Four steps for improving insurance policyholder customer experience

Tuesday, Jun 28th 2022
insurance agent with couple looking through documents

Heightened competition, increased consumer expectations and declining customer loyalty are hurdles that many insurers are facing today. More than ever, companies are turning to personalized customer experiences to differentiate themselves and compete in challenging markets.

Organizations engaging in personalized communications are seeing great results across the entire customer lifecycle; particularly, an increase in engagement. Customer engagement is powerful and impacts every touchpoint for insurers, from reducing policyholder churn to keeping up with evolving expectations of agents and customers. Engagement is crucial in determining the overall policyholder experience and the depth of relationship they have with your brand. 

Here are some steps insurers must take to succeed when adopting a customer-centric approach that will increase customer engagement. 

Know your audience

The first step in customer engagement is knowing your customer. Understanding your customer requires having a full picture of who they are and what they need.  

You must go beyond traditional demographics of age, location and employment to learn why they are looking to you, how they expect you to engage and what causes them to leave. 

These insights will establish customer-centric goals to start mapping the best real-time communications to send to meet their ‘specific demands’. 

Personalize your customer communications 

Every customer wants their voice to be heard. 

As digital communications continue to grow in popularity, the entire insurance industry is re-examining how they personally connect with customers. Bear in mind, that transitioning from face-to-face contact to online digital communications doesn’t mean you need to lose the personalized or ‘human’ touch. In fact, 88% of insurance customers demand more personalization from providers despite having more digital demands. 

When your interactions look and feel personal, customers will feel you understand their needs. This ‘connection’ customers feel increases loyalty and keep them coming back to a trusted relationship. 

Overwhelmingly, personalized interactions and messaging are proving influential in building a customer culture of trust and security. 84% of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.

Build resources that answer customers’ questions 

Whether it's offering paperless billing, online self-service tools to make or request updates, or enabling policyholders to complete a full claims cycle on their mobile app, every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle is an opportunity to proactively engage with customers. More importantly, every opportunity allows you to add value for your customer. 

Insurers can’t afford to wait until customers are experiencing long call center waits or switching insurance providers to start engagement efforts. You must proactively engage with customers, predict questions they might have and provide them with valuable information and resources at the right time

Embrace digital customer experience tech to engage 

In our device-focused world, traditional communications no longer foster engagement and increase conversions. Insurers need to start looking at interactive technology solutions that can connect with customers on digital, mobile and social platforms. 

Reaching customers on their everyday platforms, with user-friendly mediums, helps make learning about and dealing with insurance a little easier. And, the easier it is for them, the more satisfied your customers will be. Nobody wants to do enormous amounts of research and comparison shopping to find the right insurance. Once they do pick an insurer, they won’t carve time out of overloaded schedules to educate themselves with a dense, 30–50-page enrollment policy book. Regardless of how informative the packet is, it’s too dense, too time-consuming, too much of an onus on the customer. Insurance companies, who are required to share this educational tome, must format it differently.  

While text-based communications will always play a role in your customer strategy, personalized videos are showing promise in driving engagement and customer satisfaction while keeping insurers compliant. In fact, the IndiVideo platform typically sees an increase of 40% or more in conversion as compared to text-based communications. 

Personalized videos do the heavy lifting by providing customers with information that is lighter and more entertaining. Take a few key points, personalize them to add relevance to each user and the result is an easily digestible summary that can easily explain supplemental insurance options in 30-90 seconds. Now plug that information into the right point in the customer journey and you're adding value, reducing your costs and lowering churn. People appreciate the faster technology the numbers show to increased engagement and conversion rates. 

Contributed by Quadient Partner: Blue Rush