The Race to Digital – And what that means for Insurers

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In a world where convenience, speed and experience drive how we interact with each other, the value of creating a personable, seamless digital experience is greater than ever before. As consumers, our last best experience becomes the minimum expectation everywhere. So, what does this all mean for insurers? It means that it is essential for insurers to reframe their value proposition and roles to maintain relevancy to current and future customers. Insurers need to look beyond customer expectations and become proactive in both predicting and providing customer needs and desires. How can insurers achieve this? Data-driven personalisation.

Data-driven personalisation is not only to create a strong customer experience, but serves as the best way to distinguish your brand amongst an increasingly competitive digital market. IBM Research found that more than three- quarters of insurance executives expect changed customer behavior to continue after COVID-19, trading face-to-face contact for more shopping and customer service interactions online. To that end, 87% of insurance executives say that customer experience management will be a high priority over the next two years, compared to only 33% just two years ago. Unlocking the value of data and digital can allow you to create data-based insurance products that can increasingly drive the basis of competition. And such products will allow the personalization that customers are coming to expect, especially in a post-COVID-19 world where digital interactions are the new norm. Insurers that can successfully leverage data to drive new experiences will be best positioned not only to capture market share, but to expand into entirely new markets and business models.

With deep industry expertise, paired with extensive data analytics platform capabilities, IBM has been able to create a plethora of data-related solutions specifically for the insurance industry. Recently, IBM was able to partner with a large international insurer suffering from a lack of customer insights and low NPS score regarding customer experience (e.g. self-service capabilities, etc.). IBM worked in an agile approach with this client to improve the customer insights, leading to improved self-service capabilities, rationalization of the different applications to create a single view of the customer, and higher conversion of quotes into actual purchases. In other instances, IBM was involved in driving exceptional service while reducing overall contact and cost by transitioning telecommunication services into digital channels, supported by artificial intelligence services for targeted responses and a warm handoff to a human agent over asynchronous messaging.

How to become more customer-centric and data-driven? What is the current and desired situation with regards to the availability and reliability of internal and external data? What steps are needed to fulfill this ambition? Based on a maturity assessment, it will become clear how far you are from reaching your ambition. Check out this webpage to elevate your customer experience and learn how AI and data-driven technologies can help insurers win the hearts and minds of their customers.