“One of the best things about being an adult is the requirement for numerous insurance policies,” said nobody ever.
For many of us, insurance is one of those things that you pay for but hope you will never use. So, it will not come as a surprise that across the board, policy holders do not talk to their insurers unless it is an absolute must. And here is where insurtech enters stage door left. This new wave of digital insurers uses technology to reduce friction and unnecessary human contact. But it is easier to adapt when you have not been built on decades of legacy principles, processes and infrastructure.
The good news is, despite the competition, many policy holders still default to the bigger names when purchasing insurance – less concerned with cost and more concerned with the coverage it offers in worst-case scenarios. That said, as we have now seen time and time again with sectors including finance, transport, entertainment, and retail, it only takes one digital disruptor to change decades of consumer behaviour. In these cases, a superior digital customer experience was the key differentiator.
Sadly, like many others, the big company that now holds my car insurance policy is not so digital savvy – I now receive my annual renewal letter via email rather than in the post but with no follow-up. With the digital competition circling, insurance firms must embrace digital customer experience (CX) that goes beyond the contact centre to gain a competitive advantage in the market. Only then will these firms see a boost in customer loyalty and growth during what looks to be a challenging year ahead.
Becoming Digital Fluent
When CX is managed across various departments, all responsible for different touchpoints, using a patchwork of disconnected systems, the result is disjointed experiences for everyone. However, focusing on managing all customer experience interactions (CXi) across the entire customer journey – not just those that make it to the contact centre – can help provide a frictionless experience that both retains and attracts a larger happier customer base. But where to start?
Create an automated CX strategy based on empirical data
For many insurance firms, the automation challenge is far greater than finding the right technology to invest in: It’s knowing where to start. Despite having good digital transformation strategies in place, many of the big-name insurance firms failed in their early attempts at conversation automation. This is because they were automating the wrong journeys, without the necessary information needed to make it work effectively. Thankfully, insurance firms own all the information they could ever need to build a superior automated CX strategy – customer interaction data. Call recordings, emails, webchat transcripts and social media channels contain human-led conversations that can unlock the secrets of the successful automation of their need events. To ensure success, however, an AI-powered analytics engine is required to surface, categorise, and prioritise the journeys that should be included in an automation catalogue as well as provide developers with the language needed to build them.
Meet customers where their journey begins and guide them through to resolution
As discussed, the traditional approach to CX misses the mark for many policy holders. While we do not want to talk to our insurers every day, we also want to know that they see and understand our needs.
Some need events are so simple and mundane that they could, and should, be delivered through search. According to a recent survey, 80% of consumers go to search as their first stop for customer service. By understanding what policy holders may be looking for on this channel, insurance firms can optimise the knowledge available in FAQ website pages, ensuring that the customer gets the answers they need, quickly and without any friction. Smarter knowledge management is a win-win.
Others need events like renewals that require a proactive approach to wow the policy holder. Thankfully, the rise of proactive conversational AI is profound, and it has a highly valuable place in the insurance world. Imagine, rather than just receiving the same-old paper renewal through the door, the insurer struck up a conversation with the policy maker via their channel of choice – be that voice, chat, email, or social media. Better still, imagine if this conversation was open-ended and included multiple opportunities for the policy holder to update their insurance to better suit their lifestyle, with the appropriate information provided on inclusions and prices. All without ever needing to involve a human advisor.
How much would that increase the success rate of renewal quotations I wonder? And that’s before we touch on the potential to reduce the cost of claim.
Empower advisors to better connect in times of crisis
Of course, there are moments in life that you cannot automate. The moments you protected against but wished would never come to fruition. It is these need events that are best handled by a human. And yet, today, advisors are not set up to support policy holders with empathy, information and flexibility. Instead, they are burdened by a lack of visibility and targets that do not reflect a job well done – or help to grow the business.
Thankfully, when advisors have AI-powered tools at their fingertips, they can wow customers like never before – and deliver an experience that can create lifelong loyalty as well as new business. Real-time information, guidance and coaching can stop advisors from sweating the small stuff, so that they can focus on solving the issue at hand with the support they need. Visibility of their performance, gamification and mobile shift scheduling can provide advisors with the control they need to improve and feel motivated.
Don’t Wait, The Time is Now
This year will contain a lot of hurdles for insurers. Laying a solid digital CX foundation the first half of the year will help ease pressure towards the back end. NICE CXone can help. It is the only unified platform addressing the comprehensive needs of all customer interactions — across the end-to-end customer journey, everywhere, on every channel (even the emerging ones).