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The rise of the total experience strategy for insurers

ARTICLE BY

  • WImpie van der Merwe

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The experiences an insurer delivers will have the biggest impact on attracting and retaining policyholders in the future. To be future-proof, insurers cannot afford to deliver sub-par experiences for their clients. This requires a total experience strategy, to optimise multiple objectives. In recent years, we have seen the rise of customer experience, user experience and employee experience prioritised.

Total experience (TX) is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by combining the four disciplines of multi-experience (MX), customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and user experience (UX):

  • Multi-experience (MX): How an experience is enhanced and delivered simultaneously across multiple devices, platforms and touchpoints.
  • Customer experience (CX): How a customer interacts with and feels about an insurance brand.
  • Employee experience (EX): How an employee interacts with and feels about their insurance company they represent.
  • User experience (UX): How a user interacts with and feels about a product, a service or experience – especially in the digital space.

TX focuses on the relationship a policyholder has with their insurer and is made up of all the interactions they have had with a business, from the first contact with their insurer up to the present day.

How Does Total Experience Strategy Work?

Digital transformation (DX) has made it easy for insurers to focus on a Total Experience as DX assists to provide the required data to be available across an insurer value chain that can be used to create a TX.

Data and technology play a core role in TX success, as it is about how to use technology and interactions to enhance, empower and support both policyholders and employees. 

TX is about delivering an all-round exceptional experience to anyone who interacts with an insurer and its brand, including policyholders, users, employees and service providers. The fundamental idea of TX is to stop treating each component of your business strategy as an individual silo. TX considers these encounters as singular aspects of a holistic experience instead of considering them as individual events.

Here are some key benefits of a TX strategy:

  • Enhanced client satisfaction
  • Improved risk facilitation
  • A healthy work environment and solid communication
  • Increased client loyalty
  • Reduced or eradicated business and departmental silos
  • 24-hour availability – risk events do not keep office hours!

Multi-experience Versus Omnichannel

Multi-experience (MX) is a process for designing digital experiences across multiple devices (websites, mobile apps, smart TVs, wearables), modalities (voice, touch, gesture) and touchpoints.

It is not a multichannel or omnichannel, which seeks to unify an experience across different channels or touch points. MX ignores the idea of channels completely. The focus is to create or enhance multi-touchpoint engagements. Multi-experience substitutes technology-educated people with people-educated technology. It strives to create a single customer view platform to gather all the data about your policyholder or client and merge it into a single digital record.

Develop Smart Claim Functions

The potential with TX is to develop an agile, a more highly skilled and more linked claim function. To achieve this objective, insurers should focus on these strategic priorities:

  • Every touchpoint in the insurance value chain needs to become 360° customer-centric. The days of insurance being organised around products are gone and have evolved more to focus on experience and service. Insurance needs to be about personalisation, customer segments and life stages – with multi-skilled staff who can resolve as much as possible in one contact.
  • There are several ways that insurers can ensure they stay on top of the frenetic pace of change in this new era of risk, powered by technology and data:
    • Adapt business and operating models to simultaneously support both cost-efficient standard risk management and a knowledge-intensive consultative interaction with clients
    • Expand their information and data gathering networks to better anticipate and understand the new and emerging risks facing their clients.
    • Improve their ability to digitally collect, integrate, analyse and communicate data to create actionable or proactive insights
  • Focus on loss prevention and protection:
    • Insurers are seeing a gradual shift from risk management to risk prevention. Transforming the relationship between insurer and insured to symbiosis – both parties are dependent upon and receive beneficial reinforcement. One way of reducing risk and reducing claims volumes is through sensor-equipped and smart devices for home security, water meters, geysers, fire prevention and motor vehicles.
    • With this explosion of data sources, insurers can adopt strategies like predictive maintenance and behaviour incentivisation to encourage risk-reducing behaviours.
  • The importance of claim function partnership developments:
    • Creating value from embracing the wider digital ecosystem in which they operate and converging with new technologies in the claims value chain.
    • New partnerships and technology will fill gaps in data science, loss prevention, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

 

Total experience extends beyond perfecting the customer experience. It is about your employee and user experiences and how these will impact the policyholder claims journey you offer. Smart claim functions of the future will need to be powered by technology, data, and people as a total experience. 

How To Start

Total experience strategy requires reimagining how insurers approach experience management in their policyholder value chain. You don’t have to transform overnight. There are a couple of ways to adopt a total experience strategy now:

  • Treat employee experience as a branding experience 
    Delivering a great EX not only sets your team up to deliver a great CX, but it enhances your reputation. A great employee experience is one that makes it easy for employees to do their jobs well. Approach your employee experience through a customer experience lens.
  • Break down experience silos
    Just as CX challenges companies to break down silos between channels, TX challenges insurers to break down the barriers between different management teams or departments and to create better solutions. Let different teams or departments (sales, operational and claims) – especially those teams that intersect with each other – collaborate and work together to create better policyholder experience-related initiatives. The user experiences of customers and employees are connected by specific aspects and exchanges that depend on each other. 

Closing the gaps on any policyholder’s interactions is vital to the total experience. The conditions of these experiences shape an insurer’s reputation and affect the quality of services overall. Through the integration of all the user experience touchpoints, insurers can offer seamless engagements and functions with a smarter edge. Companies should pursue the design of a connected customer experience from the first interaction and throughout the entire customer journey. The handoff points, or intersections, between teams and/or departments, (i.e., from sales process to onboarding the policyholder), are often the most disaster-prone. These points are crucial to focus on when developing a total experience strategy. 

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