How to Create Seamless Policyholder Experience in Insurance
How can insurers deliver the best policyholder experiences?
According to IBM research, 60% of insurance executives confirm that their organization lacks customer experience strategies. Moreover, customer experience is among the key predictors of business outcomes. With the insurance industry's dynamic playfield, companies must overcome the challenges of traditional insurance operations, such as long wait times, poor customer understanding, and lack of personalization.
GenAI assistants and chatbots present an opportunity for insurance businesses to address these long-standing challenges. Let’s discuss the current market trends and the future of insurance industries in this blog.
Major trends in insurance industries
Like other industries, the insurance market is evolving dynamically, and customers expect their insurers to keep up with their expectations. Here are several major customer experience trends that insurance companies must keep up with:
- Customers need consistency across touchpoints
Customers expect companies to be present across almost all channels so they can communicate through their favorite medium. These platforms include websites, direct calls, apps, and even social media.
While insurance companies are finally getting there, customers have now evolved their expectations. 75% customers expect a unified experience that is consistent across all these mediums. Customers expect companies to keep up with the expectations they set in advertisements and websites through their on-call experiences.
Inconsistency in these channels can lead to frustration if customers have to explain themselves again on every channel and experience inconsistent engagement from the insurance executives. A unified solution here is a must-have.
- Customers need solutions that fit their requirements
As per Forbes, 81% of customers prefer companies that can feed them with unique and personalized experiences- customers expect that the sales rep knows their requirements and their history with the company. So that the sales reps can present effective resolutions and recommendations.
With the growth of data acquisition and processing, companies are now delivering personal experiences to customers across almost any industry and as such insurance companies must keep up with it.
- Customers and the growing trend for instant care
When it comes to sales or customer service, customers are now accustomed to getting quick response and care. Across industries, businesses are staying on their toes to address customer queries and requests. Likewise, insurance companies must also keep up with this trend by answering customer queries and recommending policies on the go.
To summarize on a top level, customers are now used to quicker and easier customer experience. Creating such CX would require insurance companies to overcome their long-standing industry challenges. Let’s dive deeper into what these challenges are.
Major issues faced by insurers
As an insurer, this is a crucial point in time to review and revise their strategies. To do so, the first step is to understand which issues are most important to address moving forward. Here's a list of some popular challenges in the insurance industry:
- Creating personalized experiences:
64% of the customers wish for their insurers to understand them well. Creating personalized experiences has been hard for insurance companies as, traditionally, different groups of people address clients on different channels.
Moreover, it is hard for an executive to recall previous interactions and go through them quickly prior to/during their interactions. It is among the key issues that insurance agencies must overcome.
- Longer wait times for customers:
As a company or a part of a team that is powered by manpower, there is only a certain surplus headcount that any company would have. As such, it is hard to keep up with all customer queries and inquiries during the peak season or hours of business This could lead to customers waiting and dissatisfied.
Another similar concern is longer wait times on call. Customers prefer instantaneous answers to their queries. However, insurance executives need to assess and refer to a handful of information in order to present an answer. This is another challenge that every company must overcome for better sales and customer experience.
- Instant resolution for inquiries:
With insurances, executives require sufficient time to understand customer concerns, refer to their policies, assess terms & conditions, and present a solution. This simply means that customers have to give executives enough time to do their research and present a solution.
In case of customer experience and sales, delay in resolving customers’ concern can directly lead to higher churn rate. Overcoming this challenge needs an assistant to help executives right away when in need.
- Agent attrition cost and time:
Unfortunately, the insurance industry suffers from a staggering 30% agent attrition rate annually. That would mean insurance companies either have to hire fresh executives and train them or pay higher costs to pouch experienced ones.
On top of that, training an insurance agent would cost over $5k each and would require months of ramp up period.This gets worse when it adds up to inconsistent customer experience because of an uneven support team skills.
Such challenges can only be addressed with the help of robust assistance that makes the job of agents easy, reducing attrition while also minimizing the training time and costs for fresh staff members.
- Keeping up with evolving insurance plans:
Insurance companies have to stay up-to-date with the growing market needs by introducing new plans and policies that can better meet customer requirements.
However, it would mean that the companies must conduct constant training to make sure that the agents are able to expand their knowledge base. Such a challenge demands for a single source of accurate and quick access to company knowledge.
As the current industry trends and challenges suggest, these are some long outstanding issues which are way beyond conventional practices. It leaves insurance companies only one way forward with technological advancements.
How can insurers become customer-centric?
It is crucial to learn how insurers can become customer-centric before understanding which technological implementations can make that happen. Here are some ways insurance companies can be customer-centric:
- Personalized and effective customer care
A key to be customer-centric is to start with listening to the customers and understanding them effectively. In terms of insurance agents, personalization is a key to understanding customers well and being effective while dealing with them. Being personal with customer care would make the interactions easier for both; agents and customers
- Quicker responses and resolutions
A key to customer satisfaction is resolving their queries and concerns in a timely manner; the sooner the better. As such, insurance companies must emphasize on providing the right answers and resolutions to customers quickly, avoiding any frustrations or disappointments.
- Well-trained and well-informed recommendations
It is crucial that customers find effective recommendations as per their unique condition with the most fitting policy or plan for them. To do so, companies must educate and upskill their agents consistently across their organization. Only well-equipped and educated agents could suggest the best recommendations to users.
- Consistent care at any hour of the day
This one is obvious, being present to support customers when they are in need plays a crucial role in customer satisfaction. Any company should ensure that they are available to address customer concerns so as to resolve their doubts right away; ensuring better customer satisfaction and sales conversion.
- Easy customer onboarding & journey
With insurance, a lot of new customers can face a significant amount of confusion and questions. For such a product, it is important to educate and onboard customers in an easy and smooth manner. This could be a key differentiator for an insurance company to stand apart from competition.
These are some of the ways insurance companies can be consistent and effective with their customer-centric approach. However, to achieve these feats, a smart and intuitive solution is a must; that is where GenAI and chatbots can help.
Understanding GenAI & Chatbots in Insurance
Generative AI, or GenAI is among branches of Artificial Intelligence that can be a game changer for the insurance industry. Generative AI refers to the use of AI to train on unique data sets to learn and educate itself. Such Machine Learning models are tailored to learn new information in order to generate texts, images, or voice.
In this case, Generative AI model can be fed by all the knowledge of the insurance industry including, compliances, competition, and company offerings. This would enable GenAI solutions to serve as a helping assistant to human agents when put in practice.
GenAI is often implemented as a chatbot where it can generate text output based on user queries or scenarios. This could mean using GenAI for automated responses to customers as well as summarized insights to insurance agents. There are several ways to actually put GenAI chatbots into use for the insurance industry.
Transforming the Policyholder Journey with GenAI & Chatbots
From personalizing customer interactions to creating thorough policy documents, AI can get many things done. Here are several ways through which GenAI and chatbot based solutions can effectively transform policyholder journey:
- Smoother customer onboarding
During the onboarding step, AI assistance can help gather customer requirements along with their background. Such insights along with the CRM data can help agents provide a better onboarding experience with personal care and right recommendations for their unique requirement.
- Automating customer interactions
Just like traditional chatbots, AI chatbots can be available to assist customers at any time. However, with GenAI and personalized information, these chatbots can help customers with many effective answers and suggestions for their queries.
- Informed agents for better customer care
AI can complement the manual agents in their service by informing them thoroughly about customer requirements and company’s product plans. These AI summarization and recommendations make customer care much more effective and consistent across the entire company.
- Crafting unique pitch & materials
Customers can find the best pitch for their purchase to make a confident purchase as GenAI can help human agents draft their pitch and documentation. This way AI can help customers find the answers to their questions easily through assisting agents.
- Educate insurance company about customer needs
Another indirect advantage of AI solutions to customers is through educating insurance companies. AI assistants can help collect frequently asked questions and requests so that companies can make more informed advancements into their product, policies, and operations.
The Future of Insurance with GenAI & Chatbots
While the benefits of GenAI are evident, not a lot of companies have been able to derive positive value out of such implementations. Especially, in a regulated industry such as insurance as knowledge sources keep on updating drastically.
An effective solution that can complement insurance company’s workflows practically can add real value to customers. A proven AI solution like Alltius’ sales assistance suite can help enable insurance companies to put AI into application with some tangible positive values.
Using such a tool as part of the user experience journey can drastically improve the experience for all stakeholders including insurance companies, insurance agents, and especially the customers. The positive outcomes of introducing such a solution can be game-changing.
Conclusion
Higher coverage costs, underwriting losses, and rising custom expectations, these are some of the key challenges that could make things worse for insurance companies. This is a high time for insurance companies to take customer care seriously.
Undoubtedly, leveraging an AI assistant can revolutionize how insurance companies operate and it will be for the greater good of all from customers to insurance companies. Leave us a message and we will book a call with our experts so you can learn how our solution can complement your insurance offerings.
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