Customer experience intelligence is the secret to attracting picky policyholders
Once upon a time, insurers were shielded from surging customer demands by product complexity and compliance concerns. That time has long since passed.
In a day and age when you can buy everything from prescription drugs to houses online, policyholders have come to expect the same quality digital experiences they can get from Netflix or Amazon: lightning-fast, hyper-personalized and seamless.
Insurance providers routinely fail to deliver on these expectations. More than one-third of policyholders have switched insurers, with the desire for a better digital experience the top cited reason.
Part of the problem? How organizations actually analyze and improve those experiences in the first place, with insights sliced and diced across various flows, product lines, and job functions. This puts teams at odds with what customers experience as a single, continuous journey. Customer experience intelligence (CXI) unlocks the 360-degree view necessary to actually understand what’s going on at different stages—and how to fix it.
In this handy guide, we’re digging into how CXI works, why you need it and how it helps attract and retain policyholders. Let’s jump right in!
Why digital customer experiences are the differentiator
The insurance industry is currently at a crossroads. On the one hand, providers are attempting to reconcile legacy software with surging customer demands for better, faster digital experiences and often coming up short. Chew on this:
Just 19% of insurance customers are completely satisfied with their provider’s digital experience.
70% of consumers are aware of their insurers' mobile app but only 37% would actually use it to reach out if they had questions about their policy.
Only 25% of insurance customers are satisfied with the interface on their provider’s app or website.
At the same time, we’re witnessing unprecedented opportunities to innovate. “Cognitive” insurance platforms are leveraging AI for real-time underwriting decisions. Embedded insurance has enabled customers to purchase personalized insurance products right at the point-of-sale. Insurers can even use image recognition technology to automate damage analysis.
It’s sort of like the Industrial Revolution, when you could spot a car and horse and buggy traversing the same road. The organizations positioned to come out on top aren’t just reimagining insurance as a practice, but how their policyholders experience it.
This is partially due to necessity as disruptors enter the market, like insurtech companies swooping in with sleeker apps and retailers developing their own embedded insurance solutions.
The good news? While policyholders are often disappointed in their digital customer experiences, this gap also leaves a lot of room for disruptors to jump in front of the competition—especially in an industry that’s historically slow to change.
“We’re seeing very uneven execution between brands, particularly in the area of mobile apps, where the top performers are really breaking new ground, but the bottom performers are keeping overall customer satisfaction scores low. We’re also starting to notice some noteworthy- thy year-over-year volatility among the brands in the study, which shows that smart investments in good technology can drive rapid performance improvement.”
How lousy data practices ruin policyholder experiences
One reason insurers often fall short of customer expectations is the way teams frequently design, deploy, analyze and improve digital experiences in the first place. Policyholder journeys are sliced and diced across various functions, each governed by their own type of data—CX is entrenched in Voice of the Customer (VoC) data while Product is digging into product analytics and engineers are combing through their error logs. And that’s without factoring different flows, product lines and offerings.
While nuanced insights are critical, traditional data and analytics tools often lack the ability to consolidate data sources to form an integrated, 360-degree view of the entire digital policyholder journey.
Instead of considering an end-to-end experience, teams become solely focused on their individual part. Invariably, no one can connect the dots, and you wind up losing the forest for the trees. The end result is often an obstructed view of:
1.) The holistic customer experience
Breaking down the policyholder journey into different stages and flows certainly has its benefits. But policyholders don’t typically experience their interactions through a series of neat and tidy steps or clearly designated touch points.
To your customers, every social media ad, product feature, technical event, support ticket and agent phone call are part of the same experience. When creating, optimizing and delivering world-class digital experiences, being able to step back and assess the big picture is just as important as the ability to drill down into a specific component.
2.) Cause and effect
A singular focus makes it almost impossible for different teams to observe how one aspect of the customer journey impacts another, or establish cause-and-effect relationships between different interactions and technical events. For example, you may have a perfectly optimized quote form, with brilliant copy and a beautiful interface.
But a technical issue makes the “Submit” button unresponsive for iPhone users on Safari. The engineering team has the ability to identify the error, if they know to look for it. And you’re aware that the form isn’t converting like it should be.
But with traditional analytics tools, the only way to determine the cause is to speak directly with an engineer—which would require you knowing a tech glitch was the culprit in the first place.
3.) Business impact
Think about the dizzying combinations of variables that make up any one customer experience.
Loading speed. App usability. The policy itself. Customer service response time. How friendly and professional the agent is. While traditional analytics tools can provide exhaustive detail as to the “what,” the why frequently gets lost in data silos.
This severely limits your ability to understand engagement beyond surface-level observations. Without establishing clear behavioral patterns associated with conversion, retention and churn (and determining the cause), how are you supposed to accurately assess, measure and prioritize improvements?
When business impact is absent from the equation, decision-making can easily get derailed by subjective priorities, squabbling stakeholders and internal politics. It’s impossible to deliver a standout digital experience when the actual journeys are evaluated with guesswork and opinions rather than real, measurable behavior.
What is CX intelligence?
CX intelligence (CXI) is technology designed to automatically measure, consolidate and analyze different types of data—including VoC, web, digital, product, and technical performance—to form a comprehensive view of the entire customer journey. CXI platforms typically work by combining multiple reporting and diagnostic capabilities, such as:
Session replays to flag signs of struggle (such as rage clicks or page reloads)
Session logs that chronicle user interactions
Technical events to more easily identify glitches
Heatmaps
This enhanced visibility enables multiple teams to more effectively examine customer interactions and see how all the pieces fit together within a single, holistic experience.
For example, let’s pretend you have a quote flow for a particular policy, where successful conversions average $500 per month. If a slow-loading webpage causes 5% of mobile users to drop out of the funnel, you can then quantify the cost of latency. This gives your IT or engineering teams the ability to laser focus on errors and glitches that actually have an impact on real behavior, and subsequently conversions and revenue.
This level of nuance is critical to not only outshine your competitors, but keep pace with companies who have set the bar for outstanding digital customer experiences.
Take Amazon, for instance. Why is it so easy to shop on their site and app? Sure, they’ve collected enough data to really know who you are and what you need—to the point of accurately predicting when you’ll run low on Tide Pods.
But data on its own is meaningless. The Amazons, Ubers and Instacarts of the world also have a system in place to apply insights into real behavior across an infinite combination of interactions, channels and touchpoints. And they can do it for every customer, at every stage of the journey, at scale.
Doing it better
Marketing complex insurance products to potential policyholders with sky-high expectations is hard enough without digging through mountains of unusable data. Even if you can’t change your entire company’s tech stack, adapting a more integrative approach to data and analytics within your immediate team can still put you far ahead of your competitors.
P.S. You can grab our full guide on improving conversion flows for picky policyholders right here.
