Customer Centricity for insurance companies

Maximum customer satisfaction through customised customer journeys

Customer centricity

As the key to success in the insurance industry

Customers in other sectors are already accustomed to a high degree of customer centricity. They increasingly expect the same from their insurer. However, the requirements for the customer experience vary depending on the generation and individual life situation. In addition, customer needs are changing faster and faster. Aligning products and processes to this poses challenges for many insurance companies - particularly due to complex IT architectures and systems that are sometimes decades old.

The solution: a holistic customer-centricity approach with a strong focus on the customer relationship, supported by artificial intelligence (AI). The entire company is centred on the customer: Everything is aimed at offering real added value to policyholders. This requires a fundamental change in corporate culture and business processes. In order to fulfil and exceed the needs and expectations of policyholders, every customer must be perceived and treated as an individual.

But what exactly do customers want and expect?

  • Personalised services and products: Customers want innovative services and products that can be customised to their individual needs and changing life circumstances.
  • Comprehensive customer service: Policyholders want 24/7 availability and customer service that responds quickly and competently to their enquiries. This also includes support via other channels such as social media or chat.
  • Smooth customer journeys: Customers expect their insurer to ensure that all processes and interactions across different channels are seamless, user-friendly and intuitive so that they are offered a consistent and positive experience.
  • Different ways to obtain information and make a purchase: It is very important for policyholders today to receive all relevant information both online and offline. They also want to be able to switch flexibly between channels (online, offline, hybrid).
  • Digital ecosystems: Insured persons want digital platforms that integrate various services and products to enable centralised and efficient management of all their insurance matters.
  • Transparent communication: Customers want clear and easy-to-understand information about their insurance services and products.

Decisive added value for insurers

Customer loyalty and recommendation

Policyholders who feel that their individual problems are heard, valued and understood are more likely to remain loyal to the insurer and recommend it to others, which also improves the acquisition of new customers.

Profitability

Insurance companies that consistently focus on customer centricity build long-term relationships with their customers, which strengthens trust and loyalty, which in turn leads to increased profitability.

Optimisation of your own portfolio

By precisely knowing and analysing their customers and their needs and expectations, insurers can use this data to make adjustments to the services and products they offer. This allows them to make lasting improvements and tailor them to individual customer requirements.

Optimising customer relationships with AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to optimise customer relationships, particularly at customer interfaces and in customer communication. The use of AI helps you to put the customer even more at the centre of your attention.

The four areas of a holistic customer-centricity strategy

But what is the best place to start if you want to align your marketing and sales model in a customer-centred way? An important success factor is to approach the project holistically and strategically. For an optimal customer centricity strategy, you need to analyse four areas and use the results to derive a roadmap for your next steps.

  • After committing to customer centricity, but before collecting and using data and changing processes, you should consider the following, among other things:

    • How should customer centricity be measured? Is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) the all-important value? Are there other key performance indicators (KPIs) that should be measured?
    • How should customers with a low customer value be treated? Does the company want to part with them for the foreseeable future, or should it endeavour to develop them into customers with a high customer value?
    • The same applies to the likelihood of cancellation: sometimes products are not continued, so that a customer with such a contract and a high likelihood of cancellation should perhaps even be encouraged to cancel the contract.

    These examples show that a balance often has to be struck between a high degree of customer centricity and commercial interests. AI can help you to improve analytical data and maintain a balance between customer centricity and profitability.

  • The current database (customer and contract data) is not sufficient for most insurers to better cater to their customers. This requires a continuous analysis of customer behaviour and the determination of various values based on the available data. AI can also support you here. The most important values to analyse include

    • Customer value: This indicates the value contribution that the customer makes to the results of your insurance company. The further development of this, the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), also allows conclusions to be drawn about the future development of the business relationship.
    • Likelihood of cancellation: This indicates the likelihood of a customer cancelling each contract or customer relationship.
    • Scoring models: These show the probability of a contract being concluded for a specific product.
    • Customer satisfaction: This is usually determined through surveys or "star surveys". The results are snapshots and often need to be interpreted, as customers are understandably dissatisfied after refusing to accept a claim, for example.

  • Customer-centred processes or customer journeys are geared towards the needs, requirements and expectations of customers from start to finish. When implementing these processes in your company, it is important to consider these five steps and the associated questions:

    • 1. understand customer needs: What do your customers want? What are their expectations? And are you as an insurer able and willing to align yourself with them?
    • 2. process evaluation: To what extent are your processes already aligned with customer needs? Which ones are important but not yet customer-centric enough?
    • 3. process changes: Which processes do you need or want to adapt to customer expectations? And which ones don't? And what needs to be created as a basis in order to be able to change these processes at all?
    • 4. implementation of feedback loops: Do you want to work continuously on improving the processes? And what indicates which ones need to be further improved?
    • 5. training and change management: How should employees be taken along on the journey? How can their attitude towards customer centricity be changed?

  • If you have traditional IT architectures, you will face numerous challenges when implementing customer-centric processes:

    • Data integration: in order to implement customer-centric processes, data from various sources such as sales, marketing, customer care and other systems must be brought together. This data is usually available in different formats and standards, which makes data integration more difficult.
    • Data quality: The quality of the data is a decisive factor for the effectiveness of a customer-centred architecture. One challenge is to ensure that the data is clean, complete, up-to-date and correct in order to carry out meaningful analyses and create personalised offers.
    • Scalability: A customer-centric architecture must be able to process and analyse large amounts of data in order to create personalised offers in real time. It must be ensured that the IT architecture is scalable and can grow with increasing data volumes and requirements.
    • Data security and data protection: Processing and analysing customer data harbours a risk of data breaches. It must be ensured that the IT architecture complies with data protection regulations. In addition, sufficient security measures must be implemented to protect the data from unauthorised access.
    • Complexity: A customer-centred specialist architecture often requires a complex IT architecture with various components such as databases, analysis tools, APIs and other systems. Another challenge is to manage the complexity and ensure that the various components can work together seamlessly and exchange data in real time.

Our offer

With so many challenges, it's easy to lose track. What is the best approach? Where are the pitfalls and where are the quick wins?

In our workshops - based on the four subject areas of a holistic customer centricity strategy - we work with you to develop your individual path to customer centricity:

  • Determination of the status quo.
  • Analysing customer journeys in terms of their contribution to customer satisfaction.
  • Uncovering quick wins.
  • Joint definition and operationalisation of your customer centricity strategy
  • Identifying suitable standard systems to support the implementation of the strategy or planning the development of new systems.
  • Reviewing the IT architecture for its future viability and deriving the necessary measures.

You benefit from our interdisciplinary team of insurance experts, specialists in customer journeys, user experience, customer analytics, CRM systems and IT architecture - whether agile or using traditional methods.

We look forward to receiving your non-binding enquiry.

Do you have any questions?

Would you like to generate ideas on how you can implement greater customer centricity in your company or do you already have specific use cases that need to be implemented? I look forward to talking to you.

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