we’re positioned to weather any storm that comes along.

By offering your customers a protection plan on new technology, they are more comfortable making the purchase decision. By working with a proven partner, you can trust that the post-purchase experience is in good hands and you’re not going to be blindsided by risks you didn’t see coming.

This is the year of the new product launch, and it might also be the year to consider whether or not your current partner has the experience, expertise and stability to properly support your protection program. Not sure what to do? Talk to us. After all, we’re the protection experts.