Customer experience can directly impact your growth potential
As technology continues to evolve, so do the expectations for customer communication. Customer experience can differentiate an insurance business as it strives to acquire new customers and improve renewal rates among existing customers.
With multiple devices and an increasingly on-the-go culture, only a truly omni-channel approach to customer experience will meet and exceed insurance customer expectations.
Wondering how an omni-channel approach to customer experience might help improve your insurance business? Read on to get a better understanding of omni-channel customer experience and tactics to improve your approach.
Customer service and customer experience are closely related, but they aren’t interchangeable terms. Customer service refers specifically to the response you’re able to offer a customer when they reach out for assistance. While a key element of customer experience, service is only one part of what shapes an experience.
Customer experience refers more broadly to the full spectrum of interactions that a customer has with your brand. In addition to service, this can include self-service, ease of access to insurance policy information, renewals, online payments, access to education about their policy, and any other touchpoint a customer may have with your brand.
As more and more competition emerges, experience becomes an important differentiator for customers when most other factors are equal. In fact, 86% of buyers state that they’re willing to pay more for a good customer experience, and 65% state that a good experience is a more influential part of their purchase decision than any advertising materials.
When you’re considering how to improve your customer experience, communication is key. It’s more important than ever to make digital options available for customer service. Insurance customers expect to be able to access information about their policy, claims, and upcoming renewals on-demand, on any device.
The claims process is a high-stress part of the insurance customer lifecycle, making it an important moment for customer service and experience. Digitization in the claims process reassures customers that their case is being handled efficiently and correctly. In fact, offering digital claims servicing can improve customer satisfaction by as much as 20% while improving claims handling accuracy.
While digitization is critical, you can’t just rely on your website to carry your customer experience. A truly omni-channel strategy requires a consistent experience for customers on every channel, including when a customer switches between channels. In fact, a recent report from Bain & Co. revealed that digital-only customers give their insurance providers the lowest customer satisfaction scores, while customers who use both digital and human channels (such as phone or face-to-face conversations) rate their insurance providers highest.
Your customer contact centers are the beating heart of customer experience, and you need to ensure that they’re operating at peak efficiency to offer the best possible service. Insurance customer service outsourcing can help improve your overall customer experience by ensuring consistent access to knowledgeable support. When you’re considering tactics to improve your customer experience, consider which functions you need to keep in-house, and which can remain consistent (or be improved) by working with an external partner.
The defining characteristic of omni-channel experience is that every channel works together seamlessly. Take time to effectively synchronize content distribution and communication channels to ensure you’re delivering a consistent message and collecting unified data from customers. Effective customer contact centers will have centralized management systems that work directly with both internal and insurance customer service outsourcing processes to maintain continuity among conversations on each channel.
Insurance customer experience outsourcing also gives you access to the latest advancements in InsurTech and business processes. Because an insurance customer experience outsourcing partner will be system-agnostic, your existing processes and tools can remain in place while taking advantage of additional optimizations. Your insurance BPO partner should offer customer experience support for phone, chat, email, text, and any other emerging technologies you want to offer for your customers.
About Patra
Patra is a leading provider of technology-enabled outsourcing services and software solutions to the insurance industry. Patra powers insurance processes by optimizing the application of people and technology, supporting insurance organizations as they sell, deliver, and manage policies and customers through our PatraOne platform. Patra’s global team of over 6,500 process executives in geopolitically stable and democratic countries that protect data allows agencies/brokerages, MGAs, wholesalers, and carriers to capture the Patra Advantage – profitable growth and organizational value.
