Research Brief
A recording for this session isn't published. Below is the BPI editorial brief — key takeaways, an in-depth summary, and FAQs drawn from the original session materials and the presenter's body of work.
Presenter
Karen Kocher
**Case Study Presentation and Dialogue**
Description
Karen Kocher, Chief Learning Officer at Cigna will present the business need, design, and implementation of programs and practices that support and empower customer centricity at Cigna. Her passion for creating social collaboration through smart mob organizing and adding global effectiveness through focus on Cigna’s value chain has garnered leadership support.
Learning Points
- Cigna's success engaging its internal crowd utilizing crowd-sourcing principles through intranet
- Designing processes and practices for crowd-sourcing
- The effects of storytelling to enable a customer focus
- Critical Success Factors for global collaboration
- Dialogue and discussion on your challenges and work in the area of customer centricity and global collaboration
Who Will Participate
Senior Executive Board members and internally invited guests
Key Takeaways
- 1.Cigna successfully engaged its internal teams using crowdsourcing principles on its intranet.
- 2.Well-designed processes and practices are essential for successful crowdsourcing initiatives.
- 3.Storytelling is a powerful tool for instilling and maintaining a focus on the customer.
- 4.Specific critical success factors are key to enabling effective global collaboration.
- 5.Focusing on the organization's value chain is crucial for improving global effectiveness.
Cigna Case Study: Fostering a Culture of Customer Centricity
This presentation by Karen Kocher, Chief Learning Officer at Cigna, details the business need, design, and implementation of programs and practices that support and empower customer centricity within the organization. The case study explores how Cigna achieved leadership support by demonstrating a passion for creating social collaboration and global effectiveness.
Key Strategies for Engagement
Cigna's approach combines several innovative strategies to embed customer focus throughout its global operations:
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Internal Crowdsourcing: Cigna successfully engaged its internal workforce by utilizing crowdsourcing principles through the company intranet. This involved designing specific processes and practices to gather and implement employee ideas, fostering a sense of shared ownership.
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Strategic Storytelling: Storytelling was a key tool used to enable a customer-focused mindset. By sharing compelling narratives, the organization reinforced the importance of the customer in all aspects of its work.
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Global Collaboration: The program emphasized global effectiveness by focusing on Cigna's value chain. The presentation outlines the critical success factors that were necessary for achieving effective collaboration across different regions and departments.
Learning Objectives
Participants in this session will gain insights into Cigna's journey and learn about the practical application of these strategies. The key learning points include how to design crowdsourcing processes, the effects of storytelling on corporate culture, and the success factors for global collaboration.
This session delves into Cigna's strategic initiatives to cultivate a deeply customer-centric organization. It explores how leveraging internal crowdsourcing, compelling storytelling, and fostering global collaboration became instrumental in embedding customer focus throughout the company, a theme that remains critically important for sustained business success today.
What you'll learn
- How Cigna utilized crowdsourcing to gather diverse employee insights and foster innovation relevant to customer needs.
- The power of storytelling as a tool to communicate customer experiences and drive empathy across the organization.
- Strategies for enabling successful global collaboration to unite teams around common customer-centric goals.
- Practical approaches to shift organizational culture towards a stronger customer orientation.
- Examples of initiatives that empowered employees to contribute directly to enhancing customer satisfaction.
Who this webinar is for
- Leaders and HR professionals interested in organizational change and culture transformation.
- Executives seeking methods to enhance customer focus and drive innovation.
- Managers looking for strategies to improve cross-functional and global team collaboration.
- Individuals passionate about employee engagement and harnessing collective intelligence.
- Anyone responsible for customer experience or service delivery in their organization.
Why it matters now
In an increasingly competitive global landscape, customer centricity is not merely a buzzword but a strategic imperative. Organizations that genuinely understand and respond to customer needs are better positioned for loyalty, repeat business, and sustainable growth. The techniques Cigna employed—crowdsourcing and storytelling—are more relevant than ever for engaging a distributed workforce and conveying complex customer insights effectively. Global collaboration remains crucial for large enterprises to ensure consistent customer experience worldwide, making these lessons vital for modern leadership.
How leaders can apply this
Leaders can start by identifying internal challenges or opportunities where crowdsourcing could generate diverse solutions, encouraging employees at all levels to contribute. Following Karen Kocher's insights, they might intentionally collect and share customer stories, both positive and challenging, to build empathy and understanding within teams. Fostering a culture of transparent communication and shared purpose is key to successful global collaboration, ensuring that geographically dispersed teams feel connected to the overall customer mission. Implementing these strategies can empower employees, drive innovation, and ultimately lead to a more responsive and customer-focused enterprise.
About this session
Key takeaways
Watching this webinar gives you grounded, practical perspective on workplace culture. Expect ideas you can use in leadership conversations, not abstract theory, drawn from Karen Kocher's direct experience.
Who this is for
CHROs, HR business partners, talent leaders, executive coaches, organizational development practitioners, and senior leaders who are responsible for workplace culture inside their organization.
Why it matters now
Workforce expectations, hybrid work patterns, and AI-driven change keep raising the bar on culture and leadership. Sessions like this help leaders make smarter, more evidence-informed decisions about workplace culture.
How to apply it
Use the ideas here to challenge a current assumption on your team, design a single concrete experiment in the next 30 days, and bring one finding back to your leadership group for discussion.