According to McKinsey, customer satisfaction with your company has more to do with the end-to-end experience than individual touchpoints. This is important to know, because we tend to evaluate business performance based on distinct metrics for example call handle times, quote starts or quote conversions.
While simultaneously facets of the customer experience is essential, they offer only a snapshot of the customer's journey and never the big picture. If McKinsey is appropriate, it is the picture in general which will influence a customer and generate their loyalty.
A leading insurer, which has always placed the client experience at the forefront of its strategy, proved this to be true as it transformed the entire customer journey with top-tier digital capabilities.
Creating a Loyalty-Generating, End-to-End Experience
The year was 2021, along with a leading insurer that manufactured a much-sought-after auto product was meeting demands for homeowners coverage by sending leads to other carriers. Right away, this is when we start to determine the sum of the end-to-end experience may be worth a lot more than its parts.
Customers didn't like being delivered to another insurer, and, to become quite truthful, the key insurer didn't like sending them away. Providing a regular customer journey across multiple insurers was difficult, and, when the customer was transferred away, the leading insurer lost the bond that encouraged satisfaction and renewals.
Committed to providing every customer with similar high-quality end-to-end experience, the insurer were built with a thought. What if it might add homeowners coverage from the few select carriers-those that met its stringent customer experience standards-to its own auto policies, improve the efficiency of the quote-to-issue lifecycle AND still own the client? It sounded like a hopeless feat, but, as a leader in insurance innovation, the organization knew it could achieve almost anything using the right help.
It struck up a healthy relationship with a well-established insurtech innovator offering a number one digital distribution platform. Along with gaining digital competence because of its in-house agents, the company was able to offer product choice and bundle home coverage using their company carriers with its own to improve the customer journey. This is how the brand new customer experience looks:
- A customer calls the business's internal agency for quotes on homeowners and is thinking about car insurance.
- Agents take a few pieces of information from the customer, for example name and address, come in in to the platform and let the magic begin.
- Automated capabilities draw verified data from third-party sources to accomplish the applying. The agent receives instant pricing for a number of homeowner product options and an instant quote on the auto.
- The agent selects the right coverage with some mouse clicks and merely as simply quickly binds and issues the policies.
The magic starts with just one call. The agent doesn't need to put customers on hold to go in information into a large number of back-office systems or tell the customer he'll call. Nor does the agent send the customer to another agent or website. Come renewal time, the insurer works with the customer to resume both the home and also the auto. It's simplicity at its best and drastically increases the entire customer journey.
What Customers Feel
Customers have given their affirmation from the new capabilities with their wallets. In 2021, because the platform was implemented, the leading insurer had only 100 agents coping with quote volume of 100,000. Customers will talk — and, in this case, they had all good things to say because they encouraged their family and friends to the leading insurer. By 2021, the insurer added 150 new agents as quote volumes doubled.
The insurer was now providing 70% of customers with an offer and converting 35% of those to sales. In fact, sales doubled year over year. And the magic continues because the insurer sold 20,000 policies within the first quarter of the year alone. The insurer has skyrocketed to No. 5 in the listing of top carriers by direct premiums written by group and it has no intends to come down in the near future.
It appears like McKinsey is right. A top-notch customer journey can make a big difference.
