Accurate, timely data is critical for a customer-facing organization. At the National Insurance Board of the Bahamas (NIB), it also serves as a management tool.

“The staff at the National Insurance Board trade in only one commodity — service,” said Algernon Cargill, director of the NIB Bahamas. “We recognize it is of vital importance to our success and to our very existence that we ensure the tools, the resolve and the wherewithal to serve with excellence.”

Many organizations rely on historical data to make decisions. This decision-making methodology uses point-in-time information including sales revenues, average selling prices and numbers of customer-service calls. To support the business, talent leaders historically submitted metrics about employee attrition, dollars spent on training classes and health care costs to help determine future spending. This information is important to the decision-making process, but not complete.

The ability to gather feedback quickly from all stakeholders — customers, employees and leaders — on an ongoing basis can help an organization adapt programs to ensure increasing sales, profits and happy customers. The NIB has developed a competency model around customer service and has been collecting feedback for the past three years.

NIB, with 500 employees, is charged with administering the social security program in The Bahamas and providing income replacement due to sickness, retirement, death, industrial injury, disease and involuntary loss of income to the nation’s approximately 300,000 residents.

When Cargill came on board in 2008 the organization was without a chief executive, morale was low and there was a need for leadership development in all areas. Customers also thought there was a very low level of customer focus and employees needed customer service training. Cargill was determined to home in on the strengths and weaknesses of the team, understand where they stood on the road to success and provide solutions for all identified gaps.

The NIB leadership team discussed ideas for organizational success and developed a competency model around the customer experience, including a focus on knowledge, training, problem-solving and supervision. To have a well-rounded understanding of the business, NIB collected three types of real-time survey feedback: employee opinions and perceptions, individual leader feedback and customer feedback.