Drummond has served just four days in the job and has told anyone who will listen that the company needs to turn its attention to customer service at all levels of the business.
He has drunk the kool-aid served by Andrew Thorburn, his former boss at NAB, who instilled in staff from the top down the need to make customers the number one, two and three priority at the bank.
Drummond wants the same intensity of focus at Medibank which means more senior staff spending time out in the field talking to customers and frontline troops to learn just what customers are talking about.
On his first day in the job on Monday, Drummond made a point of making a personal visit to the company’s Bourke Street office in Melbourne to talk to frontline staff.
The latest computer stuff-up threatens to delay the dispatch of annual financial statements to customers by July 15 as required by the ATO and the Department of Health.
Over the past 18 months, the company has been replacing its old legacy platform with a new one designed by IBM and SAP and, as with most major upgrades, problems emerged in transferring data.
The $150 million upgrade to the “Delphi” platform is nearly complete.
Customers also faced long delays last Thursday but Medibank blames that outage on Telstra, which has admitted to more problems last week.
Drummond is still learning the ropes at his new shop but has issued a call to arms on customer centricity as his first rallying cry.
He comes from NAB which topped the banks on net promoter score rankings but still rated minus 11, which means customers are likely to tell their friends to bank elsewhere.
The NPS system, however, is designed to measure how many customers would recommend you get health insurance through a particular insurer. Medibank has a positive NPS ranking but details are not available and we can expect to hear a lot more about the rankings in coming months.
The latest news, which was released on the ASX, left the stock price unchanged at $2.94 a share at lunch.
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New Medibank chief Craig Drummond has used the latest computer snafu to preach the need for better customer service at the health insurance behemoth.