What is a digital insurer? In my previous two blog posts we dived into the digital deep end. In Part 1, we looked at what a digital insurer is and what it is not. We examined the link between customer-centricity and digital readiness, and we attempted to resolve the paradox of being an insurer that is running core systems yet wants to use agile emerging technologies and insurtech capabilities. In Part 2, we likened digital enterprise to a three-chambered fusion reactor that includes apps, content and journey. The reactor safely conducts the molecular fusion of core transactional capabilities and innovative emerging technologies and insurtech capabilities to provide exponential energy to the enterprise. We discussed apps and content, and now we are at the moment of truth — Chamber 3. We MUST design our fusion reactor to use the full power of the customer journey, creating compelling and relevant experiences. The experience is the most vital chamber of our fusion reactor for building our new digital framework.
Experience and Experimentation
Experience is how we build the FINAL customer journey and deliver it to our intended customers. To experiment with new business models, new pricing models and new customer interactions, we need to employ the full power of speed to value, improved total cost of ownership (TCO) and rich ecosystems.
This is the era of digital, and speed is analogous to digital. Think about it. Instant gratification is becoming the norm in our society, and the speed of innovations is exponentially increasing. For insurers, this means we must ensure that our new digital platform can provide the speed, agility and cost-effective mediums that will yield speed in the customer journey and speed in the implementation of innovations. What is not possible with entrenched systems is now possible with cloud deployment as long as the platform is designed for the cloud and not just retrofitted to run on external servers with architecture designed for on-premises expensive deployment and upgrades.
See also: Core Systems and Insurtech (Part 1)
Find and Bind
Find and bind will become a “most sought” requirement in the near future. Because long and expensive integrations cannot keep up with accelerating growth in innovations, a new methodology is needed to stay on top of innovation. A find-and-bind platform reimagines how new capabilities can be quickly bound to existing apps and content for designing overall functions and customer journeys. Find-and-bind architectures may appear to be “nice-to-have” now, but they are increasingly becoming important for leveraging new capabilities to continually innovate. Majesco is investing valuable R&D funds in this next-generation digital platform. Find-and-bind platforms will revolutionize how insurers think of themselves because they will open the doors to a thousand timely opportunities.
Customer Journeys — The Real Deal
An organization will know that it has arrived at digital fusion when it has fashioned and is using capabilities to design, implement, deploy, measure and tweak customer journeys for the insured and intermediaries.
Many companies are using their customer satisfaction numbers as evidence that they are either “digital enough” or that they don’t need to move forward quickly. For example, a company-wide goal of customer satisfaction of 95% or above is often translated as 95% of customer satisfaction by each silo owner. This is not a bad goal – 19 out of 20 customers will be satisfied and a promoter of the company. But there is a problem, pointed out in a study by McKinsey. The study revealed that that a typical claims process goes through five to seven silos – underwriting, claims adjustment, payment, etc. If we assume that the journey runs through five silos and each achieve their goals of 95% customer satisfaction, there is a 5% dissatisfaction possibility at each stage. It isn’t the same 5% of people who are dissatisfied at every stage. The net overall customer satisfaction drops to only 75%, which is terrible. How is digital involved in customer satisfaction and in improving satisfaction across the journey?
By recrafting the customer journey and its processes, we can cut through silos and unify the experience so that satisfaction is reached throughout. We use journey maps to establish a customer-centric brand by feeding customer experience back into the design. In other words, we use data and analytics from IoT, social and other non-conventional data to custom fit the experience to the user, regardless of whether the interaction is initiated by customers, intermediaries or insurers. Then, we monitor effectiveness and continually use our knowledge to raise the bar of customer experience.
Is your organization an aspiring digital insurer? I’ve created a list of questions that may help you to consider the importance of change.
- Can our digital strategy for delivery in differentiated customer experience really be supported with traditional platforms, attaching analytics and digital systems to silo-designed core systems?
- Are we able to test customer journey maps and learn, to continually innovate the customer experience?
- Are we able to focus on innovations and not be distracted by infrastructure and IT operations?
- Do we have “first-mover” advantages when we roll out new products, new services and new customer experiences, leveraging innovative data sources and technology?
- Can we achieve acceleration and scalability to launch our digital strategy by leveraging an industry platform that is designed outside-in and continually invested with expert innovations?
