With an abundance of options for insurance, consumers today demand – and expect – seamless experiences and personalization from every interaction with brands. To stay competitive in today's environment, carriers and insurtechs must revolutionize their customer experience to meet the wants and needs of the modern consumer.
But how?
In an industry that has historically relied on limited data points such as age, household income and driving history, the next generation of insurers must look beyond these attributes and embrace new forms of data and analytics, including contextual, behavioral and motivational data.
Thinking Outside the Box
By now, most innovative organizations and business leaders understand and are even leveraging the power of data to make decisions, drive targeted marketing campaigns and improve customer experience (CX). However, oftentimes the data being used is incomplete or off-base or does not provide insight into the modern consumer. Do we really need data points like "Yellow Pages Users" in 2023?
Data that goes beyond demographic information and other traditional attributes through advanced analytics and cutting-edge statistical techniques can provide robust information on the identity, behaviors, motivations and future actions of individuals and businesses. This type of data – often referred to as predictive data – enables insurers to make more informed decisions based on their customer preferences and needs, market trends and other key factors that affect their business outcomes.
For example, insight into shopper intent and likely future needs can drive your targeted offering strategy and even product development; insight into an individual’s professional life can uncover cross-sell opportunities; and more.
See also: Key Insurance Exposures for 2023
Customer Experience 2.0
Predictive data allows insurance companies to gain a valuable view into actionable, unique and often unknown factors outside of traditional insurance data points that can help improve the customer experience. Here are some powerful thought starters on how predictive data can help insurance companies enhance the CX:
1. Personalize your customer engagement by boosting what you know about prospects in real time.
It is obvious that the more you know about a person, the better you can anticipate and address their needs and even exceed their expectations when doing so. The same thing applies when it comes to the insurance customer experience. When dealing with a limited view of who people are – such as only their age, gender and marital status – you can only do so much.
When you are empowered to customize messaging based on characteristics like price sensitivity or quality concern, direct your targeting based on your prospect’s preferred marketing channel, provide digital experiences to those eager to adopt new technology and more, you are able to provide quality, personalized experiences for even more customers.
2. Identify cross-sell opportunities and grow customer value by examining all aspects of life – both personal and professional.
With many insurance carriers offering a variety of lines of protection, cross-sell opportunities are a no brainer. However, a data-driven approach should be taken for cross-sell efforts to be effective and actually helpful to your customers. Insight into all aspects of life – both personal and professional – gives insurance brands the ability to identify and prioritize their efforts toward customers most likely to need other products.
Perhaps there are a million current consumer auto customers who are also identified as independent business owners. These business owners may be ideal prospects for a specific business insurance product that independent agents are unable to sell but that corporate could cross-sell. Or let’s say another segment of 1 million auto customers are likely to be renters who may move in the next three months. These policy holders would be prime candidates for renters insurance offers or bundles.
3. Optimize your offering by understanding your best policy holders.
If you enrich your customer database with thousands of new personal and professional insights, you’re guaranteed to unlock insights into who your most profitable policy holders are. By analyzing many more data points beyond your first-party data, you can more easily understand which attributes are leading indicators of profitable customers. And when companies can better understand unique traits about their most profitable customers, they can improve their media, messaging and experience.
What if you found out that a certain product’s customers are heavy video gamers? Perhaps your brand would choose to run more mobile ads or even gamify the application process.
While the insurance space can enhance customer experiences with predictive data and analytics, incorporating such information into the insurance process is not a simple task. It's also important to note it's just one piece of the puzzle. Insurance brands must also invest in other areas, such as technology and customer support, to truly offer the best customer experience possible. As technology and data continue to transform the insurance industry, those that take advantage of predictive data to create exceptional customer experiences will be best positioned to thrive in the years to come.
