How to Deliver a Great Customer Experience in the Insurance Industry

The insurance sector is undergoing enormous change. New competitors have emerged and customers now expect personalized, responsive experiences online.

There are innovative and reliable solutions to these challenges, but first insurance companies need to see the long-term value of digital transformation.

The top 5 CX challenges facing traditional insurers

Traditional insurers are facing a number of challenges they need to confront head on to maintain their customers:

1. Customer loyalty. According to PwC, 60% of consumers don’t feel they’re financially confident or covered across their long-term security and emergency needs. Many people don’t feel confident selecting an insurance provider or see insurance as an unnecessary expense. When they do need it, they often focus on finding the cheapest option.
2. Robust competition. New entrants to the market are capturing customers’ attention and threatening the market share of longstanding insurance providers. The high activity in mergers and acquisitions we saw in the sector in 2021 is a symptom of this competitive push, and is set to continue in 2022.
3. IT systems in need of upgrade. Many insurance companies are devoting a significant proportion of their technology budgets to maintaining expensive and outdated legacy systems that are ad hoc, impact the quality of their data and may not align with data security requirements. This impacts their capacity to understand their customer’s preferences and provide a quality customer experience.
4. Data overload. Many insurance providers are making the mistake of equating data quantity with data quality. Without effective data management plans in place, insurance companies will struggle to improve the overall quality of their data and gather the meaningful insights they need to improve customer experiences.
5. Security. There are some security challenges that come along with providing customers with insurance services online. Cyberattacks are a growing risk and insurers have a responsibility to secure their customer data from hacks and data breaches. Without these safeguards, they cannot maintain consumer confidence.

One of the biggest hurdles in insurance digital transformation has been encouraging people – both customers and employees – to embrace new ways of doing things.

When insurers focus on the upfront cost of upgrading to the right tools, they overlook the long-term costs of maintaining their patchwork of legacy systems and losing their customers to more daring competitors.

Personalized communication in Insurance is essential

It’s important to remember that the insurance business is a people business. Customers rarely interact with their insurers — and often do so in moments of high stress.

For this reason, how you communicate with your customers is vital to a great customer experience.

Customers increasingly expect engaging, intuitive and personalized interactions with all types of organizations. Low rates aren’t enough to win new customers. Customers care about how their insurance company treats them and one poor interaction online can be enough to lose a customer’s loyalty.

Customers want to feel valued. Impersonal and mass communications can create a disconnect for the customer, impacting on their overall experience. From onboarding the customer to claims management, messages need to align with the company’s promise.

This is at the heart of an omnichannel approach, which embeds positive interactions, across digital and in-person touchpoints, at every stage in the customer journey.

Behind the scenes, creating personalized experiences requires intelligent workflows, automation and AI embedded through the customer journey so you can meet customers on the right channels at the right time. This is what’s needed for insurance companies to move beyond a transactional relationship with their customers.

What opportunities does AI present IN INSURANCE?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers enormous opportunities for customer experience and improved decision making. Insurers no longer need to wait for an employee to contact a customer to build a relationship, respond to an enquiry or upsell them. Instead, AI and automated processes deliver personalized yet fast customer experiences. AI can enable insurers to:

• Automate core processes like claims, to increase productivity and allows for higher-quality human touchpoints with customers.
• Create unique products quickly with low-code tools.
• Use complex data sets to improve risk pricing and offer more personalized rates.
• Clean up data and ensure you are only collecting what’s relevant.
• Enable fraud-detection and real-time monitoring of equipment to allow for predictive maintenance before claims happen.

Soprano offers the perfect tool to enable digital transformation

Solutions already exist for the challenges facing insurers. Soprano’s advanced CPaaS solution enables insurers to deliver a seamless, digital-first experience from quote and sale all the way to claims. With Soprano Connect, you can automate proactive interactions with customers to keep them engaged throughout their entire journey and understand their preferences.

This responsive communication system is specifically suited to the needs of insurance companies:

• Automates customer service processes across multiple channels.
• Real-time, two-way mobile interactions across voice, SMS, email and interactive IP messaging.
• Geo-redundancy to handle volume spikes.
• Easy integration with insurance IT systems.

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This solution also addresses the dual challenges of data integration and security. Soprano Connect includes features like two-factor authentication (2FA) to protect customer data and its digital mobile interactions are API integrated to keep your data in sync.

This is the perfect tool, already used by insurance companies around the world, to keep traditional insurers competitive in a new digital landscape.