Insurers have made remarkably little progress in customer service during the new digital age despite the myriad of chatbots, AI, ML and CRM tech solutions flooding the insurance market. Why? Because greater forces than insurance are shaping customer expectations faster than the industry can keep up.
At 360Globalnet, we have recognised for a decade that companies disparately knitting tech and systems into a patchwork of insurance customer experience damages that experience. An excellent survey recently published by J.D. Power has found that a continuing decline in customer satisfaction scores with P&C insurers – despite increasingly digital journeys – is that as soon as a problem becomes anything other than simple, things tend to go awry.
Complexity is inherent in insurance policies and claims. It’s just that patchwork tech behind the scenes deals with it poorly.
J.D. Power found that scores are better among those companies using mobile technology as their interface. A crumb of comfort and undoubtedly because a ‘mobile first’ mindset is at least an indicator that the insurer thought about the user experience when designing their services. But the overall message is clear: customer expectations are moving faster than insurers’ ability to match them digitally.
We should not be surprised. Our brains release a pleasing pump of dopamine each time a message hits our smartphone telling us that our parcel has moved or been delivered. Customers view of how the world should run has changed dramatically on this rich diet of digital expectation management. COVID-19 only served to hasten the change as more and more people adopted notification-rich services such as Amazon and Deliveroo.
The issue is not the availability of technology, it’s the availability of trees: decision trees!
Automating small pockets of customer journeys in P&C insurance means that when a particular customer’s needs take a small sidestep outside that pocket – a branch line not covered by a narrow decision tree - the experience falls on its face.
How many times are customers faced with a limited set of options or choices and left screaming at the screen because none of them apply in their particular case? And if they do choose one, they’re filled with a dread that their claim or policy amendment will be derailed because they’ve submitted false or incomplete information. The usual next step is to pick up the phone. Thus damaging the insurer operational benefit, the customer experience and the likelihood of retention.
Like so many branches of health and science currently, the answer requires a holistic approach to customer needs. The decision trees and in-built logic that guide digital journeys need to be as rich and varied as the possibilities in real life. This can only be achieved by stopping disparate systems talking to each other (badly) and create single systems that can encompass 1000s of versions of the customer’s truth by covering all the boughs, branches and twigs rather than a single trunk with a few unsatisfactory narrow options.
360Globalnet’s technology was built to handle true complexity in claims handling. Some of our customers have over 130 different decision tree branches hanging of a single home insurance FNOL submission with similar levels of automation to completion. When it is simple to map the tree and build automation, notification and integration off the back of anything a customer submits, the user experience holds up at every stage – including throughout the whole supply chain which is wrapped in the same single record of the truth.
The options for customers can then match not only their needs but the availability and operations of garages, car hire, replacement goods and further evidence gathering to name a few.
Customer satisfaction is key to retention of customers. That satisfaction rises dramatically when customers feel that their route down the decision tree to claim completion truly matches their needs – and at every stage they know what’s happening.
We can help you increase that satisfaction through stand-alone or wrap-around digital claims transformation. Why not find out what you could do with our help? Get in touch today.
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