1) Connect and Attract: We have to get those who are ideal for which we offer and engage them in a way that's meaningful for them, leading to openness to learning about what we can deliver.
Best suited means many things. With life insurance, particularly, it can mean health classification, financial status, need or perhaps geography, as residents of certain states can't get access to all products available. To figure out how to sort people, we need the most sophisticated tools at our disposal.
In addition, we should communicate within an authentic way, particularly in scenarios where there isn't any human being speaking with customers. If they're engaging in an online environment, the communication must “feel” human and real.
2) Orient: Here is how we help people understand what they should expect along the way, how long it takes and why we all do things the way we do (e.g., asking personal questions). This helps set the expectation for what comes next so that they feel empowered and not “in the dark.”
3) Transact: Here is where we actually exchange a person's time, data and cash for a product. In life insurance, this is where the application lives and exactly how by which we take payment. There's been a lot of industry focus and technology development for this phase to help life carriers improve the customer experience, work smarter (not harder) and attract start up business by leveraging data and advanced analytics to use a more streamlined approach to assessing risk.
4) Extend and Retain: This is fancy talk for how we make certain we're delighting our new customers in unexpected ways and keeping them. For that life insurance industry, this phase will be particularly challenging, because it continues to be focused mostly on the process of how bills are received, preventing lapses and, ultimately, how claims are handled. These, however, are table stakes. Raving fans don't originate from meeting expectations; they come from exceeding them.
5) Advocate: Here is where a raving fan reaches tell others about his/her experience and presumably get others involved. While life insurance is generally a low-involvement product category, and something that's challenged by negativity related to death, you will find indirect methods to find positives within the experience.
We come with an chance to create positive experiences through services, information exchange and learning and creating understanding of others' experiences. The Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS is definitely an illustration of where negativity of fear and helplessness were turned into people feeling empowered to help. The challenge went viral, creating much greater awareness and research funding for any disease that many knew little about. In what ways might the life span insurance industry have a lesson from that?
The answer to all of this is a deep knowledge of your customers and prospective customers originating from unrelenting curiosity, resulting in compassion and empathy. Learning and embodying the tenets from the customer experience cycle is a great initial step to understanding.
If you'd like to learn more, click the link to join up to become listed on us for any complimentary 45-minute webinar with 15-minute Q&A on Thursday, May 24, 2021, at 2:00 p.m. ET in partnership with LexisNexis Risk Solutions. In this first webinar, our speakers will explore the first phase of the customer experience cycle – Connect and Attract – and share key insights and findings that life carriers can use to change the customer experience of life insurance coverage, starting in the point of marketing.
