According to home insurance provider Hippo, over half of insurance customers prefer to go to the dentist than contact their provider. This kind of sentiment provides a big income opportunity, however, as insurance increasingly becomes a direct-to-consumer (D2C) business. Within the next few years, many believe that the large levels of marketing and ad dollars traditionally spent they are driving traffic to mobile apps and websites will find it difficult to turn web visits into customers.
Insurance carriers, now more than ever before, are afforded the chance to address friction within the customer journey as customers expect a transparent and much more intuitive experience. Today's insurance consumer embraces the right engagement in the proper time. Providing certainty and clarity to customers reduces anxiety and hesitation and drives success for the customer and the business.
In 2021, Geico's marketing budget topped $1 billion, with a most of paying for advertising. Very little has changed. D2C newcomers have developed early customers with design-first thinking, an emphasis on lower prices and more modern policy terms. But the approaches are meant to acquire customers; neither focuses much on engaging the client.
According to a recent Watermark customer experience survey, CX leaders outperformed the broader market, generating a total return which was 45 points greater than the S&P 500 Index. And customer experience leaders generated an overall total cumulative return which was nearly three times more than those of the “Customer Experience Laggards.” Those are numbers any CEO of a traditional insurance provider or founder of a significant insurtech can rally behind.
How insurance can embrace a different sort of customer acquisition
For legacy insurers along with a more D2C model, customer experience represents a simple and essential transfer of mindset. By giving the lower-friction, more customer-centric experience that today's consumers prefer, legacy insurers and insurtechs can modernize their position on the market. This could be made by guiding the customer's experience online through engagement.
Tom Super, director of J.D. Power's insurance practice, recently noted that, “According to our 2021 J.D. Power Digital Experience Study, 37% of shoppers have never spoken using their agent, and something in 10 consumers report they've never interacted using their insurance company at all.”
This clearly leaves a lot of room to develop customer engagement, and the insurance industry should look more closely at just how it calculates customer lifetime value (CLV). There is an chance to understand where exactly customer engagement produces sales. For insurtechs and legacy providers alike, the issue is becoming: How can you consider engagement when your customers don't actually want to be there or don't understand exactly where to visit? This is a lot diverse from typical direct-to-consumer marketing and brand challenges.
Creating a far more direct customer experience
To win in this fast-evolving insurance marketplace, providers of all types will have to move quickly beyond branding and concentrate on the customer experience. The initial few seconds are critical-as are all the seconds that follow. Customers will require constant reassurance that things will be explained, the next steps is going to be clear and also the clients are there for you personally.
The answer to Guided Digital Commerce is automation for almost all contacts and looking after your live channels for additional complex inquiries. If you can provide the customer the best answer to a concern the overwhelming most of the time, you are able to deploy a profitable engagement solution that can reach all your customers instead of just several. In sometimes opaque insurance products, this is answer to building effective customer engagement that supports money spent around the brand.
In practical terms, this means providing relevant guidance to help customers complete their onsite journey quickly and easily. Site design and golf tournament sponsorships are only the start. As soon as the client arrives at the house page, the provider should watch for signs of hesitation, struggle or opportunity. Site analytics can help the insurer understand the nature of hesitance as well as how you can address it. If visitors have a tendency to find yourself in trouble at a given reason for the procedure, offer relevant information in context, explaining what to do and just what to expect next. Keeping the customer inside the digital channel and increasing self-sufficiency is good for the client and good for business. Anticipate and act on customer behavior instantly. In a sense, be the greatest possible type of insurance agent: one who's clear, helpful and mindful of the customer's needs but never pushy.
Branding, data science, risk-pricing, terms, customer reviews-these are all part of the mix for competitive success. But none of them from it matters if you cannot keep customers on your site long enough to see what sets you apart. By providing a new and kind of engagement experience, insurance can start changing customer perceptions from the moment they arrive. When customers are guided towards the information they have to make confident buying decisions, they're more prone to bind policies, give accurate information to enable accurate risk calculation, update their coverage and generate revenue for the business. Which sure beats a trip to the dentist.
