Fidelity National Financial employees share research success stories
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Company: Fidelity National Financial
Client: Tammy Strickland, Vice President of Customer Research & Discovery
In the client’s own words
Three members of Fidelity National Financial–Pamela Williams, Joneth Mancini, and Laura Kaltz–share their recent research success stories with Llewyn Paine Consulting, LLC.
“Working with the Operations, identifying these gaps, and then being able to go to leadership and say this is what’s needed because this is what your teams say they need–that is huge and impactful.”
–Tammy Strickland, VP of Customer Research & Discovery
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Success story #1: Engaging operations through standardized listening sessions
Background
Pamela Williams: My role is product ambassador and operation liaison. My focus is to educate all the Operations around the country and to provide great feedback to the development team.
Why Pamela decided to work with Llewyn
Pamela: I've known these Operations for over 20 years, and I thought I was always bringing back really great information from them. And then I took some of Llewyn’s courses and I realized that I was probably swaying their answers with how I asked my questions.
One of the things that I was concerned about is that I didn't want to sound inauthentic to these groups that I’ve known for 20 years. But I found I was able to still have my personality, and yet bring back good data.
How standardizing questions made Pamela’s listening sessions better
Pamela: By going out with more structured questions, I was able to guide the conversation in a very structured way across a large group. In the past, my presentations would take me an hour. But with this new approach, there was so much buy-in, so much interest that pretty much every presentation was around 3 hours with all groups. And all of the feedback has just been amazing.
It’s also driven follow-up engagement. In a recent group of 81 attendees, after the meeting they attended 133 training sessions on different areas of the program and provided 4 product enhancements. And we're finding that they have increased their productivity with our products.
One more bonus: we had management in most of these groups, and what I really appreciated is they were looking around and saying, I didn't realize my team didn't know this. So we took the opportunity to have the sales team go out and retrain them. I've been looking at their numbers and they have increased.
On working together
Tammy Strickland: It would be very easy for consultants to know what they know, and they're not willing to evolve on what might work best for us as client. But with Pamela’s approach, it was not something we anticipated using. We all liked it, then Llewyn took a look at it, made sure that we were keeping it in line with what we should be asking and getting good data back, but allowing her approach to be something that we used because it was very comfortable for Pamela.
Pamela: Llewyn is very calm in her demeanor. She’s extremely knowledgeable. You can tell that she has thought this out.
Success story #2: Repairing training gaps through operations research
Background
Joneth Mancini: I'm Senior Vice President. I was formerly the branch manager for Chicago Title New York NCS. I was asked to partner with Laura to figure out how we can harness technology better to service our customer, and to learn what is preventing us from being more successful than we are.
Laura Kaltz: I’m VP of Regional Technology Initiatives, and before that I closed commercial real estate deals for almost 20 years.
Why Joneth & Laura decided to work with Llewyn
Joneth: Tammy recommended that we participate in learning how to develop interviews. I have the gift of gab, so I thought I was good to go. But by taking the training with Llewyn, I realized the importance of developing open-ended questions. That was very key because we needed to get the best response from the field in order to figure out next steps for the project.
After going through the training, we ran several interviews, and we were able to identify areas that needed to be looked into further.
Laura: Llewyn taught us how one word can change an entire question. There were at least one or two questions where we went back and rephrased because you could just tell that one word was leading them down the wrong path. Making those minor adjustments gave us more of the feedback that we thought we should be getting.
Because of the background Joneth and I have, we thought we knew what was going on but we were surprised at times.
How Joneth & Laura’s research impacted operations teams
Joneth: One of the things that came out of the surveys and the interviews was we had a gap in training due to the pandemic.
Laura: The follow-up surveys that we did really allowed us to figure out what we needed to focus on. It gave us data so that our executives wouldn't just think of it as two people’s opinions. Instead, it was, here's the data that supports what we're telling you, and that's really helpful.
Joneth: So Laura and I worked with [redacted platform partner] to provide loop-back training. The field managers and the employees received it well because it was based on solid information. Some operations are still continuing this loop-back training. It is a long-term investment so you don't see a gap like we did before.
On working together
Joneth: Llewyn has extraordinary patience. At no time did anyone in the group feel bad that they didn't know something. She just gently guided the ship back to the course. Which isn't easy, especially with a group that doesn't have a marketing background.