Customer experience is a relevant topic to any industry but because of the vast diversity of customers (from baby boomers to millennials, from full-time to gig workers, etc.), it is a challenging topic. Additionally, there is rapid use of new technologies in every aspect of a customer’s life which many times makes the customer experience a digital journey.
At Quesnay, we have seen the value and increasing priority in considering the customer experience in designing new products and solutions. Leveraging our experience working with entrepreneurs, startups, corporates, and investors, we have described a holistic approach for customer experience in the insurance industry below.
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Three Phases of Customer Experience
We describe trends across three key phases of the customer journey: Acquisition, Engagement, and Retention. Acquisition is the process of attracting new customers to use a company’s products/services. Engagement involves building a relationship with the customer through different communication channels. Retention is the last part of the journey and its purpose is to create loyalty to a company’s products, services, and brand.
We have also aligned these trends to the insurance value chain to emphasize the need for an integrated and repetitive process in incorporating the customer experience in solution development. The key parts of the insurance value chain included here are: Acquisition, to Underwriting, Claims, and Retention.
Trends and Best Practices
For Acquisition, we see personalization as the first step. The use of different tools such a digital marketing, email marketing, outbound marketing, content management, reward programs, and affiliate programs are helping companies to get closer to customers by reaching them where they are. Using big data and analytics within insurance is helping providers to better understand customer behaviors and better define customer segments (personas).
Customer Engagement is all about making the experience easy and friendly. The use of chatbots is becoming popular not only to help customers with insurance education, quotes, or claims, but also to help agents and insurance companies make processes simpler and less expensive.
Although Retention in insurance could be seen as including only the renewal process, we envision this phase of the customer experience as the point at which the company leverages the information from its customers to offer them loyalty programs, and new, complementary products and services.
Who’s Doing it Well?
InsurTechs
Life.IO is a customer-centric technology platform. It offers an integrated approach, from product ideation, development and commercialization, through marketing, sales and in-force management.
LUMOA is a customer experience management software that uses customer feedback to provide analytics and insights to reduce churn and increase revenue.
Reply.AI delivers instant, personalized attention to customers through AI chatbots. This helps companies to deliver a better, faster, and more cost-effective customer experience.
Rulai offers a user friendly platform to design and deploy customized virtual assistants (AI chatbots). Rulai’s platform can be used without coding experience and chatbots can be customized easily.
SPIXII provides a cloud-based solution to rapidly deploy chatbot technology with advanced analytics and customer focus.
Inspiration Outside the Industry
Apple branding targets customers’ need to belong to a community. Customers’ experience are segmented into communities based on personalized “lifestyles.”
Netflix configurators empower consumers to make their own decisions, leading to a more convenient, personalized, and efficient buying process.
Zappos emphasizes customer empathy rather than service, giving customers small perks for stressful request tickets.
Sephora has tiered loyalty programs to translate into a status symbol. Higher tiers allow access to limited edition products.
Chewy resolves online and phone tickets almost immediately and interactions leave customers feeling in control.
Connect with us if you want to know more about Customer Experience and how Quesnay can help you.