How to achieve personalized customer experience through omnichannel

An ongoing process of digitization, catalyzed by the pandemic, has allowed the insurance industry to break free of some of the boundaries of physical offices and paper forms. This digital push is helping insurers shift towards automation and streamline tedious processes – a necessity for meeting today’s increasingly digital consumer expectations.

The average customer makes insurance purchasing decisions only after vetting their options through online research. Accordingly, insurance companies would do well to bolster their social presence. This will not only help court new clients but will also help facilitate a unified customer experience across all channels. 

With digital players new and old making bold strides in the insurance ecosystem, legacy carriers, in particular, must work to up their digital capabilities and online user experience if they hope to remain competitive in an evolving industry. Offering an omnichannel customer experience is a good place to start.

Connectivity
In terms of building an omnichannel infrastructure, the insurance industry at large is lagging behind industries such as retail or banking. Disparate legacy systems and longstanding analog processes have limited insurers’ ability to achieve the kind of connectivity customers are demanding.

More tech-savvy than ever before, today’s consumers have growing expectations that the services they use will be personalized and offer tailored information needed to make informed decisions. 60% of millennials expect a consistent user experience, regardless of which channel they are using to interact with their insurer – a reality that calls for heightened focus on social media, website engagement, and mobile integration. In short, as customer expectations change, insurers must react quickly and strategically.

This trend dovetails with the continued coexistence of insurance agents alongside digital functions – whereby insurance representatives can digitally engage with users at any time throughout the value chain. And since agents themselves want more user information and seamless ways to please their customers, the “blurring” across channels adds value in both directions.

Omnichannel
What makes an omnichannel approach so valuable? The ability to create seamless interactions with users, anywhere, anytime, ensuring that those user experiences are smart, intuitive, meaningful, and personalized.

Omnichannel connectivity, for example, gives insurers the ability to share the right information with customers at any touchpoint in the process, always at the right moment. Customers today want the ability to seamlessly navigate the entire insurance cycle – from research to purchase, policy changes, bill paying, claims, and more – on any device: From a phone to a tablet to a desktop.

An omnichannel approach empowers users to feel confident in their decisions at any point in the insurance process. A customer hoping to reassess their policy? They should be able to reach a knowledgeable and helpful agent quickly and regularly. Chatting with a bot? Once they’ve made a connection, a customer should only need to provide information once to be effectively assisted. 

An omnichannel insurance experience is also crucial in helping insurers reach a wider range of audiences, each with a different set of preferences. If an insurer cannot address the needs of each customer segment, it will hinder growth. 

Recent statistics show that improving customer experience can result in increased revenues – 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Customer experience is poised to overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator as streamlined omnichannel access can serve as a key enabler to elevated customer experience.  

ROI
Market demographics are increasingly diversifying, particularly as younger, digitally native generations age into independent consumers. Accordingly, they bring with them the expectation that you can buy just about anything, anytime, anywhere, digitally, without much effort or energy.

Because of this new norm, the process of researching and buying insurance must be an easy, intuitive, and pleasant experience, in line with the browsing and purchasing habits of today’s hyper-connected consumers. With an omnichannel insurance experience, everything is at the tip of customers’ fingers.  

Retailers such as Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon have paved the way for tailor-driven, personalized experiences. Both customers and agents expect insurers to be able to provide this as well. No, insurers shouldn’t be expected to start producing TV shows and streaming music, but they can learn from the ways such companies have curated a personalized experience for each user across multiple platforms and devices.

The path forward
Though the insurance industry at large still has much ground to cover in providing personalized, simplified, tailored experiences, a handful of high-profile insurtech companies are championing this new era of customer-centricity. Lemonade is a prime example of a newcomer to the industry that is disrupting the norms of customer interaction. Some longstanding insurance players have also found success in personalized insurance offerings: As early as 2007, the Progressive Insurance Group launched its Web 2.0 site, offering intuitive navigation, greater personalization, and customization.

If insurers hope to grow and maintain an engaged, loyal customer base and stay relevant in a changing world, they must embrace omnichannel engagement. Doing so will give them the ability to make decisions efficiently, collect data to improve processes, create new products and enhance existing offerings. Many are already on such a transformative track, but even the swiftest must remember that omnichannel connectivity is not something to tack on to existing processes – it must be baked into their brand from tip to tail, reflected in the CX of every connected platform.