How data empowers insurers to reimagine customer experience
P&C insurance carriers are increasingly expected to deliver seamless experiences across the customer journey.
As a result of the pandemic, customers are already under additional stress and pressure. Added to this, the increase in work-from-home, digital services, and the need to continue to deliver high-touch, high-empathy interactions have also revealed gaps in many organizations’ customer experience (CX).
Having an insurance company that offers a supportive, painless-as-possible and context-aware experience can make the difference between a customer staying or switching carriers. Whether for obtaining coverage, paying premiums, filing a claim, mitigating lawsuits, or making settlements — insurance companies that can deliver easy digital processes that put the customer first have the opportunity to improve loyalty. However, delivering an exceptional customer service experience can be challenging, especially if your systems are not integrated and, therefore, unable to leverage customer experience data.
The question then becomes: How can insurance companies leverage customer experience data to deliver better customer service? It starts with repositioning the contact center not as a cost center but as the true front door to the business. The contact center needs to be connected to the business so that insights from within the contact center can be shared with the business and vice versa.
A disconnected journey so far
The insurance industry was in the midst of digitally transforming its business model before the pandemic. Even for insurance providers that were already on this journey of transformation, while they had started to look at how they could use automation to optimize workflows and processes, the AI required to achieve true transformation hadn’t matured enough to make it scalable.
When the pandemic hit, some more technologically advanced organizations were able to quickly switch to software that offered digital experiences, but that technology didn’t always connect to other systems. Primarily on-premises systems were not able to provide the sudden need for flexibility, scalability, or work-from-home benefits that the cloud offers. Many legacy software and key systems were unintegrated and unable to connect and secure valuable customer data across the customer journey.
Further, organizations found that it was hard to access data while ensuring compliance and security. For customers, this resulted in an experience that felt piecemeal with parts of the journey digitalized and parts still manual, like needing to email or fax documents.
Customers today judge the insurance industry by the same standards as their favorite digital brands. Given this, the price point of premiums is sensitive to anything less than optimal experiences.
Modernizing the customer journey
Now, as insurance providers are once again focused on reimagining the customer experience, they’re looking at how the contact center can serve as a central hub for customer engagement — and how automation and practical AI can deliver a more streamlined experience. Achieving this, however, requires moving systems to the cloud, integrating them, and enabling data to flow between every application that supports the customer journey.
For customer service organizations, that means tying all that data into one screen that empowers agents to deliver exceptional service based on knowing the customer’s past engagement with the brand and not wasting customers’ time by asking them to repeat information. This requires full access to — and high visibility into — customer experience data in real-time.
A modern cloud contact center offers the ability to deliver and leverage this data while unifying the customer experience so it feels seamless by taking the following actions.
Connect everything. The best modern cloud contact centers are mature and designed to integrate with the systems and platforms in use today — including on-premises systems. They connect unified communications, the customer information file, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems while providing a holistic historical and real-time view of the customer’s engagement story. They ensure that data flows securely between systems to deliver the agent or user all the information they need to know. Agents have insight into who the customer is, their history, preferences, and previous engagements, as well as updates on the status of accounts and claims in real-time. Great data also benefit the customer, and it can be used to route the customer to the best resource matched on their preferences and skills to quickly resolve issues.
Automate routine requests. Solid, integrated CX data combined with automation will allow you to deliver accurate and personalized self-service for customers. Similarly, AI-based applications, like intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), can use APIs to tap into that data and handle routine tasks for live agents. This allows customers to resolve simple requests quickly and frees live agents to address more complex, nuanced, and high-trust issues that require more empathy. By freeing agents from work that conversational AI applications and automation can tackle, insurance companies can rethink the role of agents, and how they can be retrained to deliver more proactive customer service, upsell or cross-sell products, and handle more complexity.
Serve as the central hub for customer engagement. Apps and websites offer customers self-service options, but when they need to talk to a live agent, they need to be able to do so easily. Contact center software pulls relevant customer information from your CRM and displays it on agents’ screens so they have immediate access to customer histories across all channels. Agents become empowered to focus on solutions and services instead of bridging disparate systems. Customers are happier when they don’t have to repeat the same information, and problems get solved quickly.
Future-proof against disruption. Finally, modern cloud contact centers enable agents to work from home whenever needed. When disruption happens, insurance companies can be assured that customer support will not be interrupted. They will be able to continue to meet customer needs — with all the customer CX data available to them wherever they log in to the system. This is essential during times of crisis or unpredictable circumstances.
Harnessing customer experience data and integrating it into a modern cloud contact center platform enables insurance companies to deliver an easy, effortless experience that improves loyalty, retention, and revenue. Expanding the role of the contact center to serve this purpose helps companies stay at the forefront of digital transformation and meet today’s customer expectations.
Dan Burkland (dburkland@five9.com) is president of Five9, where he manages the entire customer lifecycle from sales and implementation to ongoing support, all of which are critical to customer success for a cloud software company. These opinions are the author’s own.
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