The insurance industry, including insurers, agents, and brokers, faces the challenge of fulfilling the constantly changing customer expectations. With the increase in digital competition by disruptors and banks, insurers have to redefine their customer loyalty strategy in order to strengthen brand loyalty to the new and existing policyholders. Intelligent communication technology can also increase operational efficiency in front, middle and back office workflows, from faster tracking of customer contacts to damage processing.
How can insurance companies create unique customer experiences and achieve cost savings through digital customer engagement? These five aspects play an important role.
Change through API technology
Most insurance companies still rely on their old infrastructure, even though they are increasingly switching to the cloud. Companies can use cloud-based platforms, such as Twilio, to modernize existing IT systems. APIs enable technology developers to develop the best possible flexible solution for the company, customers, and the application.
Software developers can flexibly add new functions, optimize existing and improve the already developed solutions. In addition, APIs can be integrated and bridged directly into the communication between the existing technological infrastructure and systems.
Fulfill new customer expectations
According to a survey by IDG Research, a better understanding of customers is considered the highest digitization hurdle – and while the number of younger generations is growing, it is crucial for insurance companies to understand their habits and preferences in order to gain brand loyalty. While insurance companies generally benefit from a high level of customer loyalty, the aspiring demography of young, digitally raised insurance buyers must be tried out open, innovative alternatives.
Digital sales channels become the most important point in customer address. A report by Ernst & Young has shown that 80 percent of insurance customers are willing to use digital communication channels (including web chat, email, mobile apps, video, or telephone) to get in touch with their insurance provider instead of speaking to a representative or broker. 67 % of Generation (18-23 years) stated that they would rather conclude their insurance coverage digitally than speak to a representative.
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Building a cross-generational brand loyalty
Today, customers expect you to be able to take out insurance easily and quickly online. You would also like to use the digital market to compare tariffs and insurance options. In view of these new values and priorities of customers, customer experiences become even more important for customer acquisition, loyalty, and satisfaction.
New sales channels, direct-to-consumer channels, or self-service become the predominant sales model. Insurance companies can integrate virtual assistants into their landing pages or other digital sales channels in order to lead customers through the fully digital policy registration process. Automated chatbots can answer first questions and collect customer information to qualify customers before they are forwarded to a telephone call with a live agent.
Improvement of the work processes of intermediaries
Self-service and automation technology can almost halve operating costs. However, human employees should not be replaced by automated chatbots. Instead, insurers have to concentrate on improving the intermediaries’ work processes in order to offer faster customer service on a large scale. The experience of the intermediary is behind the customer experience.
For example, insurance companies can create more productive work processes for intermediaries by integrating intelligent communication technology and routing functions into their customer service channels. In addition, customers want to interact with the insurance company about the channel of their choice and at a time of their choice. Intelligent chatbots can serve as the first communication line, but the effective forwarding of customers to agents is also important. Insurance companies can, for example, modernize their old telephone system with cloud-based interactive language dialogue systems (IVR) and programmable routing functions in order to forward inquiries to the right agents faster.
Ensuring trust and security
Policyholders trust the insurer’s personal and sensitive data. With the digitization of core business processes that are shifted to the cloud, insurance companies must proactively handle, manage and protect themselves from fraud.
Multi-factor authentication is an effective instrument to verify the identities of customers across various channels. The embedding of live audio or video channels in digital damage processing processes makes it easier to examine claims.
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The establishment of trusting customer relationships is the focus of the activity of insurance companies. Reliable communication is important in every phase of the customer relationship – and will only become more important in the future. In order to build brand loyalty to the digital market, insurance companies have to redesign the customer journey with the help of new technologies in order to fulfill the developing customer requests with reliable service after simple and quick insurance protection.
