Seeking a single view of the customer: Why insurance needs to embrace omni-channel

Transcription

1 Seeking a single view of the customer: Why insurance needs to embrace omni-channel

2 Introduction In recent years the air has been thick with discussion about customer centricity and omni-channel engagement, but what exactly do these phrases mean in practical terms for the insurance industry and what benefits do they create to make them such desirable strategies? Every business in the market will say that it puts its customers at the centre of everything it does. After all, without customers businesses fail and so keeping them on board is a fundamental ingredient to commercial success. But the truth is a little different. Traditionally the insurance market has started by analysing a particular risk and understanding the potential liabilities that it creates. It then develops an insurance policy to provide cover against that risk and takes the policy to market. For hundreds of years the policy has been the axle around which everything in the insurance world has turned. The more modern thinking is that by segmenting customers, understanding their needs and developing products specifically tailored to meet them, insurers will be able to attract more of the customers they want, retain them for longer and increase their profitability over the medium to long term. 2

3 Chapter One Turning centuries of tradition on its head Customer centricity turns hundreds of years of operational strategy and embedded industry culture on its head and starts not with the risk, but with the individual customer s needs. In addition to understanding what customers need in terms of product, there is also a need to analyse how they want to do business. How do they want to deal with insurers? At what time of the day do they want to make enquiries? What level of self-service functionality do they want? Only by understanding the service that customers expect today and the changes they want to see made in the future can insurers effectively develop their operational capabilities and align them with their customers expectations. It is not enough to believe that if you build it they will come. If you do not build it to their liking they will go elsewhere. It is important to note that a single insurer will have to build numerous product and service propositions to meet the needs of different customer segments and that while customer centricity is a philosophy they can employ across their entire business it does not look the same in each area of operation. Explaining the challenge, Stephanie Smith, director of retail operations at Allianz Insurance, says: It is really about thinking about what customers want, knowing the customer and tailoring your service and product to their needs. It depends on the line of business in terms of how we treat customers. If you look at our pet business we have quite a detailed level of customer segmentation and we have between five and seven different customer types. There are some very different customer demands and needs and we have to be aware of them all. Insurers have to identify, understand and focus their efforts on a target market, but that market is likely to be fractured as Smith s example shows. 3

4 Chapter Two It s all about Omni-Channel Armed with improved customer understanding insurers are also trying to create an omni-channel experience that gives customers the ability to interact with them whenever and however they choose without ever losing the thread of the conversation. But the ability to create a single view of customer interactions across every possible medium is logistically, technically and operationally very difficult to deliver. You cannot just switch an omni-channel capability on and there is a path towards it, says Paul Wishman, e-commerce director at LV. You tend to go from traditional to digital and you then have to have multi-channel capability. You then move to intelligent cross channel interactions and capabilities before moving into omni-channel. Smith at Allianz agrees and she says: Having a single view of customer is a journey the whole industry is going on but it does take quite a lot of fundamental rethinking about how our data is organised, how we present it, what MI we have, how we measure the health of our business do we talk about policies or do we talk about customers, and so there is a lot to do. The other thing is the way we are organised. We have a claims department, we have a sales department, we have a commercial division and a retail division and it is highly possible that you have one customer that can be both a retail and commercial customer who is midway through a claim and also wants to buy something new. To put this into context Smith says that information has traditionally been indexed around policy numbers and so in the not too distant past Allianz knew how many pets it insured but did not know how many owners there were. This is no longer the case and by reconfiguring the way it collects, stores and analyses data Allianz has a better understanding of the actual owners and that information is much more commercially valuable to the business. If insurers adopt effective customer centricity strategies supported by effective omni-channel capabilities there are rich rewards on offer. There are clear cross sell and up sell opportunities for insurers who know their customers better, who can see exactly what products they already have and who understand the way they want to do business. 4

5 Chapter Three Better Customer Understanding = better product and service delivery Similarly better customer understanding and heightened product and service delivery will improve customer satisfaction levels that in turn drive retention and referral numbers. These benefits are not something that insurers will derive overnight and so there is a need to step back from the short term metrics of business volumes and market share and look towards longer term measurements such as the profit made over each customer lifecycle and the way that margins increase the longer the relationship lasts. If companies are to move successfully in this direction then there is a need for greater degrees of interactive communication with customers so they can actually get a handle on what they want. Canvassing customer opinion is becoming more prevalent and exit popup screens asking for feedback are more common on insurer and broker websites. Similarly automated telephony systems ask for feedback at the end of a call and there are also more in-depth surveys carried out on a continual basis. Potentially it is possible to gather feedback after every customer contact and if analysed and used effectively this data has the potential to reshape the way businesses organise themselves and determine the way they deliver their products and services going forward. Explaining how LV tries to turn this data into useful information, Wishman comments: I have a team that takes the data and turns it into actionable insight and this is an ongoing and continuous process. We identify and prioritise the incoming concerns and look at making changes wherever possible. Can we change the process quickly and what sort of change is required? Is it easy to change or is it something more fundamental that needs to be looked at in the medium to long term? Accurate customer insight will enable policies to be redesigned and developed for the better and broker Simply Business says the 100,000 online visitors it receives each month give it a wide and representative view of the market. Fiona McSwein, chief customer officer at Simply Business says it found, for example, that a lot of landscape gardeners struggled to get cover for the nursery businesses that they also ran. This meant that if their plants were destroyed by flood or frost they would not be covered under the standard policies available. 5

6 Chapter Three Similarly, standard policies for photographers provide cover for their equipment when it is in their studio. But customer research showed that the majority of photographers spend a lot of their time doing outdoor shoots. Again this rendered the cover they had inadequate for their needs. Working with insurers Simply Business has looked to address these issues and come up with policies better designed for the specific needs of its clients and McSwein says: We are obsessed about getting that sort of data insight to make sure we can create the sort of products that people actually want. But Simply Business is not alone in working in this way. Allianz has recently refreshed its home and motor policies for the direct market and had previously offered a base cover that could be built up through a large number of add-ons. It found this was simply confusing customers who did not know what was and was not covered by the time they had finished. Now Allianz has improved the base level of cover and reduced the optional add-ons to make the policy more transparent. 6

7 Chapter Four Conclusion: Seeking a new philosophy Insurers across the market are trying to implement this more customer centric philosophy and there are a number of large change programmes currently underway. In the last three years Hiscox has in-sourced its contact centre and established a completely new unit in York. In a bid to collect more information from customers and deliver the sort of telephony service they wanted, the insurer has done away with scripted question sets. But such a move brings implications in terms of culture, recruitment, training and operational procedure and these all need to be addressed. Kate Markham, managing director of the UK direct channel at Hiscox, comments: Once we implement a new system and take those scripts away then it requires a shift in the skills and comfort that employees have around talking to customers without those prompts. It is a much more natural, personal customer focused conversation, but it takes time to get there. In addition Markham says a lot of work is also being done to improve the firm s IT capabilities and she adds: We are part of the way through a significant implementation of a new retail system and that really is going to allow us to be much more customer centric because the system has got customers at the core rather than policy at the core and so for the first time we are going to have that single view of the customer. As the industry goes through this period of upheaval it has to be sure that it is creating genuine benefits and not overspending or inappropriately prioritising the changes that it delivers. That will require companies to have a better understanding of the purchase journeys that customers make and to track them over weeks, months and possibly years. How much information do customers want before they buy a policy and do they open, read and act on the additional information that is actively or passively made available to them? Additionally, work is being done to make the ongoing relationship with customers more fluid and by creating an ongoing dialogue firms can create a deeper relationship with customers. We are trying to make the whole post-sale service experience more exciting, says McSwein. Instead of having an annual policy underwritten at a single point and renewed a year later we want the future to be more about an ongoing relationship. We want, for example, to provide recommendations on weather warnings or reminders about lagging pipes if weather is changing. 7

8 Chapter Four All of this activity relies on businesses knowing their customers better. Without that level of intimacy it is impossible to evolve in the way that they want and to align all of the available channels into a single, coherent proposition. As the industry seeks to overcome the inherent challenges of its move to a customer centric and omni-channel approach it will also have to guard against forgetting the traditional channels that its most vulnerable customers often rely on. The market may be moving away from paper-based communications, for example, but for many elderly customers this is their preferred way of operating and they are a growing sector. Change might be coming, but it has to incorporate rather than simply replace what has gone before. 8

9 Author Jonathan Swift has written and commented about the insurance industry for over 16 and a half years during his time at Incisive Media. He has appeared on television speaking about topics as diverse as the insurance implications of Michael Jackson s death to the consequences of consolidation on motor premiums; and is a past winner of the British Insurance Brokers Association journalist of the year and Association of British Insurers general insurance trade journalist prizes. Twitter CODEXX Hitachi Solutions. Hitachi Solutions works with insurance companies around the world to help them migrate to new technology solutions that put the customer and agent at the heart of the enterprise. Utilising Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Hitachi s own insurance software, users of the system have a complete 360 view of their customers, agents and other third parties and can market, sell, and service more efficiently, and cost effectively.