Insurers across the board are reporting higher customer adoption of digital channels over the past year. However, a recent Bain survey indicates that high digital channel adoption among property and casualty (P&C) insurers does not necessarily translate to high Net Promoter Scores (NPS)1. These results remind me of a recent question posed to me by an industry analyst: Has digital transformation succeeded or failed in P&C insurance? One answer based on this survey is that while there have been pockets of success, there is still room for improvement in P&C insurance.
What do insurers need to do to successfully transform their business to delight customers and win sales to succeed in the long-term? In a global customer service study conducted by Microsoft, customers rank getting their issue resolved in one interaction as the most important aspect of customer service, followed by reaching a knowledgeable agent and not having to repeat information2.
Orchestrating a unified experience consistently to meet changing customer buying behaviors and expectations is hard. We hear from many insurers that their employees are feeling increasingly overwhelmed. Ironically the proliferation of new tools and services, including solutions from insurtechs, have exacerbated this problem, especially when the tools are used standalone and unintegrated. Some of the common issues we hear are:
A customer service representative is unable to access the same information as the customer, agent, or partner because the self-service digital app is completely disconnected and separate from the system that the representative is using.
Underwriters are unable to provide faster quote responses because it takes too long to gather and analyze data from multiple sources.
Claims teams are struggling to settle claims quickly or provide the personal touch that customers prize because they are too busy manually reviewing every claim.
To meet higher customer expectations, insurers will need to go beyond just providing digital self-service tools. Insurers must reimagine everything – products, channels, and processes – to achieve consistently optimal experiences:
On the sales side, insurers must continually evaluate and adjust products, distribution channels, and underwriting practices so that they can optimize customer or agent experiences for higher conversion, while maintaining profitable growth.
On the service side, insurers must provide timely, relevant information and real-time transaction processing capabilities so that insurers can solve customer issues effectively and efficiently in one interaction.
We believe that for insurers to deliver a consistently great experience, they require the foundational support of an agile platform like Guidewire Cloud that fully integrates core, digital, and data across the entire customer lifecycle. Guidewire Cloud enables insurers to continuously measure and optimize the experience end-to-end:
Entice the customer with the right product through new or existing channels with quicker launch and updates of products that have been tailored using behavioral, social, and environmental signals.
Empower employees to make smarter, faster decisions with less manual work and embedded insights so that they can focus their energies on resolving customer issues quickly.
Integrate new vendors quickly to test new products and services.
At Guidewire we believe that every single insurer can succeed in their digital transformation. We welcome the opportunity to help you move to that upper-right quadrant in the customer satisfaction survey – and stay there even when market expectations change.
1 “A Digital Reckoning for Insurance Companies” by Bain, September 14, 2020.
2 Microsoft 2019 State of Global Customer Service survey