Hurricane season demands personal insurance conversations
Building trust with insureds through smarter conversations is critically important long before they're faced with a catastrophe.
Insurance is at greater risk of suffering from an erosion in trust than any other industry. Delivering an exceptional customer experience is difficult even in the best of times. But when you add the emotions that are connected to a catastrophe like a hurricane, tornado, wildfire or other natural disaster to the mix, the chances for a negative customer experience increases.
Now, with a fluctuating post-COVID-19 market and premiums set to rise, 91% of more than 200 executives surveyed from across the insurance industry are prepared for customer distrust to increase further.
To earn customer confidence and trust, insurers need to find ways to provide customers with a great end-to-end experience that includes greater clarity and guidance through frictionless processes throughout the entire customer journey. There are several ways for insurance companies to earn customer trust by streamlining the communications process across points of quote, sale, renewal and claims.
Personalized, proactive and relevant
Clear and personal conversations are essential for building trust. Insurers that provide a regular cadence of relevant communications — not just when a policy is set to renew — will differentiate themselves from their competitors as a trusted advisor.
These communications can also reduce business risk by providing education and tips for protecting a customer’s property. Personalization at scale can be a reality through digital experiences and advance analytics. Technology can automate timely and relevant communications delivered via the customers through their preferred channels.
These same tools can assist in content authoring so the insurer can ensure greater consistency in messaging, tone, and adhere to the insurer’s brand and style guidelines. Additionally, analytics can help match customers to the best policies to their needs, identify which clauses are creating confusion and enabling personalized conversations to help customers make smarter decisions and feel empowered about their choices.
Frictionless claims process
Frictionless experiences are paramount to engendering trust and establishing an insurer’s reliability. From the First Notice of Loss (FNOL), make collecting customer information easy. Leverage customer data that is already available and pre-populate it in a guided form to jump start the process and reduce errors for employees. Delays in the claims process during a hurricane can weaken trust. It’s already an emotional experience. If the process is cumbersome, the customer will be frustrated and dissatisfied.
While insurers might feel the pinch of managing communications across so many different digital platforms simultaneously, customers don’t have such a nuanced view. If a customer first engages with an online chat, they expect all that information to carry through on any device or platform — regardless of where their next interaction is. Insurers have a major opportunity to invest in technology platforms that enable this seamless omni-channel experience for every customer, every time.
Self-service automation
Limited call center support is no longer enough in the 24-7 multiple time zone world we live in. Many insurers are still publishing a huge library of static, blank PDF forms online and trying to call that digital self-service. This requires customers to locate the right PDF, fill it out and either scan or fax back to the company. Not only is this a terrible experience for the customer who may not have access to a printer or fax due to hurricane displacement, but this process is also susceptible to errors which will delay processing by the agent.
Eliminate issues caused by Not In Good Order (NIGO) forms with truly digital forms that are responsive so that the customer has a guided experience. Easy and fulfilling self-service automation allows customers to submit their application and the required information for a policy on their timeline and on their device of choice. Automating this process will reduce customer frustration plus it will create efficiency for your back office processes by responding rapidly to updates and rules changes to forms, resolving data errors and greater visibility with reporting.
Real time updates
The reality is that customers are comparing the digital experience of their insurer to the digital experiences that retail, food delivery and ride share services offer. Providing personalized, meaningful two-way conversations from the FNOL throughout the claims journey across their preferred communication channel — whether it is chat, text, email or by the mail — is now expected.
An example would be easily submitting initial claims information by seamlessly collecting FNOL information through a personalized, interactive experience via their preferred channel. To set expectations, insurers should provide estimated timeframes tailored to the individual’s specific circumstance at the outset of a claim. Engaging the claimant by providing real-time updates via text messages throughout the investigation will help build trust and eliminate a customer’s fear that their claim disappeared into a corporate black hole.
Not only can it improve the customer experience, but timely digital communications can also help decrease the cost-to-serve by reducing or even eliminating the need for customers to call expensive contact centers for updates on their claim.
Smarter conversations matter even more when the customer is experiencing a crisis. Insurers need to be accessible, and to enable two-way conversations while also providing clear, concise, and timely information with speed and transparency. Insurers should monitor sentiment so that communications lead with empathy.
Modern customer conversations platforms give insurers the tools to enable the creation of — and the ability to maintain — the proper tempo of communications required to keep the claimant properly engaged, with insights that are personalized and delivered to their preferred channel.
Not only does using digital tools provide the critical information your customer needs to feel supported during an emotional time but also provides business continuity and delivers the right data to your employees. Optimizing your customer conversations and touchpoints will have a significant effect in ensuring customers trust their insurers.
Ruth Fisk is Vice President of Insurance Marketing at Smart Communications, a customer conversations management platform provider. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
These opinions are the author’s own.
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