Rapidly evolving market landscape, cutthroat competition, and ever-growing customer expectations have emerged as a good rule of thumb to adapt to in the insurance industry. For this reason, future-looking insurance businesses are striving to keep up with the emerging trends to cater to the customers in the optimum manner. Customer experience in the insurance industry has emerged as a powerful competitive differentiator. Apart from giving insurers an edge over the competition, customer experience also accelerates customer retention and business growth. After all, comprehensive insurance customer experience management strategies extend to all aspects of the customer journey, ensuring brand loyalty and new business acquisition.
As insurers continue to invest in customer experience, they must stay ahead of the emerging trends. Here are some customer experience trends that insurers should watch out for:
Hyper-Personalization
In the highly dynamic world of customer experience, personalization is key to satisfying modern customers. After all, a survey reveals that over 80 percent of customers are more likely to buy from a business that offers tailored experiences. By tailoring products, services, and interactions to meet individual customer’s needs and preferences, insurance businesses can make customers feel appreciated and valued. However, to truly win customers, insurers have to ensure that the personalized customer experiences in insurers are also meaningful. Hyper-personalization refers to the usage of real-time customer information, predictive analysis, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and automation technologies for anticipating needs and taking the best course of action. It allows insurers to offer high-level, contextually relevant customer experiences for each customer based on real-time behavioral data.
Visual Engagement
Visual engagement is one of the top customer experience trends in the insurance industry. It enables insurers to interact in real-time with customers using visual tools such as video conferencing or screen sharing. Some futuristic insurers are also leveraging inbound video chat to improve customer engagement and experience. Some of the popular visual engagement tools are:
- Screensharing: With screensharing, agents and customer service representatives can turn phone calls into visual presentations.
- CoBrowsing: Co-browsing can be used to walk them through complicated processes such as claims filing or policy selection.
- Video Conferencing: One-on-one video chat can improve communication between agents and customers and can also be used for damage assessment.
- Website Annotations: These can be used to share additional information, guide users, and highlight important sections of the website.
AI-driven Chatbots
Growing businesses often struggle to handle increases in customer support queries. Oftentimes, it can be challenging for customer service teams to increase their bandwidth without hiring more staff to meet the growing demands. This is where top new-age insurance technologies come in handy. AI-powered chatbots can ease the pressure on the customer service teams. AI-enabled customer experience in insurance is simple, efficient, and productive. Chatbots and AI-backed insurance customer experience solutions can be used as self-service tools. Chatbots can answer routine customer questions, even outside of regular business hours. They can tailor the interactions with the customers, recommend relevant products to meet the customer’s needs, provide tailored offers based on their journey, and make relevant suggestions regarding the next best course of action. Owing to their round-the-clock availability, AI-driven chatbots have emerged as powerful tools for managing customer service. They can be programmed to recognize human sentiment and simulate human-like conversations.
Loyalty Programs
While customer loyalty programs have existed for several years, they are now being reimagined and transformed in the digital world. A well-designed loyalty program not only helps in expanding the customer base but also positions the business as a trusted partner, differentiating it from the crowd. Loyalty programs are not just about offering rewards. Rather, they utilize the customer’s history with the business and other information to present timely and relevant offers, thereby improving the overall customer experience.
Apart from personalizing customer experience in insurance, businesses must personalize the loyalty program as well. They can do so by aligning the loyalty program with customer interests and beliefs and tailoring communication. With an effective program, insurers can reward customers for loyalty while gaining valuable data that can be used for personalizing the customer experience.
Do-it-yourself Insurance
Do-It-Yourself or DIY insurance is becoming popular amongst modern customers as it allows them to enjoy better control over their policy and coverage. Customers can easily buy and manage their policies and coverage without any intervention or assistance from a third-party provider. It also enables customers to tailor the policy to best meet their requirements. They can select the kind of coverage they want, choose the level of protection, and buy any add-on benefits. They can get guidance on how to buy the best-suited plan with the help of online tools and resources.
DIY insurance is also cost-effective, especially when compared to traditional policies. As customers buy directly from the provider and cut out the intermediary, they can save on broker or agent charges. All in all, DIY insurance allows customers to enjoy higher transparency, leading to improved customer experience in insurance.
Final Words
The customer experience in insurance has evolved over the last few years, and it will only continue to change in the coming years. Hence, insurance businesses must be ready to embrace new trends. New-age insurance customer engagement solutions are powerful tools for transforming the customer experience. By consistently experimenting and innovating to see what works best for modern customers, insurers can set themselves apart.
