Established in 1952, nib is one of Australia's fastest growing health funds servicing over 1 million Australian and New Zealand residents.

This growth has brought some unique challenges; especially around how their customers interact with the health fund on a daily basis and how effectively nib manages claims processing, product enquiries as well as complaints.

"KPMG helped us build the foundation to start our lean journey. By better understanding our customers we have been able to improve the customer experience across many of our value streams."

– Adam Novak, Customer Experience Manager, nib

To better meet these challenges and stay competitive in the market, nib saw an opportunity to shift their focus to improving the overall customer experience and their interaction with the business. The central idea was that by enhancing the overall customer experience, coupled with an improvement in the way the business thought about their processes, would lead to greater operational efficiencies and improved profitability.

KPMG worked collaboratively with nib in assisting them develop a customer-centric process improvement capability based on lean principles.

A significant first step to achieving this was the development of a nib Quality Improvement Team, which included capability building and knowledge transfer to the team and throughout their business. In parallel, areas that had the biggest impact on the customer experience were identified for pilot projects (learn by doing).

Through this, a series of projects to help improve customer interaction and satisfaction were delivered, resulting in sustainable improvements to their claims processing, customer correspondence, on-boarding process, call centre, and retail network. 

"The training course was absolutely brilliant, one of the best that I have attended in recent years. The claim processing exercise was an eye opener and provided real experience rather than just a process flow chart."

– Tony Colic, Procurement and Asset Manager, nib