The Candid CMO: Conny Kalcher, Group Chief Customer Officer at Zurich

The Candid CMO: Conny Kalcher, Group Chief Customer Officer at Zurich

7 minute read

Conny Kalcher, Group Chief Customer Officer at Zurich Insurance, explains the appeal of the insurance industry and how the right metrics can prove the power of marketing.

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  • Author:WFA

    WFA

Expert opinion
10 June 2025
Connie Kalcher, Group Chief Customer Officer at Zurich Insurance, explains the appeal of the insurance industry and how the right metrics can prove the power of marketing.
“You either become obsolete and irrelevant, or you follow your customers’ needs, and work out how you can service more of them.”

Most marketers would kill for the chance to work at Lego, but Conny Kalcher moved from Denmark’s leading brick maker, where she’d been from more than three decades, to the seemingly less glamorous world of Zurich Insurance.

Given that insurance was a category not known for its marketing, she admits it took time to seal the deal. “They had reached out to me through a headhunter, and I'd said no thank you,” she recalls.

But then they came back, inviting her to meet the CEO. “Understanding the ambition of the business and the vision of the CEO was what convinced me,” she says. “I knew it was still a very big hill to climb but that was the challenge. I was attracted because it's a different thing to climb a big mountain if you know the ambition is there.”

As a result, for the last six years, she’s run the global customer and marketing team of around 100 people, leading a central function that sets strategy and the direction for global customer strategy and campaigns.

“I could see how all the learnings I had from my previous career could fit so well into how to try to make an industry more customer focused,” she recalls. “I was going into a whole different industry that's not known for being customer focused, which is not known for being marketing driven, and to try to make change in a whole different context. The mountain was so big that it felt like an exciting challenge.”

A journey around Lego

Like many in the profession, Conny didn’t initially think she wanted to be a marketer. She started as a teacher, before considering becoming a journalist, and then got a job at Lego.

Her first role was in the publishing department back in 1985 when the company was publishing books and doing children's animation. “This was very exciting for me. It was not necessarily writing myself, but collaborating with and editing the work of professional writers,” she says.

Over the course of her three decades with the company, she spent time working in different marketing and customer areas, including films and computer games as well as a stint in HR. She also draws on some of the tough times at Lego when she thinks about her current role. “We had a [financial] crisis [in 2004] and then it was about getting back to the core of the value proposition to kids and focusing on how to deliver and understand our core consumer,” she says.

Research told the company that its target audience was spending just 20 minutes playing with its toys, an insight that led to its big opportunity. “How can we make sure we're not just a toy, but we are having offers that reach into their gaming time, for example, or what kind of bedding are they sleeping with? What kind of backpack do they have? Where do they go for entertainment, in the amusement park,” she says.

It was all about identifying what Lego’s core consumers wanted and needed. “You either become obsolete and irrelevant, or you follow your customers’ needs, and work out how you can service more of them,” she says.

That same vision has guided her work at Zurich. “It's not just about the products we have on the shelf and thinking all customers are the same because they're not. They have different needs and they come from different starting points. So, we introduced segmentations to be much clearer about how we address those different needs and become much more relevant for our customers of today,” she says.

Getting into the detail

Since joining in 2019, she and her team have changed the visual identity, created a CX strategy, developed segmentation models for the whole company and built a huge database. “Are we there yet? No, there’s still work to be done. It's like a big super tanker, more than 63,000 people, it doesn't turn overnight,” she says.

The goal is not to direct but to enable change. “It's change with some kind of freedom and it's often co-created with the business. It's not an edict from headquarters but it's like: how can we work on improving our business together and achieve good results for our customers?”

The early stages of the process were perhaps the easiest, but as the detail starts to be applied across the business, she admits it can be challenging.

“When you start talking about how we transform sales and distribution, that's more the machine room of our business. And that is a little bit slower to change and it creates a more heavier lifting effort because that is really the core business you're trying to influence,” she says. “We're trying to change from not doing much to doing a lot yet doing it in a considered way.”

One of her key initiatives is more regular customer communication. “We know that the challenge with insurance products is that you have very few touchpoints and if we have more touchpoints with an insured person, they are more loyal, because they see the value of what we provide. So, the more products they can engage with, it means that they stay with us for longer because they realise the value of what we do.”

23% of customers claim that they have not had an interaction with us in the past 12 months if they don’t have a query or make a claim each year, so Zurich is also seeking to get more direct connections in a category known for its intermediaries. “We are launching apps around the world with services and through that we're building the connected customer layer again, because we know the more we can demonstrate the value we can bring, the happier our customers are and the more loyal they are to us.”

The impact of technology

As with many brands, Zurich is also looking to utilise technology to speed up the journey to market. A great example is the brand’s tone of voice strategy, which aims to make it more optimistic, more embracing and engaging, changing how staff talk on the phone but also in written communications.

“We have created an AI tool that helps the organisation translate existing communication into this new tone of voice. Cutting hours and hours of workload out by not having to rewrite every single piece of paper,” she says.

Tracking the impact of marketing investment in a category not used to being customer centric requires KPIs and Conny has her own metric, developed alongside the CFO.

Called NRR, net revenue retention, it seeks to connect marketing activity with real financial value. “Through this KPI, we can measure on an ongoing basis the value this customer strategy is creating. The financial value it’s creating,” she says. “It’s not about selling to the finance team. It's about co-creating with them a measurement in the language they understand, a metric that gives the evidence of whether we're creating value or not.”

Her advice is that co-created KPIs could be an easier path to demonstrating value than trying to link spend to sales indirectly. “I would say to everybody to team up. Find a good metric for how you measure the impact of what you do rather than trying to convince them if you spend X amount on advertising, you will drive X amount of sales because we all know how difficult that is.”

About WFA’s Candid CMO series

WFA wants to celebrate the world’s best marketers and explore the journeys they are on to deliver better marketing. This series helps distil some of the biggest learnings of our CMO members. As we are great believers in the power to learn from successes as well as missteps, we hope this will give our readers the opportunity to learn more about the things they are most proud of, but also about where they may have done things differently. More at https://wfanet.org/CandidCMO.

If you'd like to nominate someone with an interesting story to be interviewed for the Candid CMO series, get in touch with Camelia Cristache.