Digital Insurance – Customer Service Excellence Through Customer 360 Degree View

Across every industry, customers respond best to companies which provide personalized service and products that perfectly suit their own interests. This is even more true for companies in the life insurance and general insurance sectors. Moreover, today, risk, client retention and business acceleration through operational efficiency are the three most pressing issues facing the insurance sector – and are actually stymied by the same challenge. All of the above-mentioned factors are further compounded due to the fact that a majority of insurance companies still lag behind when it comes to customer experience and satisfaction levels. Like the banking industry, the insurance industry has also made attempts to shift to digital channels, but those attempts can at best be called sporadic.
 
Insurance companies should remember that customers today no longer behave in the same ways they used to. The explosion of digital channels has dramatically changed how companies reach, engage and delight the customers. Customer Experience is the new battleground as firms strive to differentiate themselves from their competitors, create loyalty and ultimately increase profits. This makes it pertinent for insurance companies to take a holistic or a customer 360-degree view, if they want to succeed and keep growing.
 

Why is Customer 360 Degree View Important

While there are numerable reasons why having a 360-degree view of customer is important, to sum it up, Insurance industry provides solutions to varying risk needs of both individuals and business owners. This results in multiple contractual relationships with the same customer and household. In a product-centric business, the existence of such independent relationships is an acceptable scenario, however for one to transform to customer-centric, it is imperative to have a consolidated view of relationships with a customer.
 
Whether it be the initial stage, i.e. – identifying and understanding targeted prospects, or the middle and later stages such as acquisition of the customer to engaging and servicing the customer, having a 360 degree view of the customer helps companies enormously with processes such as using peer networks and social listening to understand and build a profile of prospects, their personas, needs and preferences, risk accumulation during customer acquisition, integrating the various channels of interaction and providing customers with an omnichannel experience, proactively engaging with the customers and many more such benefits.
 

How Insurance Companies Benefit from Having a Customer 360 Degree View

The biggest challenge insurance companies face today is how to have a single, consistent – and persistent – relationship with a customer who engages with them across multiple channels? The answer to this question is “by taking a customer 360-degree view”. Taking a customer 360-degree view provides significant benefits to companies. To elaborate a bit further,
 

• Insurance is a business of managing risk. Companies can’t accurately calculate the risk if they can’t effectively access and use all their data. Having a customer 360-degree view prevents such scenarios and helps companies in effective managing of risks.
• It also helps companies to have a crystal-clear understanding of customer behavior, with the added prospect of correctly predicting a customer’s future behavior, usage patterns, product buying possibilities etc.
• Customer 360-degree view also provides companies with the opportunity of cross-selling and up-selling. For example, let’s say that a company specializing in general liability insurance wants to develop a commercial insurance product and so it acquires a small company that exclusively provides automobile insurance. The parent company must eliminate any barriers to gathering customer data across its expanded enterprise in order to cross-sell to current customers, up-sell to new customers, and extrapolate trends to expand market share. Customer 360-view provides insight on what current customers are asking for and what the market demands.
• Companies can also improve fraud detection and ensure prevention and elimination of policy duplication, incorrect customer identification, multiple insurance claims for loss or theft of the same property etc.
• Customer 360-degree view helps insurance companies to give their customers a cross channel or omni channel experience. Thereby majorly improving customer satisfaction levels, efficiency and overall productivity.

How can Companies Apply Customer 360 Degree View?

In order to effectively apply customer 360-degree view, insurance companies need to bolster their technological capabilities, which would enable them to perform a number of functions which are necessary, such as
 

• Enable powerful search across all data types and emerged social media channels to produce meaningful sub-second results.
• Scale up and adapt to an ever-increasing volume and variety of incoming data, thereby reducing irrelevant data and ensuring optimum utilization of available data.
• Ensure all the requisite security controls as regards to customer data are in place. These security controls are also mandated by law in many countries.
• Enable themselves to act upon a customer’s feedback. This process involves analyzing whether the customer is happy, satisfied or disappointed with the service.
• Reduce the manual work so that employees can focus on value-added activities.

Customer 360 Degree View is Revolutionizing the Insurance Industry

It won’t be an exaggeration to say that customer 360-degree view is fast revolutionizing the whole insurance industry. To take a few examples,
 

• Digital Value Proposition for Claims – For the digital age, the claims value proposition—that is, the value an insurer can provide to its customers through the claims process—needs to go beyond traditional after-the-fact claims management. Customer 360-degree view is enabling insurers to adopt a faster, analytics-driven approach to claims handling and fully automate the claims handling processes for clear and simple cases.
• Enabling Product Simplification – Customers want simple and fast digital interactions, but complex coverage details that include many specific exceptions can create barriers. Customer 360-degree view is helping companies in implementing and maintaining the technology systems necessary to improve efficiency.
• Office Process Digitization – In a majority of cases today, claims handlers and adjusters manually carry out often-complex tasks, leading to significantly divergent results. Digital tools and systems are helping simplify and standardize manual processes, resulting in a leaner process and higher customer satisfaction.
• Ensuring Innovative Customer Lifecycle – Offering truly innovative customer journeys requires a combination of AI and upgrades to technology platforms as well as the digital integration of partners in the claims industry ecosystem. A greater understanding of these elements and the digital operating model needed to bring them to life can help claims managers make the proper investments. Customer 360-degree view is making all of the above possible today, with immense possibilities for the future.
• Enhanced Security Through Vetting of Claims Characteristics – AI powered customer 360-degree view is helping companies infer as-yet-unknown characteristics of a claim, such as the likelihood of fraud, total loss, or litigation, to speed up their downstream handling.

SimpleCRM’s Customer 360 Degree – Digitally Transforming the Insurance Sector
 
Developed by SimpleCRM solutions, customer 360 degree is a module that is suitable for streamlining various operations in the insurance sector. It’s a one stop solution that will take care of every aspect of digitalization, thus ensuring seamless transition for insurance companies towards the digital age.
 
Customer 360 degree automatically pops up when a customer calls and even before a support team member picks up the call. This intuitive interface displays entire customer details including personal information, product holdings, interaction through all channels, complaints and many more types of information that would be beneficial to a customer and also to the support personnel. Customer 360 degree thus ensures multiple advantages for an insurance company, such as saving a lot of time and person-hours as compared to what is normally spent in switching from one window to another pulling out the individual reports, which increases overall efficiency and reduces downtimes.
 
SimpleCRM’s customer 360 degree has features that will be a huge positive for insurance companies as they go about gaining a competitive edge in the hugely challenging insurance industry. Insurance companies can know their customers better, gain an insight into customer experience, provide an omnichannel experience to customers, increase lead generation and have more sales opportunities, provide bespoke product recommendation to customers and increase overall security through SimpleCRM’s customer 360 degree. Also, the customer 360-degree module is flexible and compatible and can be easily integrated with third party systems, which means the module is easy to implement for insurance companies in their day to day operations.