Customer experience can be a competitive differentiator for life insurers, and many of them are making strategic investments in customer experience across the enterprise to bolster business growth. These investments in people and technology are providing the 360-degree view of their customers that’s needed to uncover new opportunities. At the same time, they’re enabling a better experience for customers and employees, which is helping to drive business results.
Transforming customer portals into digital customer engagements
The customer portal is an insurance staple that’s long overdue for an overhaul, especially now as consumers embrace digital technologies. Specifically, it needs to shift from transactional to experiential and personal if insurers are to meet the rising expectations of this next generation of insurance buyers. And whomever is first to meet the needs of these potential and existing policyholders, will win their business and perhaps even their loyalty.
One way to quickly transform the portal is by investing in today’s data-driven, intelligent core insurance platforms. Many of these platforms come with out-of-the-box integrations to best-in-class customer experience providers. They offer a powerful way to transform the portal by accelerating time to value for the new and differentiating capabilities their solutions provide such as faster, easier onboarding for policyholders. But portals alone cannot drive greater digital engagement. Advanced customer engagement requires data and analytics capabilities to provide the personalized experience consumers expect.
Data analytics: a must-have capability for advanced customer engagement
Data analytics is the driving force behind advanced customer engagement solutions. You needn’t look any further than conversational AI to see how data analytics is transforming the way we sell and service life insurance. Together, these technologies provide the personalization and seamless experience consumers expect across all channels whether it’s directly answering customer inquiries or connecting them to a human agent for assistance.
And core insurance platforms play a key role here too. These modern digital life and annuity platforms offer a powerful way to leverage your portal to drive more engaging customer experiences and uncover new opportunities. They bring together the data and back-office functions like underwriting, integrating them with ecosystem partner capabilities, to provide more relevant, engaging front-office customer experiences. For example, life insurers are increasingly using straight-through processing and external third-party data in lieu of paramedical exams to speed issuance of some life policies in the competitive direct-to-consumer market. They’re also turning to machine-generated video experiences that onboard new policyholders in a seamless and engaging way.
These advanced customer experience capabilities make use of the data within insurers’ data lakes as well as from external sources. Insurers that master this level of data management will be well-poised to improve the customer experience along the entire insurance value chain, particularly as even more intelligent technology platforms emerge.
Cognitive platforms: a better experience for human agents and the customers they serve
Cognitive platforms connect portals to advanced customer experience capabilities that combine the following: machine learning, sentiment analysis, natural language processing for speech and text, vision analysis and human plus computer interaction. This mimics the function of the human brain and helps to improve human decision making. For example, advanced chatbots augment self-service capabilities by freeing up human agents to focus on more complex support issues and proactive next-best actions. We call this “human + machine collaboration.” And we think it can also help mitigate the effects of talent shortages by directly supporting policyholders or by indirectly assisting customer service staff, automatically providing information they need to support the customer.
Investment in cognitive platforms can profoundly advance differentiated customer experiences. Such platforms will be instrumental in enabling the omnichannel, multiproduct experience customers expect, and do so without placing a heavier administrative burden on short-staffed support teams.
Further, as more intelligence is built into human + machine collaboration, we’ll expect to see product lines blur and organizational silos dissolve, exposing new opportunities to invest strategically in customer experience solutions that benefit the entire enterprise. Leveraging the best of human ingenuity and technology affords insurers greater freedom to reimagine the insurance experience to one that is more customer-centric and omnichannel, keeping insurers ahead of customer expectations. Therein lies the competitive advantage—insurers unlock efficiencies and value through differentiated experiences that improve both employee and customer satisfaction, driving top- and bottom-line growth.
Let’s have a conversation about how you can use customer experience to drive growth.
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