A customer purchasing car insurance lives somewhere, in a house or perhaps an apartment that requires homeowners' or renters' insurance. A customer seeking homeowners' or renters' insurance might have a vehicle or two parked out front. And how a number of these individuals also run their very own business ventures?
Carriers have been increasingly conscious of the necessity to own customers, meeting all of their needs. The thought of keeping your insurance customers beneath your roof for those their needs is appealing from the business perspective. After all, in case your car insurance customers need to insure their dwellings, as well, why shouldn't they make use of the coverage you already provide?
But owning the customer isn't just about money. It's also about service, as Blue Cross Blue Shield notes. Some insurance company that covers a customer on multiple fronts, even with products the insurer doesn't underwrite itself, is poised to provide a level of service that may meet a customer's needs over a whole lifetime – if the insurer's own systems support this goal.
Enter omni-channel.
Omni-Channel 101
The goal of an omni-channel presence would be to give a single, seamless experience for insurance customers. In the customer's perspective, buying property and casualty insurance ought to be a “one-stop shop”: everything they require, reachable via a single interface, says Bryon Morrison at Nectarom. Most carriers currently fall short of that customer expectation.
If one-stop shopping sounds like a rebranding of multi-channel without any real substance, think again, says Kathy Hutson of IBM Analytics. Multi-channel marketing was a stopgap solution, a way to allow customers to reach multiple products while still keeping those lines siloed. With omni-channel tools, insurers break up the silos – allowing their teams to provide the particular solutions customers would like.
Frost & Sullivan provides an elegant definition: An omni-channel presence offers “seamless and effortless, high-quality contact experiences that occur within and between contact channels.” Instead of directing people to “the folks over at ___,” an omni-channel presence puts all of an insurer's “folks” into a single type of approach for customers.
Omni-channel and other alike tools are shaking up the insurance industry, based on a 2021 Majesco white paper. Omni-channel approaches provide exciting opportunities for both insurers and customers, Mark Breading says, and we are only scratching the top of their potential. The very first of the big carriers to embrace omni-channel, Progressive, is already seeing early returns on this investment, as we will touch on below.
Keeping Customers in the Fold
An omni-channel approach offers several opportunities for P&C insurers. Here's how omni-channel assists in maintaining customer ownership.
While good customer support and relationship management happens to be about meeting customers where they stand, their position continues to shift in the digital age. Consider:
- 84% of U.S. households possess a computer, according to Andy Serowitz at Insurance Thought Leadership.
- 80% of shoppers use digital tools at least one time during their shopping process, including while they look for home, auto along with other types of P&C coverage, according to a current McKinsey study.
- 53% of consumers have tried a new-to-them financial or insurance brand in the past year after discovering it online, based on the program for the 2021 Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit.
- 25% of customers now go shopping like insurance using a mobile app – and that number is growing. Millennials and the coming Generation Z are much more likely to buy insurance online, Serowitz says, and also the percentages track their presence within the population. As today's children and teenagers grow, the use of these tools increases.
These digital natives are well-informed and expect a seamless experience, Kamna Datt at Ameyo says, which changing demands are shaking in the insurance industry. Once the domain of local friendly faces making personal connections with clients, insurance providers must now deal with customers who wish to do their shopping online.
The demand for online connections is more than the usual whim. One Accenture study discovered that 78% of insurance clients are pleased to share personal information using their insurance provider, whether it means better coverage or service. Customers want to hand companies their info – and also the value of that info can only be leveraged by companies using the omni-channel infrastructure to unlock its potential.
Customers expect various things using their insurance experience of today's world, as well. Once, a core concern for consumers was whether a P&C insurer underwrote the products it sold. Today, however, customers are more interested in convenience, says Progressive Product Manager Carolyn Wald.
Progressive's home advantage program bundles other carriers' homeowners' and renters' insurance offerings with the company's own car insurance plans. The result is big business for Progressive, benefits for the insurers that underwrite the non-auto portions of the policy and convenience for purchasers that keeps them coming back.
In 2011, Andres A. Zoltners, PK Sinha and Sally E. Lorimer posed an essential question in the Harvard Business Review: Do your visitors “belong” for your salespeople, or to your organization?
“In a complex ecosystem of intermediaries and agents, ownership from the end customer can often be lost,” says Dennis Vanderlip, industry solutions director at Microsoft's Worldwide Insurance division. When communication channels are siloed or confusing, ownership becomes harder to keep. And with every intermediary who enters the image, ownership becomes much more muddled.
This also shines a light on a frustration that customers experience. Customer desire to be loyal, a 2021 Bain & Company brief found. Or, more precisely, they don't wish to juggle multiple insurance firms. Instead, they prefer to “simplify their lives and work with a single company that provides them good reasons to stay.”
Omni-channel platforms offer a solution. When customers can carry out most or all of their insurance business needs via a single user interface – so when that interface connects to all the core systems of the P&C insurer as well as to core systems of other carriers products – the customer's experience becomes one seamless coping with the insurer. Even when the underwriter changes, the customer can stick to the insurer of her choice.
Because clients are willing to provide information through digital systems and discover it simpler to keep utilizing a single familiar interface, an omni-channel approach makes it much simpler than ever before to keep customers by anticipating their needs. A well-designed system can use customer data to anticipate needs and supply personalized alerts and service to customers who are buying a car or home, opening a company or passing through other major life stages.
One of the most popular questions that arises when “insurance” and “lifespan” are paired is that of life insurance coverage – an area that stands to be upended by omni-channel approaches, based on an EY white paper. While life insurance coverage is definitely hands-off in its approach, an omni-channel approach both make it easier to meet customers' needs in this region and also to bundle life insurance coverage along with other insurance solutions, e.g., auto, homeowners, etc.
Building Your Omni-Channel Presence: A Quick-Start Guide
While an omni-channel presence can go very well for both customer and insurer, it is also a tragedy that triggers people to eschew the organization permanently.
In an article for that Financial Brand, Jim Marous describes an event together with his own auto insurer that left him cold, mainly due to major mistakes in the company's uses of its omni-channel system.
Marous stops working the major problems into several categories. The insurer's system, he says, made communication harder, was essentially a multi-channel approach overlaid on still-siloed product systems, created redundancies that led to broken promises and made it difficult to view customer data across channels.
Such negligence is really a surefire method to weaken relationships between existing customers and their agents – to the point that neither the agent nor the organization can claim ownership anymore.
How can insurers avoid these pitfalls? Vinod Muthukrishnan, co-founder and CEO of customer experience management company CloudCherry, recommends keeping the next points in your mind when seeking an omni-channel platform that boosts customer ownership:
- Know your brand. The customer-facing end of the omni-channel presence must communicate a unified look, feel and vision. Regardless of how your customer connects to your company or through whom, the knowledge should consistently sell the company's brand, vision and coverage. In so doing, you are able to differentiate your brand to promote ownership, too, as you IBM white paper notes.
- Understand your visitors. Tracking how customers communicate with you and also what they prefer might help be sure that your company doesn't spend your time and on tools that customers ultimately won't use – or overlook communication channels customers crave.
In addition, choosing platform provider and other professionals to construct and service your omni-channel presence should be done carefully. Look for companies by having an eye toward customer experience and ownership; they'll be considering how you can unify your brand and connect with the people you serve.
Finally, understand that a real omni-channel experience should enable a customer to accomplish a single application its their insurance needs, even if the last mile from the application process takes place in a answering services company.
And this is true whether you underwrite all of the products you offer or not. The key, which we'll explore in a future piece, is to have alternatives and powerful offerings to meet all your customers' needs.
