Paul Carroll
I've been hearing people talk about improving the customer experience for a decade now. How are we doing?
Denise Garth
It depends on how you define customer experience. I think the focus on customer experience started out being about how customers interact with us online. But I think the customer experience issue has expanded beyond that. It's now also about whether we are providing the right products and services to meet their unique needs. We’ve moved into a greater level of personalization, where we’re looking at risk more individually and at how customers live their lives.
That shift moves us into how to create an experience more holistically. It's not just about how am I looking at my policy online or how am I paying my bill online or how do I check my claims. It’s more than that.
I think affordability has become a big factor, with the increases in premiums, in particular for property and vehicle insurance. We now are actually seeing the protection gap growing. Customers want more than just, Oh, I can go pay my bill online.
Paul Carroll
Can you think of an area where things are going especially well?
Denise Garth
There are pockets of companies that got ahead of the curve, particularly during COVID, especially with payments. People were looking to make sure they could operate digitally.
In benefits, some insurers are making it easier to enroll and to offer more guidance attuned to what someone really needs—I know you’re married, you’re older, you don’t have children and so on. So the insurer can frame what they’re recommending.
Paul Carroll
On the flip side, are there areas where you think not a lot of progress has been made?
Denise Garth
We still do a lot of underwriting at the aggregate level, not the individual level, particularly for property and auto.
We also engage too often at the transaction level, not at a holistic level. You have a claims department… but just for this line of business, and each creates its own experience. Nothing really ties it all together holistically across functions or lines of business.
Paul Carroll
Is the solution just management discipline, or are there particular technologies that can help as tools become available?
Denise Garth
I think it gets back into leadership and strategy. You can still be organized by lines of business, but someone has to be thinking holistically, from a customer perspective. Many companies tried with a chief customer officer or chief digital officer, but I'm not sure they always had the necessary authority. Those business units are run with their own P&L, and they set their own priorities.
I think that's the same problem that has happened with data and analytics. Everybody's kind of gone off and done all their individual initiatives, and nobody has put together an overall strategy.
What has really worked well for companies is to have an overall strategy. This is what we're going to be as a business. This is going to be our data and analytics strategy. This is going to be our customer strategy. This is going to be our distribution strategy.
With a strategy, you can start at any point across the business and the strategy will bring it all together. Without a strategy, you run the risk of siloed solutions, disparate experiences, inconsistent experiences – in essence a hodgepodge of solutions that don’t work together to execute the strategy.
Paul Carroll
I feel like, these days, I'm contractually obligated to ask you about generative AI. How does it play into this in the near term and then maybe in the long term?
Denise Garth
I think it's a big thing. As you know, we're already into a third release of our core solutions that uses Gen AI, where we have moved from providing guidance to taking actions. You can take a transaction that, once you go through all the screens to conduct it, would take seven to 10 minutes, and you can do that in 30 seconds. This is going to be an extremely powerful productivity tool and a way companies can bend the learning curve for employees, particularly as we have growing retirements and loss of institutional knowledge.
Using Gen AI externally, with customers and with agents, will take a bit longer.
Paul Carroll
When you talk about dealing with external folks. I think of Alaska Air’s issue with a chatbot earlier this year. It promised a customer some great deal, and Alaska Air tried to disavow the promise, but a court said, Nope, you’re liable for what your chatbot said.
If you were to come up with an ideal scenario, maybe two, three or five years out, what could the customer experience look like?
Denise Garth
Within the next two years, we could see a very different kind of experience.
Customers won’t have to navigate through phone trees—“Hit one for this, hit two for that.” AI will give customer service agents information much more quickly, so customers won’t just be sitting on the phone. Service agents won’t have to manually pull information together across multiple systems. We will be able to pull all the information about customers across multiple systems, we’ll begin to personalize the experience based on all the information—I want to get a text for this but a phone call for that.
A couple of weeks ago, my brother got a text from his insurance company saying they had started working on his claim. He didn’t know anything about a claim, but he learned that someone had hit his son’s car, and the insurance company was letting my brother know they were already on site.
The car ended up being a total, and the insurance company got my nephew, who’s still in college, a rental until he could find a new car. The claim was a great experience for them because the insurance company engaged in a wholly different way and did it so promptly. The process didn’t just begin 24 hours after the accident; it began immediately.
Paul Carroll
I think that sort of experience has to become the norm.
Any final thoughts?
Denise Garth
I just think we have to think bigger on customer experience. We can't just think about an individual transaction or a specific function.
And as we have newer buyers coming into the market, we have to realize that Gen Z’s and Gen Y’s have different expectations and are technology natives. They have different lifestyles than we have. So we have to adapt our processes, provide different products and personalize the way we engage with them.
Paul Carroll
Thanks, Denise. You always have such an interesting perspective.
