How USAA Bakes Customer Experience Innovation Into Its Company Culture

by Micah Solomon (that’s me). Originally published in Forbes.com. The author is a consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah:email, chat, web).

If you've ever wondered what a culture of customer experience innovation looks like, here's a jaw-dropping illustration: A security guard working at USAA authored, during his tenure, twenty-five fully realized patents for his company. These patents, each designed to improve a portion of the customer experience provided to USAA customers (“members” in USAA parlance) are just a few of the 10,000 ideas submitted by employees each year, of which 897 have received U.S. patents.

USAA, a Fortune 500 company which operates in insurance, banking, and financial services, is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Its campus there, holding 19,000 of its 34,000 total employees, is nearly the size of Pentagon and has security that's just about as tight. Once you do make it through the security gauntlet (which was a close call in my case: an armed-to-the-teeth security guard busted me, politely, for neglecting to swipe my visitor’s badge), inside you’ll find a cheery, fast-paced, self-contained world. It even has three Starbucks; the busiest of the three is said to do the most business of any Starbucks in the U.S. (though this claim is challenged by the Starbucks at the CIA in Langley, where baristas are instructed to notwrite employee names on the cups).

Nurturing a culture that supports customer-focused innovation

I’m here at USAA to spotlight a discipline at which I see many companies fall short: nurturing a culture that supports customer-focused innovation to grow the customer experience and prepare it for the future. As a customer service and customer experience consultant, I find myself explaining daily, to client companies, that this is a wholly different discipline from the day-to-day delivery of great service, and it’s one that’s essential to the improvement and, when needed, transformation of the customer experience.

So how does USAA, which is regularly rated at the top of its various industries for customer satisfaction, propel innovation? And how can your company go about it as well, in order to improve its own customer service and customer experience?

There are some clever processes involved, and I’ll get to those in a moment. But what it requires, first off, is a mindset. USAA burst onto the scene 96 years ago as a disruptor shaking up the staid insurance industry, a members-only organization created with the intention of serving military personnel (initially, officers only) who hadn’t been treated well by the industry as a whole. This ethos, that “we’re here to do better, and to always keep our eye on what ‘better’ looks like” is the essence of a customer service-focused innovation culture—or, if you prefer, an innovation-focused customer service culture. “One of the tenets [there are six] that guide USAA is “innovate and build for the future,” says Lea Sims, USAA’s AVP for Employee and Member Innovation, tells me.

One thing striking about the security guard giving birth to 25 patents is that he's not such an outlier; of the patentable ideas come from the employees at USAA, most come from employees who aren’t on technical teams. And, at USAA, they don’t think this is weird; they think it makes sense: “You have to realize, Micah,” Darrius Jones, Vice President for innovation, tells me, “Every employee here is a customer—a member—of USAA. You get your membership with your initial onboarding documents. This, combined with serving members every day, keeps employees in constant touch with how USAA does business”—the good and also the bad, or if not really “bad,” then the doing business in a way that’s, in an employee’s eyes, not as efficient as it could be, or “lacking in this great idea I can’t get out of my head for how the experience could be improved.”

Innovation comes to the aid of hurricane-flooded customers

Some innovations are dramatic, and come in response to heart-wrenching developments—either experienced by an employee in their “customer” life, or in the course of helping out customers. That’s the genesis of the aerial imaging tool that was developed in the wake of Hurricane Harvey: In 2017, Sims tells me, “our claims adjusters heard from members who couldn’t get home and were desperate to see what damage would be awaiting them. Within 24 hours, several teams here working together constructed an online portal with before and after aerial photos using existing satellite imagery and post-storm imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to determine the extent of damages. This gave our members the ability to remotely search and view damage of their homes during the hurricane, which helped them begin the rebuilding process before they had a chance to physically get back to their homes.” This tool has had the chance–unfortunately–to prove its worth since then over multiple hurricanes, according to Sims, and has been used most recently for those affected by Hurricane Florence.

Augmented Reality: The "Shazam of Car Buying"

Sometimes the innovations are more consumeristic. In San Antonio, I previewed a new augmented reality app that I immediately dubbed “the Shazam of car buying” but is officially called The Augmented Reality Car Shopping Experience. This iOS and Android tool, which has just rolled out as of press time as a pilot program, uses car recognition and augmented reality technology to determine the year, make and model of nearly any car that catches your fancy and that you aim your phone’s camera at, whether on a dealer lot or the neighbor’s driveway. The machine learning model that powers it, says Kelly, is made up of millions of vehicle photos taken of the side, front and rear of thousands of vehicles to be able to determine the year range, make and model.

“USAA began piloting this augmented reality (AR) application,” says Kelly, “with the aim of making car buying easier for our members.” The app pilot allows members who are in the market to buy a car to point their mobile device at any vehicle (model year 2000 or newer) and immediately pull up information including purchase price, cost of insurance, similar vehicles for sale in the area, and attractive USAA “best buy” cars to be considered as alternatives, all overlaid on the image of the car. The ultimate goal, according to Kelly, “is to enable USAA members to understand the total cost of owning a vehicle without having to be at the dealership.”

Getting close to the customer–in this case, deployed military and their families

In addition to inventions that arise from employees’ own experiences as members, there are those that come out of employees’ understanding of the experience of deployed military and their families. While many USAA employees are former military and even more come from military families, the organization doesn’t leave it at that. Every new USAA employee goes through an onboarding experience for military-life awareness that includes preparing and eating MREs and drilling (moderately) with a retired drill sergeant. Later, throughout their careers at USAA, employees are kept updated via a newsletter that lets them know of the latest goings-on and changes in military life.

How this plays out on the banking side is instructive. USAA’s bank is for the most part branchless, in the belief that a phone- and digitally based experience is most appropriate for a far-flung membership. Being branchless, and serving a unique population, led USAA to become the first major U.S. financial institution to roll out voice and facial recognition, a technological innovation based in part on an employee contribution that was ultimately awarded a patent.

USAA's Accessibility Lab: envisioning the needs of members with disabilities

Imagining the needs of some segments of the member population can benefit from more concerted consideration. This includes addressing the needs of members with disabilities. To this end, USAA has an accessibility lab devoted to considering how services provided by USAA that are working just fine for fully able-bodied members may need to be adapted to make them work for those with disabilities. For example, those of us with normal vision generally consider check scanning (for which USAA holds multiple patents and was the first to roll out in the banking industry) a straightforward application of technology. But what if you are visually disabled? How do you know that you’ve actually scanned the correct check, front and then back, and done so completely and correctly? In the accessibility lab, to address this shortcoming, USAA developed voice-enabled remote capture: essentially, the phone speaks what it’s seeing as it scans the check.

Harvesting and rewarding innovative ideas

Making the decision to be innovative, and finding ways to make sure your employees actually understand your customers’ experience are two key elements of an innovative culture. But they’re not enough on their own, especially in an organization of the size and scope of USAA. Formal processes are needed as well to support innovation.

USAA harvests ideas through their “Always On Ideas Platform,” a portal that’s available to all employees. There are multiple additional ways for employee innovators to participate, including what USAA calls challenges, competitions and hackathons. “Challenges are where business sponsors within USAA present a problem or challenge and ask the employee innovator crowd to provide ideas for solving it,” says Sims. “Competitions are volunteer-based and more involved, taking about eight weeks to complete with sessions over lunches. Hackathons are sponsored by particular departments within USAA and are designed to be rapid-fire problem solving over a day or two.” (Patent law being a famously tricky discipline, USAA’s behind-the-scenes control processes include review and engagement with their chief legal office, which is made up of IP attorneys and specialized support staff.)

The rewards? While employee ideas (considered “work product”) do remain the property of USAA, the company does provide recognition and rewards, including being immortalized on a leaf of the Patent Tree (for those whose inventions are awarded a patent) that takes up an entire wall of the company’s innovation lab as well as recognition at innovation ceremonies and monetary rewards for winners of hackathons, competitions, and challenges.

Training for innovation

USAA offers various training sessions to encourage and distill innovation, including a particularly ambitious partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. The company sends two groups of 40 employees through an innovation program every year; the first week is held on campus at UT and subsequent weeks are held at USAA. Students are taught innovation concepts and design thinking for the equivalent of 60 Master’s-level hours of coursework, culminating in a presentation where teams are presented with an idea for which they develop a business case and recommend whether or not USAA should go forward with the idea.

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).