How to compete on policyholder experience with pervasive insights

We are all policyholders of some kind of insurance. Yet unlike the experiences we have with other digitally enabled businesses which provide frequent communications and care, the services we receive from our insurers are extremely scarce.

Speaking from my own experience, I have been using the same carrier for my home and auto insurances for the past 5 years and my life has changed significantly during this period. I got married last year, found a job closer to my home so I don’t have to drive 60 miles each day to work; my husband and I have refinanced our house a couple of times; and we also added a security system.All of these events should have impacted our insurance policies, yet the only time we hear from our carrier is right around the time of renewal – exactly one touch per year, no more, no less.

I am sure my experience is hardly uncommon. Insurance has been employing a low-touch (and often wrong-touch) practice for a very long time, and that same approach is becoming less effective in the digital era. In fact, insurers have already seen negative impact on their business with lukewarm customer engagement.

Transform to a High-Touch Insurance Provider with Data and Modern Analytics

The good news is, by leveraging data and modern analytics, an insurer can transform itself from a low-touch to high-touch service provider, and drive seamless customer experience with data-fueled customer insights, online and offline.

Imaging my carrier has all the information about me on hand, such as every event that has happened to me since I became a policyholder, every interaction I have had with each of the business functions: agents, claims handlers, customer service, etc., and even my activities on social media, they would have had a better understanding of my changing insurance needs. The analytic insights derived from these data would have allowed them to act more proactively by offering me personalized insurance policies and premiums, hopefully before I switch to a different carrier.

Personalized, Timely Service on a Comprehensive Analytics Platform

A better policyholder experience can be realized by leveraging a comprehensive analytics platform. Here is how:

1. To establish a complete, timely, contextual view of their policyholders, carriers need to select an analytics platform that can integrate disparate customer data from various systems.
2. They can then use the same platform to develop and distribute critical customer insights such as life-time value, cost of acquisition, churn rate, etc., to various lines of businesses to help drive better decision-making and business outcome.
3. An advanced analytics solution with integrated machine learning capabilities can also make recommendations on the next best action to take for a given scenario, and feed user’s responses back to the system so it continues to learn and improve over time.

Make Faster and Smarter Decisions

The quicker the relevant data and insights can be delivered to the customer–facing employees, the faster and better they can make appropriate decisions. A solution that makes analytics pervasive is designed to rapidly integrate data and insights into an insurer’s existing processes such as marketing, customer service, claims and underwriting, so the frontline employees can access these insights right at their point of work to deliver customized, frictionless services to the policyholders.

Fig.1 Example of a Customer Insights Analytics Platform

How Insurers Can Act at the Speed of Customers with Data-driven Insights

To learn more about how insurers can achieve customer experience excellence by adding pervasive analytic insights into their processes, I’d like to invite you to an upcoming webinar on Sept. 26:
How Insurers Can Act at the Speed of the Customers with Data-driven Insights.

This GoodData webinar will feature Ellen Carney, Principal Analyst focused on the Insurance vertical at Forrester Research.

Ellen will share her insights on how carriers can drive successful customer experience initiatives with data and analytics insights, as well as the key elements needed to deliver measurable impact.

September 26, 2018
11:00 am Pacific

We look forward to seeing you on our webinar.

Hmmm, I wonder if any carriers will read this post and act upon accordingly? I sure hope so.