With the global growth of the demands for customer experience, CX has become an integral part of nearly every business decision. Boardrooms across virtually all industries are busy with CX planning. When embarking on a digital transformation project, introducing a new product, or merging with a new software system, customer experience is what does the sales.
With the advent of technologies that allow clients to interact with providers remotely, outstanding customer experience in insurance has become more critical than ever.
Due to the overwhelming digitization, customer experience in insurance is no longer measured in isolation (vs. just other insurance providers) but rather vs. other digital service providers in general. Customer expectations drive this trend, taking things beyond the overall CX. Customers seek simplicity, quickness, and efficiency and will not accept anything less.
Today, the most resilient enterprises center their entire operation around the client. And for the end consumer, the most significant aspect of stimulating loyalty is the professional experience. According to The State of Connected Customer survey, 84% of customers feel the company’s experience is as essential as its products or services – yet there is a vast gap between customer expectations and what most organizations provide.
Customers used to consider insurance a commodity product they had to buy based on what was offered for many years. But over the last decade, the market has grown saturated with more insurance products and possibilities, resulting in a more intelligent customer with varying requirements and desires. To address these evolving expectations, insurers must be more agile, work quicker, and prioritize superior CX.
Insurance firms encounter several complications, such as personalization and integration. 88% of insurance clients choose highly customized services. They are also keen to accept integrated products (for example, house, life, and vehicle insurance with a single premium), demonstrating the value of seamless experiences.
A McKinsey survey found that 70% of consumers hinge on their assessment of a company on the quality of its customer experience. According to a second McKinsey analysis from 2017, CX leaders in the insurance sector are 80% more likely to retain clients and have two to four times the increase in the value of a newly-launched business.
In a 2019 survey by Forrester, health insurance scored the lowest in terms of CX out of 19 categories, with automobile, home, and life following closely after. This is hardly surprising considering that just 1-10% of a typical insurer’s client contacts are about their services, with the remaining 90-99% focused on sales. Insurers must reconsider their strategic position in terms of customer experience.
Although sales calls are still crucial for converting leads, insurance businesses increasingly embrace digital technology, the World Insurance Report 2018 says (Capgemini – EFMA). According to the report, “tech-savvy” clients who are more familiar with technology prefer digital tools.
The same goes for people aged 18 to 34. A Gartner survey found that more than two-thirds of marketers responsible for customer experience think their firms compete primarily based on the level of CX offered. In the same research, 81% predicted they would compete almost solely at the level of CX within two years.
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Implementing a customer-experience (CX) change may be stressful. Many executives are reluctant to begin because they are intimidated by the numerous hurdles of implementing transformation across practically every division in the organization. However, it is this hesitancy that generates actual dangers for the company.
The positive aspect is that there is now a tried-and-true method to improve customer experience. According to McKinsey, it consists of precise phases spread over three fundamental building blocks:
Companies may get a competitive edge by integrating all three building pieces.
The first step in achieving a successful customer-experience transformation is to agree on a clear description of the sort of experience you intend to provide. A good CX aspiration fulfills the company’s mission and brand promise.
Companies then transform their objectives into expected commercial value by identifying the particular changes in client behavior that they anticipate. Even if consumer demands change over time, they prioritize the experiences leading to expected customer behavior. After prioritizing the experiences with the highest potential to influence consumer behavior, CX leaders identify the internal procedures and technological capabilities required to rethink them significantly.
While CEOs frequently create extensive CX-transformation roadmaps, many fall into the trap of adopting business-as-usual programs to accomplish the necessary change. Customer experience efforts at the most successful organizations look and feel radically different. These businesses form agile, cross-functional teams with genuine project ownership, extensive technological competence, and a culture of design thinking and continuous improvement.
These aren’t frills for firms that are dedicated to a CX culture. They reflect a considerable investment in hiring and growing agile teams with solid experience in design knowledge, establishing cutting-edge omnichannel platforms and technology, and reinventing the experiences, goods, and services that best deliver on the brand promise.
To develop client personas and understand customer demands, cross-functional agile teams conduct rapid-fire quantitative and ethnographic research using design thinking and sophisticated analytics toolkits. Once new goods and services have been produced, these agile teams ensure they are expanded across the business, integrated into the technological platform, and constantly tested and enhanced across segments and regions.
Another critical component of all successful CX transformation programs is a central team that combines ideation tools and methods and continuously conducts both generative and evaluative customer research. It brings together cross-functional experts with specific expertise, such as scrum masters, omnichannel technology architects, designers, and researchers.
Executives who have effectively adopted new customer experiences maintain the improvements by focusing on the following fundamental aspects.
Bringing these essential components together has the most long-term influence on customer experience.
We studied hundreds of tactics and identified the ones that can change CX initiatives and create actual growth in our current business climate below.
Improving the insurance customer experience digitally relies heavily on having correct data to solve requirements and difficulties. As the foundation of their CX activities, insurers should prioritize data collection throughout all client-related procedures, including purchasing, renewals, and claims. Insurers may offer more personalized insurance plans and experiences if they can access the relevant data at the right time. This boosts trust and the possibility that consumers will willingly give more data in the future.
Furthermore, insurers should explicitly welcome consumers to share data across all interactions and make it as simple as possible for them to do so. Customers, for example, are more inclined to contribute more information if they are not compelled to repeat it. By pre-filling previously collected information, you may focus on increasing the understanding of your consumer by requesting new data.
The data that is accessible in-house may be mined and supplemented using open data platforms and customer-centric analytics to develop insights, analyze trends and behaviors, and identify buyer values and factors, among other things.
Lastly, including research methodology into experience design and providing feedback choices to capture real-time sentiment at crucial decision points throughout the insurance journey are critical to developing the most accurate knowledge of a consumer.
Customers who browse for quotations online want a quick and easy search. Digitizing the whole quote-generation process boosts client satisfaction dramatically. What often strikes out is the ease and the ability to complete the entire procedure online in real time. When requesting personal information from clients, the CX’s aim should always be to simplify the process and reduce the time it takes to complete it.
Prospective clients need help with the complex and confusing terrain when obtaining business insurance. 92% of business service purchasers report feeling stressed during the purchasing process. The competitive distinction between service providers is thin, and purchasers are more risk apprehensive than ever after COVID-19.
Fortunately, your CX program may assist prospects in navigating these difficult times. Requesting recommendations from satisfied customers discovered in your CX program can provide other prospects with purchase motivation.
Testimonials, the second most convincing resource purchasers utilize during their purchase decision, may be obtained straight from your CX project to boost company development efforts and provide reliable proof of your service. Similarly, satisfaction scores and online ratings can help to alleviate buyer concern and be more compelling than your own sales and marketing materials, as well as your website.
Customers don’t simply buy items or services; they also invest in a particular brand and the experience it provides: A positive customer experience increases loyalty and income. Customers want a similar experience whether they connect in person, on social media, on mobile devices, or with online applications. If your online presence lags, it may greatly influence how a customer perceives your company.
Insurers are beginning to recognize the advantages of revamping their systems and processes and creating intelligent workflows that combine data with AI, straight-through processing, automation, and other techniques to incorporate exponential technologies at every process stage.
Integrating operations across organizational boundaries empowers staff and helps consumers to feel recognized, get speedier service, and receive insurance refunds or claim payments immediately. Furthermore, automating operations might generate novel ideas for company value.
Touchless handling of claims is an example of an innovative approach to managing a claim from the first notification of loss (FNOL) to settlement with little to no human intervention.
The bottom-line potential of fully automated claims in business vehicle insurance is very attractive. Although claims and losses are very high in this industry, one of the most practical methods to achieve revenue and optimize the customer experience is to improve operational efficiency and link companies from end to end.
According to the 2019 analysis by Cognizant, “the evolution of chatbot technology will force a total reimagining of insurance” during the next decade. Customers want prompt and accurate replies. Chatbots eliminate bottlenecks and provide real-time answers to frequently requested topics.
It’s worth noting that insurers spend an average of $124 million per firm on artificial intelligence. This significant investment is due to its multiple features, including the ability to optimize risk modeling, automate claims processing, and streamline customer relations.
Some of the primary advantages of insurance bots are as follows:
For example, the IFFCO Tokio General Insurance Company sought to enhance its claim processes after discovering that up to 30% of its clients were dissatisfied with the assessment of their claims.
The insurance company built an AI-based Claim Damage Assessment Tool (CDAT), which assesses car damage from photographs uploaded by clients via an app using powerful computer vision and deep neural network-based algorithms. IFFCO Tokio General consumer claims were handled in 15 minutes instead of 3 to 4 hours utilizing AI, and processing expenses were reduced by 30%.
Explore our case study on chatbot development for insurance.
There are enormous opportunities for insurers to stand out from the pack by placing a strong focus on outstanding CX. We hope the above tactics give you fresh ideas for thinking about (and assessing the effectiveness of your company’s CX project! Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you’d want to discuss any of them. We’d be pleased to share more about our approach to CX strategy for insurance businesses, information about our study, or how We may assist your company in elevating its CX program.