How insurers use data to enhance the customer experience
Customers want to be catered to. The ability to differentiate the customer experience between touchpoints and provide personalized interactions at each stage is critical for insurers aiming to branch into the digital space. Modern customers are not just contacting insurance providers through their local agent or a single digital touch point—their journey weaves through a series of online and offline connections. Technology has created a market where these customers can easily research providers, products, and services prior to engaging an insurer to make a purchase.
Today’s digital-savvy insurers understand the value of delivering excellent service at each of these stages. They recognize that customers ought to feel known during agent interactions, heard when they engage call centers, and understood when connecting with brokers. That said, delivering on these expectations is no easy task. With dozens of customer touchpoints across social, mobile, web, call center, and agent interactions, carriers often find themselves collecting a wealth of isolated data. Far too often this data is kept apart from the other channels—agents rarely know what interactions customers have had with a call center, call centers rarely have insight into the customer’s app history, and so on. This disconnected customer data prevents carriers from creating a 360-degree, omni-channel view of the customer, and it weighs on the customer experience.
With an increasing amount of information at their fingertips, consumers expect more from their conversations with insurers. Call center employees also need a unified view of the customer and of the company’s products. By the time customers reach the call center, they have already done extensive research on an insurance company and are ready to ask specific questions. Call center staff need deeper insight into the customer’s digital journey if they’re to provide a satisfying customer experience.
The same principles apply for agents and brokers. By combining data from different channels and systems, insurers can both provide agents with access to standard information to pre–populate forms, and streamline the process of identifying the right products at the right prices. For example, If a broker can see that a customer buys professional indemnity insurance from them but not directors’ liability insurance, they can start a conversation and potentially sell the customer on a packaged policy that saves them time and money.
The challenge is to figure out how to get customer data out of disconnected systems, analyze it, and use it to transform customer experiences. By harnessing the latest technologies, insurers can integrate their data and deliver the information, tools, and service capabilities that customers and agents need. Customer relationship management solutions (CRM), like Dynamics 365, help insurers create that 360-degree view of a customer across multiple product lines, which helps provide a seamless, personalized customer experience.
To give their teams this level of insight, insurers need to break down information silos across the organization and establish the customer, not the product, as the focal point of their sales and marketing efforts. The most efficient way to unite these data processes is through a CRM-powered insight system. A digital insight system takes interactions from the agent channel, customer web and mobile channels, the service center, existing siloed back-end systems, and from marketing and social interactions, and brings them all together.
As consumers continue to gather more resources to shape their decisions and more competitors enter the field, carriers that differentiate themselves through making customers feel known create a notable competitive advantage. By democratizing their internal data, insurance providers can help ensure their agents, call center representatives, and brokers are all working with up-to-date customer information and cater each interaction to the specific needs of each unique client.
Want to learn more about becoming a digital insurer? Download our latest white paper, Delivering Differentiated Policyholder Experiences.
