5 Digital Insurance Trends Shaping Customer Experience

Traditional insurers are finding it difficult to remain competitive in today’s dynamic, digital environment. Insuretech start-ups are thriving in what is now an experience economy – consumers value experiences and emotions over and above products and services. These innovative, technology-led organisations are delivering an exceptional customer experience by adapting to and meeting the ever-changing needs and expectations of consumers today.

Among IT spending in the insurance sector, customer experience (CX) will have a 37% market share by 2024, rising at a CAGR of 17,5% to reach 50 billion USD – According to a recent IDC InfoBrief sponsored by Liferay

It’s clear that without a customer-focused strategy, insurers will struggle to attract and retain customers. To improve customer experience in insurance, insurers will need to change the way they interact with customers.

According to this new IDC InfoBrief, “providing an excellent and personalised experience to new digital customers is a must for any insurer to build loyalty and long-term relationships, with 60% of insurers saying attracting and retaining customers are their top priorities“

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Looking ahead to the remainder of 2022 and beyond, we have identified 5 emerging digital insurance trends. Across the board, the focus on customer experience enhancements is clear:

1. Omnichannel is driving insurance customer experience

Following the pandemic, customers are embracing digital interactions with their service providers more than ever before – a trend also noted in insurance.

“In times of COVID-19, in EU markets, only 28% of consumers used to favor digital contact with their agents before COVID-19, increasing to a whopping 43% during the pandemic” – EY Global Insurance Consumer Survey

Meeting the needs of all insurance customers does, however, require an omnichannel communications strategy.

By constantly communicating valuable information to your customers, you can build stronger relationships. But to build trusting relationships, you need to keep communications integrated across channels. Otherwise, consumers may get unsynchronized messages across channels, eroding the customer experience.

To provide integrated omnichannel communications, you need a communications portal that gives your business users the ability to view, manage, edit, and report on all communication channels, a single view of the customer. That way, every interaction with the customer is part of a seamless communication journey that presents a unified and engaging front to them.

2. Reducing complexity and faster processing times is key

The insurance industry is notorious for being paper intensive. This has a negative impact on customer experience as it is time-consuming and leads to frustration.

Two of the top five insurance customer requirements are related to speed, based on the 2020 Gartner FS Customer Experience Survey

TOP CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS FOR INSURANCE TRANSACTIONS

Top requirements for customer engagement

n = 1,025 insurance customers.
Source: 2020 Gartner FS customer experience survey

To meet insurance customers’ growing requirement for speed and simplicity – shaped by digital services provided by other service providers in various industries – insurers will need to automate manual processes, integrate digital channels with their back-end systems, and improve third-party processes.

Insurers should consider having a comprehensive customer communications management strategy. Such a strategy will enable them to service customers quickly and efficiently via both digital channels and human teams. A Customer Communications Management platform supports this approach by recording every communication with a customer, including their personal documents.

Personalised, interactive video is also a great CX tool. It drives personalised digital customer experiences, such as interactive policies that offer visual engagement and real-time interactivity. It can help simplify complex policy information and be used as a tool to help guide the customer on the right product to cover their risks.

3. Leveraging customer data to enable personalised interactions

Based on their experiences with retailers, banks, and other sectors, insurance customers place increasing value on personalisation when it comes to the products, pricing, and communication they receive from their insurer. This expectation goes far beyond being addressed by name or receiving vaguely suitable offers based on broad segmentation.

The more routine tasks your insurance organisation brings online, the richer the data you gather about your customers becomes. Since the digital transformation boom began, many insurance organisations have been sitting on a goldmine of data, without focusing on how best to use it. To ensure your competitive advantage, your organisation will need to consider all the ways in which data can be turned into insight and then into action.

One of the reasons insurers struggle to leverage customer data is a lack of a “single source of truth” – an integrated source of real-time data that is easily accessible by business users. Technologies like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Customer Communication Management platforms can help insurance organisations integrate and leverage data sources to access personal, usage, behavioral, and other types of information in real-time. Customers can then be targeted with relevant products as well as personalised, usage- or behaviour-based pricing. For example, if they drive less, they want to pay less for insurance coverage

Sixty nine percent of consumers would share significant data on their health, exercise and driving habits, in exchange for lower prices from their insurers, and 66% would also share significant data for personalised services to prevent injury and loss, as reported by Accenture’s global Insurance Consumer Study.

5. The shift from paper to digital experiences

Moving to paperless insurance should achieve a quick ROI and an ongoing cost-saving for the insurer. But achieving cost savings should not be the only objective of going paperless. This is an ideal opportunity to enhance the customer experience.

Fortunately, improving customer experience through a digital option is easily done. What was a flat, unnavigable policy document on paper, transforms into a fully indexed, easy-to-navigate document digitally. A paper bill becomes an interactive, digital bill that presents the most important information in a clear and concise manner.

Paperless insurance as a business objective should be seen as a journey, not a finite destination. There will always be customers that prefer paper documents, and insurers need to cater for this by offering a range of channels, with the ability for customers to select their preferred communication methods.

An omnichannel CCM Platform can help your insurance company reach its CX goals

• Build trust with insurance customers via communication (via print, PDF, HTML, email, text, and online interactive experiences).
• Generate and delivers insurance policies, bills, statements, and any other customer documents via print and digital channels – through a single provider.
• Leverage interactive video to drive personalised digital customer experiences, such as interactive policies that offer visual engagement and real-time interactivity
• Store documents securely online and enable customers to self-serve.
• Encourage customers and brokers to adopt digital communication channels.
• Gather and utilize customer data to continually improve the personalisation of communications.

Investing in a reliable customer communications management (CCM) platform is an essential part of providing the kind of omnichannel experience that insurance customers now expect. It helps provide a great customer experience, and builds engaged relationships, which in turn results in customers for life and a competitive advantage in the current marketplace.