Spin the wheel to land on any insurance carrier's website. Did you find Allianz, USAA, MetLife, Radian, Traveler's, State Farm, Protective Insurance or American Family? Have you detected anything familiar? Perhaps it's images of smiling people, like you and me, living their lives, connecting with one another or being a household. Running a business today, leading organizations, from insurance, healthcare and finance to mobile and technology companies, find themselves centered on a common theme of enhancing customer experience (known as CX). It comes down to relating to other people and finding commonalities in a world that's rapidly becoming disconnected.
Human emotions and also the need to connect are driving business all over the world to change their focus to consumers. Based on Harvard Business Review, “On a lifetime value basis, emotionally connected customers are more than two times as valuable as highly satisfied customers…. Companies deploying emotional-connection-based strategies and metrics to design, prioritize and measure the customer experience discover that increasing customers' emotional connection drives significant improvements in financial outcomes.”
People are drawn to others – it's human nature. Yet today, a lot of our connections and information are impelled by technology, data, the internet and mobile phones. How can we bridge this dichotomy? We use technology for connecting with others. Insurance providers can serve as a prime example of a business that's being pushed to incorporate technology and knowledge to create those human connections. Imagery can change people’s perceptions of the products or services.
Common sense? Definitely. However the next logical real question is, how do companies deliver on these promises and demands of connecting. Consumers and businesses – and not just millennials – want products and services quickly, otherwise immediately. Behind the scenes, innovation departments, data scientists, IT departments and line of business leaders are exploring automation technology from robots (digital workers), business processes, workflow, customer care teams, engineering and other departments that can work smarter and faster.
Let's look at a few examples where insurance companies are improving and automating business processes. Claims processing is really a department that are responsible for a high amount of documents, forms, packets and pictures. Leading insurance providers with fast response times are utilizing intelligent technology that uses AI and machine learning. They've eradicated manual processes that slow them, namely a mix of physical paper and electronic documents, for example emails and PDFs that aren't inside a structured format. They use tools that automatically capture the data from claim files, can recognize different types of forms and files, categorize them and export that data into another intelligent system, for example an automated workflow or claims processing software.
I use insurance companies all over the world who're pressing forward with digital transformation projects and therefore are incorporating these type of automation processes. The results that insurance customers report on their behavior to all of us demonstrate the opportunity to expedite countless documents and claims each year, decrease document preparation efforts by 50% and indexing by 75%, reduce fraud and cut improper payments by about 2%, leading to positive ROI within six months.
The human touch is taken away from all of these mundane, time-consuming processes, enabling insurance companies to reply to claimants or billing-related questions faster. This is improved CX, which customers don't see, but where they reap the benefits and grow loyal. It's the start of making the emotional connection that people all want. Now, insurance companies' customers can relate to those happy, smiling faces they see on insurance websites.
For insurance providers, the information around CX ought to be surface of mind. Bain & Co. surveyed near to 30,000 P&C customers and located that highly loyal insurance clients: retain at 97%, buy 25% more insurance, consolidate almost 90% of the insurance with one provider and refer 250% a lot more than neutral clients. Bain found that loyal clients deliver 300% more lifetime value than neutral clients and 700% more quality than low-loyalty clients.
These numbers alone should support the proceed to connect with your fellow humans. And, the funny thing is, it starts with uncovering and optimizing your data. Digital transformation and automation will lead you to CX and also the first start of emotional intelligence.
