Imagine completely altering your customers’ experiences...
Changing their attitude to dealing with you, their insurer, from one of frustration to one of total convenience.
Imagine a world where insurance customers can manage everything seamlessly from their smartphone.
Remember what Uber did for making the customer experience of finding, booking, tracking and paying for a taxi suddenly seamless? That’s what good CX is all about and this type of transformation is also happening right now in insurance.
In this blog, we explore why great CX is so important for insurers and break down one of the best approaches insurers can take to boost their CX.
Customer service, user experience, and relationships are the backbone of any business.
Which means companies that offer best-in-class CX (customer experiences) see stronger growth and reach greater profitability.
To achieve this, along with aiming to enhance the user experience, insurers need to continually improve their customer journeys across all business functions and channels.
Today, the consequences of providing poor service are increased due to the ease, reach and speed of spreading negative word-of-mouth via social media. One poorly managed claim can quickly lead to significant brand damage and rapidly declining customer numbers.
For the insurance industry, where companies primarily compete on price, improving customer experience can be especially valuable. A recent McKinsey report demonstrated that improving the customer experience (and therefore attracting and retaining more customers) can increase profitable growth far more than raising advertising spending or even lowering prices.
For example, the research revealed auto insurance carriers that provided customers with consistently best-in-class experiences generated two to four times more growth in new business. Plus, about 30 percent higher profitability than firms with an inconsistent customer focus.
Why?
Because satisfied customers are 80 percent more likely to renew their policies than unsatisfied customers.
When people like the experiences they get, they stay put. If they don’t, they look elsewhere.
So what are some of the things that insurance companies can look to implement to improve their CX?
The big one is digital documentation.
Digitising the entire documentation process massively improves the customer experience.
Not to mention relying on paper forms is wasteful and inefficient.
Use of online forms
Ask anyone what they love and “filling out forms” won’t be the answer they give.
And having to labour through it with pen and paper is even worse.
Moving everything online allows your customers to be freed from printing, filling out forms and checkboxes, and scanning and emailing forms.
It also completely gets rid of piles of messy paperwork for your staff and allows for a centralised system that can easily be checked for errors.
How? Wherever possible, ensure your forms can be auto filled and only ask for information that is absolutely necessary. The CX goal when requiring customers to input information should always be to create processes that take the minimum amount of time to complete… your customers will thank you for it.
This enables people to sign documents anytime, on any device, wherever they are. There’s no need to scan or travel anywhere to sign another document.
How? This can be easily achieved via integrating with established platforms such as DocuSign or by creating your own eSign systems that free your customers from needing to physically sign anything.
Think about this: You’re a teacher that has to mark 100 maths exams. Would you rather take many hours to mark them all by hand or instead create an exam with multiple choice answers where every exam could be automatically marked and the scores filed and secured instantly?
By having things online, rather than in paper form, documents can be received and processed in real time. This avoids the need for documents to be sent around or checked for errors. By implementing automated systems that receive and process the standardised online forms, your workflow will be improved, as well as wait times for customers.
The benefits from moving to digital documentation are well supported by industry statistics, where 12 of the top 15 insurers in the US have now moved to digital documentation platforms. It makes the whole process more streamlined, stress free, and ultimately increases customer satisfaction.
One of these US insurers were able to realise huge cost and efficiency benefits by switching entirely to using online documentation.
At its claims centres, this resulted in a 90 percent reduction in printing and distribution costs and a 55 percent reduction in cost per document. It also saw significant reductions in document turnaround times and entirely eliminated the portion of Not in Good Order documents (documents missing information, initials and/or signatures) that were slowing down processing times.
There are huge opportunities for insurers to differentiate themselves via stronger CX. Insurers that stick with legacy systems and processes risk falling behind as leading organisations build more engaging relationships with customers and capture ever-larger shares of the market.
For more information on how you can enhance your CX to boost your standing with your customers, have a chat with the insurance experts at Ensure.
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