What Does Customer Experience in Insurance Look Like Today?
Overview
The pandemic outbreak has taken the world by a storm and poses many challenges to insurance companies to radically change the way they conduct business. Dealing with complex and high-value claims, remote working of insurers, channel overload, increasing fraud risks, threats to customer data security, and maintaining continuity of distribution channels are a few of the major challenges faced by the insurance industry. Insurers need to overcome these challenges and emerge adaptable as well as resilient. And then, insurance companies need to restore their customers’ confidence in them and offer a great customer experience.
Recent Shifts in Consumer Behaviour
Trust becomes more relevant when your customers’ confidence in you and the current situation is a bit shaken. One of the after-effects of the ongoing global economic downturn is that it has made the future quite uncertain. Customers are thus looking for backup plans and reinsurance options. Your customers don’t wish to return to their old ways of dealing with insurance companies and brokers.
Health and well-being will continue to dominate people’s lives, even when we return to the “new normal”. Every business will ultimately grow to become a health business. Consumers mostly staying at home is going to be another increasingly significant trend for insurers. Besides, a reinvention of authority may occur due to the travel limits, lockdown, and self-isolation mandated by several governments.
How to Improve Customer Experience
Customers expect much from insurance companies and others during this pandemic situation and this is the best time to meet their expectations while aiming to enhance their experience. There are several ways in which you can reinvent the overall customer experience (CX) in times of today.
1. Innovate the Insurance Buying Process
Though agents on the ground drive a fair share of the insurance business, the tide is now transitioning to online. Digital intermediaries and platforms have gained paramount importance. A change is happening in the insurance industry, as insurers digitalize insurance buying, accept support documents online, execute claims processing and management, and use self-service options through digital bots and AI-driven IVR (Interactive Voice Response).
Insurers have executed short-term fixes and workarounds in the processes of their organizations. Employees can thus operate from their homes and continue to serve customers. Capitalize on this insight and understand that simpler customer journeys can be effective. Consider delivering an unparalleled digital customer experience through much use of artificial intelligence (AI) and smart automation technologies.
2. Sell Insurance Through Telehealth
Today, health and life insurance companies are using the telemedicine process, instead of taking a physical medical test, mandatory to buy health insurance. Under this telemedicine process, as a customer buys an insurance plan, they are urged to offer some basic information about their current health status. They are then scheduled for a telephone call with a health expert appointed by the insurer.
The customer makes a declaration about their health condition to the doctor, who asks simple questions on their medical conditions and lifestyle habits. Based on this conversation and the medical conditions that the customer discloses to the doctor, the insurer issues a health insurance policy to the customer.
3. Focus More on Digitization, Data, and Personalization
The most significant changes that the insurance industry witnesses today are in the way products are sold, serviced, and how customer data is utilized. As these changes lead to higher levels of personalization, there will be a shift in the customer experience as well as the value proposition. It is expected that a few of the insurance products will start to be sold via a “digital-first” advice approach.
The introduction of remote sales solutions, like video conferencing, shows insurers they can put together and use a highly effective integration of different distribution channels. These solutions help to minimize distribution costs for the insurer while enabling them to offer customers – a personalized piece of advice. Besides, carriers may adopt voice-activated intelligent agents to make simple insurance offerings.
Data analytics shows there may be higher demand than in the past for certain kinds of insurance. Insurance companies may thus need to review their channel strategy approaches. They are expected to invest more in creating digital pathways and integrating their distribution channels.
Insurers are recognizing more than ever before the relationship between being customer-centric and their digital strategy, operational improvements, and business transformation approach.
4. Increased Use of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence will affect the entire landscape of insurance as we are restoring to normal. It helps to drive savings for insurance carriers, policyholders, and brokers. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors will offer personalized data to pricing platforms.
Safer drivers will have to pay less for auto insurance this way. The same rule applies to people with healthier lifestyles, as they won’t have to invest more in health insurance.
AI also enables a seamless automated buying experience with chatbots pulling geographic and social data of customers for personalized interactions. Insurance carriers will also permit customers to personalize coverage for specific items and events, better known as on-demand insurance. AI also plays a key role in settling claims faster, while decreasing fraud. Virtual claim adjusters and online interfaces make it quite efficient to settle and pay for claims while decreasing the chances of fraud.
5. Address New Revenue Pools
Insurers need to scale their protection offerings, once they have planned to address new pools of revenue generation. Various new risk-management needs have come up as an outcome of the current epidemic.
These needs consist of business continuity cover for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), event-cancellation, and pandemic insurance policies. Especially, healthcare needs have emerged to the forefront during this pandemic phase. Healthcare is one of the sectors where insurance companies are expected to play a greater role.
Carriers have begun to roll out several different value-added services, including patient-tracking apps, remote safety alerts, specialized cover for healthcare workers, and telemedicine. Besides, the boom in e-commerce and delivery services provides insurance companies with key opportunities to extend their protection offerings, setting up new sources of revenue.
Are you delivering a seamless customer experience?
When the world is racing towards digitization and your customers are the most concerned about their safety and health, the insurance industry will see many changes in its approach, policies, and processes. How carriers interact with their customers and how broker networks integrate with that, may soon look much different. Insurers will need to address the challenges with efficacy and ultimately overcome them while giving due importance to social responsibility. Enhancing customer experience will become the most important for insurers due to big shifts in consumer behavior, to guarantee customer loyalty, and ultimately take a step forward in this era of digital transformation.
To learn how healthcare organizations are striving to enhance customer experience during this global economic downturn, don’t forget to check this out.
