The challenge for insurers trying to get service excellence right is that customer expectations keep changing and soaring. Customers prefer their experiences to be connected and personalized.
Our customers want their preferences known across touchpoints and interactions, and any required information should already be available to their service representatives. A service representative should know the details of all recent customer transactions and be able to respond proactively.
Policyholders now expect these kinds of consistent interactions across insurance company departments from claims to agents and producers. They also want their service needs to be accessible across all channels, including mobile devices, personal computers, branch offices, and phone. Customers should be able to start their omnichannel experience with one method and pick up where they left off with another channel of their choosing.
Relationships with customers were previously built within individual departments such as claims, sales/agents, and banking. This led to disjointed and often unsatisfactory customer experiences or, at best, nothing extraordinary — a chance lost to be “brilliant in the moment.”
Although service excellence can come in many different forms, one thing is clear: Insurers know they need to focus on it. P&C insurers attending Connections Reimagined in November 2020 identified “delivering service excellence” as one of their top strategic imperatives for 2021. And to achieve it, insurers need the right data and tools.
Insurers that connect with a single, unified database of customer information and integrated artificial intelligence can leverage raw data into high-value insights, thus enabling quick decision-making to personalize the customer experience. By approaching customer relationships as a single entity, service representatives now have a 360° view of their customers’ interactions with the entire company. This enables them to create a unified customer experience across all business lines and strengthen relationships with customers. Today’s customers love when their insurer understands their wants and needs in the context of their lives. Your customers are more knowledgeable and have high expectations of the kinds of service that new technology enables. They have little patience for businesses that cannot keep up with evolving standards. Delivering service excellence today is the expectation.
To learn more, check out the full report: "Top Five Imperatives of 2021: Insurer Priorities, Challenges, and Successes." You can also view our recent Connections Reimagined session "Insurers' Top Five Imperatives for 2021," where Guidewire's Carrie Burns spoke with three industry analysts about process improvements, key insurer priorities, and current industry trends.
This blog is the fifth in a six-part series. Read the others here: