Customer Experience has become the cornerstone of busines’s success stories and improving those metrics by consistent customer engagement is of paramount importance. Thanks to the visibility of omnichannelling in mainstream markets, enterprises are able to fulfill customer satisfaction across connected channels effortlessly. A 2017 Harvard Business Review report points out that the more channels customers engage with a brand the more likely they are to spend on them.
When it comes to getting consumed by this digital wave, traditionally built markets like insurance are forced to take longer strides in fulfilling their omnichannel reality. While the very construct of the insurance world lives and thrives on customer interaction, plain or discreet, insurers didn’t explore much about how digital interconnection, and not mere digitization, can accelerate the complete lifecycle; until recently. With the markets booming with independent software vendors for the FinTech market, traditional insurers are diving right in to find more avenues to offer their customers connected experience across all platforms.
Omnichannelling, the Insurer’s way!
In 2011, American insurance giant State Farm developed an innovative marketing technique by creating a website called “chaos in town” that let the users enter an address and witness a robot virtually destroy the neighbourhood. A couple of years later, they improvised the game and let the users trigger virtual demolition through a mobile app that picks user’s GPS location and proceeds with an interactive segment to understand the “what-next” leading to the policies associated with State Farm.
The biggest takeaway from the upgrade in their ad campaign is how they tried to reach out to their customers the omnichannel way and announced the world the inevitability of digital means penetrating at every level of the insurance world. It also became apparent that even the conservative business models have got the difference and significance between offering the customer an additional channel (multichannel) and letting the customer pick, engage and stay connected in the medium of their choice (omnichannel).
So it is clear that insurers have to adapt omnichannelling somewhere along the line. But how effectively can that be done considering the financial and other socio-economic aspects of the communities involved?. What does it take for an insurer to upgrade to a digital future by encompassing the omnichannel modes of customer engagement? Luckily for the insurers, there is widespread availability of omnichannel engagement models in the market across the retail industry. Irrespective of the extent of adoption, insurers have to ensure that their version of omnichannelling has the following core components to it to achieve a connected experience across all platforms.
- Analytics-driven Personalization: Personalization across channels has been considered as the Holy Grail of omnichannel’s purpose in the digital era. In the insurance domain, it is all the more relevant because of the innate diversities and the subsequent complexities that gets tagged along with insurance profiling of a customer base. People would not just want the insurers to know their financial capabilities but also empathize with it enough to come up with personalized schemes to secure their future. With intuitive, unified mobile and web interface and an aggressive drive to channel every data collected to meaningful outcomes any insurer, irrespective of their position in the market, can understand and serve their customers better.
- Security: When it comes to availability, accessibility and security of business means, insurance domain is one of the very few that stakes these metrics as absolutely crucial. With marketing exploding with competition, the digital wave has brought forced or innate cynicism in the minds of customers about how trustable a company can be with customer’s data and options that gets generated from it. With a narrow margin for a win, insurers must ensure that their channels of communication with the customers are available, reliable and efficient all the time to ensure that the customer can also have a 360 degree view of their financial portfolios.
- Engagement: Like every other facet of the industry that omnichannel has touched upon, customer-centricity is one of the crucial factors that can separate the winners and the others in the digital era. Apart from offering connected experience across all available media, insurers have to tread carefully by offering engagement exactly to the level that the customer would desire; only a few things in the information era is as putting off for a customer as getting a barrage of messages, calls and activities in the name of customer engagement. From start to end, insurers should consider every customer lifecycle as unique and invest in learning and catering to them along the way as they evolve.
In conclusion,
The era of interconnection has taken the world by storm and customers want no stone unturned by their favourite enterprises in ensuring that their loyalty to the brand is aptly rewarded with the right tools that will empower them to fully grow as a digital customer. The digital insurers have to tap this need of the industry to cater to their customers for a lifecycle-long commitment of personalized engagement that can always be relied upon.
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