Finance
USAA
The United Services Automobile Association (USAA), founded in 1922 and headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, is a financial services company offering insurance and banking products to military members, veterans, and their families. USAA continues to be ranked as one of the top performing brands in the market on CX and have built a culture where all employees (not just a single department) are encouraged to submit ideas on how to improve on the membership experience.
Summary
USAA understands something fundamental: you can't truly serve someone until you've walked in their shoes. Their "Zero Day" training puts every new hire through military simulations in order to build real empathy. As a result, they achieve 95% retention.
But they go further - they invite customers to help design solutions. They use AI to handle the routine admin, so humans can focus on what matters most: understanding and connection.
This shows us that when you build empathy through experience, co-create with customers, and use technology to amplify human connection, retention isn't just a metric, it's a natural outcome.
Support delivery
*Observational only
Insights
Empathy
01: Empathy through experiential training
USAA achieves a 95% retention rate partly through their "Zero Day" onboarding where new hires experience simulated military training led by real military members. This creates emotional understanding of their customers' context, with employees receiving dog tags as tangible reminders to practice empathy in daily interactions. The training builds genuine empathy rather than scripted sympathy.
Opportunities for our work
Opportunity Area
Experiential empathy training
For some customers there's a backdrop of other challenges that the customer care team are unaware of, potentially adding to the stress of a troubleshooting situation. From our research alone, we've spoken to customers who are managing households with children, aging parents, some with learning and physical disabilities, as well as the pressures of work. When their systems break down, stress amplifies.
There's an opportunity to transform traditional customer service training from theoretical to experiential by creating immersive simulations that help agents understand the emotional context of customer interactions. Apple could go one step further and even bring customers into the co-creation process, to ideate truly human centered solutions.
