How to wow policyholders with delightful digital experiences
Personalized digital customer experiences (CX) are a non-negotiable for today’s insurance shoppers. A whopping 62% of customers would switch FSI providers if they felt treated like a number, not a person.
But how do you ensure policyholders feel like your insurance app or website was specifically designed with their needs in mind? By combining empathetic interactions with delightful digital experiences and action-based feedback. In this post, we’re taking a closer look at the latter two and what they actually looks like in practice.
Let’s get started!
3 things your policyholders need for a delightful digital experience
There’s a reason why 72% of customers rate personalization as “highly important” in today’s financial landscape—feeling seen, heard, and understood are all equally critical for a quality digital customer experience.
In the context of an insurance app or website, this means policyholders feel their individual needs are recognized and accommodated at every stage of their customer journey, from onboarding to claim submissions, policy upgrades to account maintenance.
However, this is often easier said than done. Only 25% of policyholders are satisfied with their provider’s app or website interface.
What to do instead
Delightful digital experiences stand out by offering:
1. Intuitive interactions
Interactions with your app or website are equally effortless across every device, channel and browser, so policyholders don’t have to pick and choose between personal preferences and experience quality.
2. Strong technical performance
Policyholders can quickly perform their desired action, with glitches, bugs and lags frequently monitored, and mitigated.
3. Information accessibility
Policyholders can easily find the information they need—without having to sift through your site, decode industry jargon or beg customer support for assistance. Self-service is critical to a personalized experience, yet more than half of digital insurance shoppers don’t use the tools and resources created to guide them.
Quick improvements you can make:
Describing products and policies in concise language
Providing additional context with helper text
Using headings, lists, bullet points and section summaries to make policies easier to skim
Effectively measuring policyholder feedback
Financial brands that deliver a better customer experience receive twice as many recommendations and their customers are 2X more likely to try new products or services. The challenge with insurance providers is the significantly lower frequency of touchpoints. Customers typically interact with their insurance carrier once or twice per year, which makes it especially critical to get each touchpoint right.
Sure, organizations have the capacity to capture every tap, swipe, and click. But it’s basically a Goldlilocks situation. If you have too much data, there’s no way to effectively identify and prioritize digital experience improvements that will actually make a difference in retaining your policyholders—especially since over 80% of data coming through an enterprise organization is not usable or actionable. When everything is important, nothing is important.
On the other hand, if you don’t have enough data, it’s equally impossible to understand customers—what they’re looking for, where they’re struggling and how they’re actually experiencing interactions.
Just think about the dizzying combination of factors that influence
whether your policyholders feel valued and satisfied:
How closely your offers reflect their evolving needs
How quickly your website loads on their specific model of smartphone
How easily they understand your policy description
How annoyed they get when they try to submit a claim
How quickly customer support responds to their request
Without knowing what prompts specific behaviors, it’s impossible to assess, measure and prioritize improvements—or establish behavioral patterns associated with conversion, retention, renewal and churn.
So how do you get it just right? By zeroing in on the data that draws a direct and quantifiable correlation between specific customer feedback and retention or churn.
What to do instead
Effectively implementing action-based feedback means your insurance website and app are regularly measured, tested and improved according to real customer behavior, not just broader performance metrics and voice of customer (VoC) data.
As the adage goes, actions speak louder than words. Especially since so few customers actually provide them. In our own research, we found that VoC data is typically provided by just 4% of customers. That makes it difficult to assess and improve their experiences on a more granular level. Incorporating deeper data into the analysis enables you to identify and compare real behavioral patterns that have a direct correlation with churn and retention.
Customer intelligence technology combines several data sources—web, digital, product, technical performance, and VoC data—to form a single, comprehensive view of the customer journey. This gives you the ability to drill into individual components and examine how all the pieces fit together.
Or as Nick Frank and Michael Nadel put it: “By leveraging data, analytics and advanced segmentation, insurers can develop a granular understanding of their customers’ evolving insurance priorities, life situations, motivations, buying behaviors and unmet needs. Which customers are most likely to switch providers? Where are the high-value customers, and how do we retain them? Where are the pockets of profitable growth?”
For instance, customer intelligence can reverse engineer recent cancellations to uncover how policyholders engaged with your website or app in the days, weeks and even months before churning. This gives you a list of specific sequences, behaviors and interactions at-risk customers display—like unsubscribing from emails and then ignoring three consecutive account notifications.
From there, you can deploy re-engagement campaigns as policyholders begin to display these behaviors instead of waiting for their renewal date.
Back to you
Meeting policyholder expectations during their digital interactions requires a combination of delightful experiences and the ability to effectively measure and refine them. This means both nuanced insights and the big picture to provide real personalization. Customer intelligence gives insurance carriers the ability to re-examine digital customer experiences in a way that actually reflects their interactions with your brand and product.
This doesn’t just represent a shift in technology but a shift in mindset. Instead of reacting to churn and retention rates and then trying to understand where they’re coming from, customer intelligence proactively responds to customer behavior—and continually improves their experience—at every stage of the journey.
