Hollard - Elf Yourself!

Positive customer reviews are vital for a brand to drum up fresh business; they carry substantially more weight with consumers than traditional advertising or marketing. 

But to voluntarily take the time to say nice things about a brand – we’re all more likely to throw a brickbat than a bouquet – a customer must be wowed. And this comes down to how much the customer feels taken care of.

Hollard Insure, Hollard’s short-term insurance division, really needed help. Flow Communications came up with “Elf Yourself!”, a unique internal campaign combining festive cheer, education and technology. It was a gift that’s still giving.

Keeping customers happy is a difficult task. From time to time Hollard Insure has to encourage its staff anew to know and live out the tenets of its service manifesto (which includes elements such as “be human”, “stay connected” and “get it done”).

But we all know that office pep talks and chirpy emailers only get so much engagement – which is to say, usually not a lot. And any goodwill that staff feel doesn’t last long, and customer service soon deteriorates again.

At the end of 2024, Hollard Insure needed to boost morale around customer service and buff up what its customers think of it on Hellopeter, one of South Africa’s most important online review platforms. Achieving a positive reputation on Hellopeter (where reviews are usually more harsh than positive) is a tough – but vital – nut to crack.

To encourage positive engagement with Hello Peter by Hollardites, Flow Communications needed to come up with something particularly inventive: something effective and memorable. And we did: “Elf Yourself!”, a festive season-related, AI-driven naughty-or-nice campaign that was fun and engaging. The underlying message: if staff took ownership of complaints and responded with empathy and action, customer satisfaction – and reviews – would improve.

The situation on Hellopeter’s website was plain for all to see. Things were dire; most reviews were very angry and scored one out of five stars, and Hollard Insure’s 12-month rolling Trustindex score was sitting at a less-than-impressive 4.6 out of 10.

This wasn’t just about bad optics – it reflected a gap between Hollard’s brand values and customer perceptions, which could only be closed by frontline behavioural change.

Clearly, there was a lot of room for improvement. We needed to make the needle move (and keep moving) in the right direction for Hollard on Hellopeter.

The campaign had three objectives:

• Raise awareness among Hollardites that Hellopeter is still relevant because reviews are there for everyone to see – especially the negative ones; it shows the world how much Hollard is trusted; and this is where people go to check Hollard out before signing up (bearing in mind that what others say about Hollard carries more weight than what it says about itself)
• Encourage Hollardites to take responsibility for their actions so that the insurer can raise the scores on Hellopeter and be competitive
• Create a campaign that would get noticed around Hollard Insure, using language appropriate to the Customer & Broker Experience team (for example, the key elements of the Customer & Broker Promise – those promises to “be human”, “stay connected” and “get it done”)

We knew that conventional ways of trying to bolster staff morale and improve customer relations, such as emailers, calls to action or even team or individual incentives, mostly don’t work well. And it was the end of the year; people were tired and really looking forward to the festive season break.

And we had a game-changing ace up our sleeves. At Flow, we specialise in combining excellent communications with cutting-edge technology to drive original, effective solutions for our clients. 

Flow’s people came up with a campaign that combined in-person activation, a staff survey on the customer experience (to emphasise how it’s done at Hollard) and an AI activation with which staff could produce “elfies” – images of themselves as elves. Hollard’s little helpers, as it were.

The campaign was conceived by the Hollard Insure Customer & Broker Experience team primarily for its own members, but also to create talkability and awareness among Hollardites (as staff call themselves) generally. After the campaign, colleagues continued to be encouraged to engage with “Elf Yourself!”, which remained active.

A few strategic considerations had to be taken into account:

• The campaign had to be easy to execute – especially the AI component, as not everyone is necessarily conversant with this technology, in particular imaging
• It had to be voluntary; not everyone would be enthusiastic about manipulating images of themselves, nor want them to be made public (Hollard had to be cognisant of privacy legislation)
• Staff also needed to be incentivised to participate in the activation’s short survey – both the “Elf Yourself!” functionality and the promise of seven R600 Nando’s vouchers up for grabs served this purpos

For the technical element of the campaign, Flow used the following combination of technologies:

• Meta’s WhatsApp API: for messaging, including prompting users and for the participant survey
• Midjourney AI: for image generation, Midjourney being one of the best platforms for this. We configured the AI model to generate with a creative flair (i.e. the “AI temperature” was increased)
• A simple SQL database: to store the results