How to Captivate Customers (Part 4)

ITL Editor-in-Chief Paul Carroll recently hosted a webinar on "Captivating Customers With All-Channel Experiences,” featuring experts from Capgemini and Salesforce.com and the former chief customer experience officer at AIG. To view or listen to the webinar, click here. For the slides, click here.  To see how important it is to provide a seamless, multi-channel experience that will captivate customers, look at our experience with a large North American property and casualty company. Revenue was falling. Too many customers were leaving. Customer service and the overall customer experience were lacking. Antiquated systems – both those facing the customer and the back-end, legacy infrastructure – needed to be modernized. The company began a multi-year transformation, starting with its auto insurance business unit, and then expanded to other areas. With our help, the company designed and deployed a “Quote to Card” capability across multiple channels. The solution provides real-time information by integrating internal and third-party systems. The insurer is now able to complete the “end-to-end” quoting process (build/rate/bind a quote) for both the direct-to-customer channel as well as the agent channel, in a much more efficient and elegant manner. The insurer incorporated a rich analytics component. As a result, it can perform robust online analytics, capturing information such as time spent by a prospect on the site, analyzing when and why a prospect is abandoning the quote process, etc. The insurer can also personalize the user experience, using results from the analytics platform coupled with advanced techniques such as caching and multivariate testing. Subsequently, the insurer added self-service capabilities for customers to conduct billing activities such as reviewing their account summary, paying bills, viewing payment history and updating personal profiles and other information. As a result of the initiatives, the insurer is now able to create a 360-degree view of its customers across sales and service. There has been a 34% increase in customer retention and a 37% increase in customer satisfaction. Meanwhile, costs are dropping. Average times for handling issues are dropping at call centers. Less time is needed to train agents, and their productivity is up 40%. More customers are using self-service channels. Fraud is also declining because the insurer can, for instance, see when people are trying to game the process by fiddling with numbers to get a better quote. Additional capabilities are still being added as part of the multi-year transformation road map. This is the fourth in a series of four articles adapted from the Capgemini white paper “Cloud-Enabled Transformation in Insurance: Accelerating the Ability to Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences.” The other articles are here, here and here. For the full white paper, click here.