Insurance carriers are supposed to assist customers during tough times, be it when encountering an accident or surviving the loss of a dear one. Ironically, insurance providers have never cared enough about customer experience.
Even today, when a customer tries to access an insurance document through its application or official website, they have to go through endless manual processes, talk to brokers, and go through countless back-and-forth interactions before they secure their benefits.
Thanks to rapid digital innovation, customers now know what personalized customer experience really means. When interacting with other brands, customers are already familiar with omnichannel experiences, AI powered digital journeys, and self-served platforms. And no wonder they expect the same from insurance brands, too.
According to a survey by Accenture, 58% of insurance customers said they would be willing to share more personal data with insurance carriers in exchange for personalized experiences.
Insurance carriers can no longer treat customer experience as a second priority.
But what does a holistic customer experience look like in insurance? We’ll be discussing that in this article.
Why Does Customer Experience Matter in Insurance Service?
Insurance service providers can never entirely rely on self-served portals. That’s because each insurance differs from the other, as are the terms and policies. If you leave it solely on the customers to fill out a long digital form or pay insurance premiums on time, it would be a disaster, to say the least.
Similarly, insurance services should not be entirely agent-focused. For example, Assurance IQ, a North American insurance service provider, relied solely on human interactions to drive their operations. The process was that agents would get the customers on phone calls to help them select the most helpful insurance policies.
However, this over reliance on human interactions led to challenges such as agents getting burned out, as there were as many as 6,000 insurance plans, and processing thousands of customer queries every day became impossible. The situation worsened for newly joined agents, who needed at least six months to adapt to handle customer queries efficiently.
That means neither fully automated nor fully human-based interactions work for insurance customers. Instead, insurance carriers should look for a way to balance the two.
Insurance service providers should instead build an empathy-led, connected customer experience.
But how to develop it? Find out in the next section.
What does a Holistic Insurance Customer Experience Look Like?
For a second, assess your insurance customer experience from the customer’s perspective. Most insurance brands allow customers to get a quote online, but that’s it. Customers have to rely on broker channels and legacy technologies to complete a purchase, get reminders, or receive insurance benefits in the toughest of times.
Online retail stores or tourism companies provide end-to-end customer journeys through WhatsApp, Facebook, or any apps customers trust. Customers don’t have to switch between applications to place an order or ask for a query; they get personalized responses from their most-used apps. Sadly, most insurance service providers don’t provide similar services.
The key to building an empathetic customer experience in insurance lies in understanding which phases of the customer journey should be automated and which are best for human agents.
“For starters, clear communication and product information that is transparent and helps the customer make informed decisions, without being sold or pressured, or feeling that they’re badly informed about their options. Also, the application process should be easy to complete digitally, from online quotes to all the way to policy management and even claims filing.” - Kevin Huffman, Owner of Kriminil Trading.
Insurance customer experience is divided into four touchpoints: website, sales, support, and self-support. Let us explain each touchpoint below:
Website
Challenge: Most insurance websites are locked and clunky, and users can hardly navigate them to find their desired terms and policies. If you want to know about a particular insurance plan in detail, you must submit a quote request, and the agents will contact you.
Typically, insurance websites look like this 👇
If a customer urgently needs insurance, the last thing they would want is to wait to receive the quote. Clunky interfaces can instantly disengage potential customers and increase the site’s bounce rate.
Solution: A great way to address this challenge is by using AI-powered website widgets. Alltius’ website widgets have recorded 30% more active users. As you embed it within your website, it engages with potential customers to answer their insurance plan and quote queries. This intrigues customers for longer and encourages them to take the next step of booking a call with an agent.
Sales
Challenge: Insurance sales are complex. In a typical insurance sales call, prospects seek help from agents to match their needs with the available insurance policies. This would mean putting customers on hold to find the correct information. Naturally, leads won’t prefer waiting for long, and such old-school sales practices will only lead to poor user experience.
Solution: Alltius helped Assurance IQ reduce and address similar challenges with an AI-powered knowledge base. It helped the brand narrow agents’ search by shortlisting 5-10 most relevant plans and addressing 3-5 specific needs. This helped sales reps answer questions like "My client is a 60-year-old woman in Atlanta who utilizes physical therapy, has glaucoma, and prioritizes dental benefits. Which plan would best suit her?" much faster.
Alltius’ AI assistant could also compare two or more insurance plans, their benefits, and inclusions for specific customer needs. Questions like “Provide a concise explanation of how Plan X stacks up against Plan Y and Plan Z on the stated customer needs N1, N2, and N3” would be quickly answered by the assistant.
By answering 96% of agents' questions faster, Alltius ensured higher user engagement for the insurance provider. Read the full case study here.
Support
Challenge: Similar to sales, the biggest challenge with insurance support is the long waiting times. While support agents take forever to understand and process customer queries, customers get frustrated and switch their insurance providers.
Solution: Alltius’ intelligent agent support assists solves this challenge. It captures customer queries from support tickets' past conversation histories and collects customer interaction patterns from CRMs. The tool also labels and groups these conversations, analyzes user behavior, and transforms tickets to help support agents better understand customers and their sentiments. With a simple search, it provides solutions to repetitive queries based on past conversations and composes personalized responses.
Self-support
Challenge: Certain parts of an insurance buyer journey can easily be automated for improved user experience. For example, when a customer is within your insurance app portal, they might have certain queries, like when their insurance matures or when the due date for the next insurance premium payment is, etc. If customers need to ask these minor questions to human agents each time, the process becomes exhausting.
Solution: Alltius’ In-product assist is a perfect solution to this challenge. It reduced up to 70% of ticket deflection time by offering in-product coaching to the users, answering their questions based on popular themes, and creating AI-powered workflows. This means empowering customers and freeing up agents’ time by only routing critical queries to them.
Conclusion
Insurance customer experience is changing for the better. Customers are looking for a guided customer experience in insurance where they can find answers to their queries faster without waiting for hours in the queue.
If you want to adapt to the changing trends of the insurance industry, it is time to adopt AI-powered, empathy-driven customer experience strategies.
Check out Alltius to learn how to transform your insurance brand’s customer experience.
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