Suncorp’s new customer advocate shares priorities
Andrew Chanmugam, Suncorp Group’s (Suncorp) new customer advocate since August 2022, has lifted the lid on the role’s responsibilities and priorities.
Suncorp’s Office of the Customer Advocate serves as the voice of customers, ensuring they are heard, understood, and treated fairly across the organisation. With an office separate from the business, the customer advocate focuses on:
Advocating and making things easier for customers, especially those in vulnerable or complex circumstances;
Driving fairer dispute resolution outcomes; and
Identifying opportunities to improve the group’s products and services.
In an interview with Suncorp, Chanmugam said his main priority as the new customer advocate is to listen and understand what customers and the community currently need from insurers and banks.
“The customer advocate is designed to represent the voice of the customer, so it’s very important that much of my time is spent bringing those voices into Suncorp and understanding what’s important to our customers,” he said. “I’m seeing and hearing that cost-of-living pressures for consumers and small businesses are really starting to bite, and that is sometimes exacerbated by additional vulnerabilities such as domestic violence and financial hardship.”
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Based on Suncorp’s Financial Inclusion Action Plan, Chanmugam will focus on insurance accessibility and affordability amid skyrocketing inflation and geopolitical instability globally.
“There’s a conflation of things that we need to consider and adapt to, to continue to understand what our customers need and how we can support them in this changing environment,” he said.
Chanmugam also brings a few changes to the customer advocate role as it continues to mature since it was first introduced in 2017.
“There’s an opportunity here to introduce new ways of working to really embed that voice of the customer through every area of the business, and there are a couple of things we’re doing, like introducing a customer checkpoint through all projects,” he said.
