Adopting new strategies and making the right investments enables you to significantly improve customer targeting and conversion.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic boosted consumers’ interest in buying life insurance, our market was undergoing profound shifts. Driven by the rise of insurtechs, an array of processes are rapidly changing across all product lines.
With this market disruption comes exciting opportunities for traditional insurers to modernize stale practices and products. This requires reimagining your business processes and investing strategically in the right resources for making new models work. Let’s discuss steps you can take toward more effectively targeting and converting customers in today’s marketplace.
Address insurance customer acquisition fundamentals
To start, we recommend updating your business approach in three ways. These are:
Simplifying and personalizing experiences. With traditional carriers and insurtechs already supplying bound term policies in less than 30 minutes — without invasive sample collection — it’s imperative to streamline, automate, and personalize your policy application experiences. As you develop a business strategy for doing so, be certain to include all product lines. Consumers increasingly expect simplified and personalized journeys regardless of whether they’re purchasing term, group, or whole life policies.
Revising your targeting methods. Appropriately targeting today’s consumers requires partnering with multiple types of entities. For example, tightening your relationships with financial services firms can provide you with data potentially indicating a personal life-stage event that could trigger their interest in — or need for — life insurance, such as a 20-something applying for a home mortgage. Another data gathering approach is partnering with “frenemies,” such as an insurtech that only sells auto policies.
Recalibrating distribution. Although some insurtechs focus on selling term life directly to consumers, others have become online brokers and are partnering with traditional insurers. For group policies and more complex life insurance coverages, no one questions the value of brokers and agents as the decision-making process requires more guidance. Regardless of the distribution route you choose, it’s critical to treat your distributors like customers by giving them the same digital experience you’d provide in a direct-to-consumer digital channel.
Convert prospects to policyholders
Next, you’ll need to modernize your technology strategies and investments. We suggest:
Thinking like an insurtech. This means you’ll need advanced technology solutions, but not across the board. Instead, make investments in small bites. Select a life product for development and adopt a flexible and agile platform to support it. Then, empower your internal teams to pursue a test-and-learn approach, build upon their successes and, ultimately, broaden the technology deployment throughout your portfolio. This enables you to spend your budget more wisely while iteratively reaching your transformation goals.
Getting personal. To accelerate underwriting and deliver personalized experiences across all life products and distribution channels, you need a 360-degree view of every single customer. Ideally, you’ll also gather detailed data on those that got away, along with where and when they abandoned their relationship with you. This necessitates the ability to rapidly access, ingest, and analyze vastly more data than ever before, whether the data was generated internally or is supplied by external partners.
Introducing new distribution toolsets. Over the past few years, insurers have started shifting focus to building customer-centric environments, making it easier for consumers to understand and apply for life insurance online. However, existing broker and agent tools have grown antiquated. To stay competitive moving forward, it’s imperative to develop similarly intuitive and streamlined experiences for your brokers and agents to support their ability to target and convert new customers.
Invest in a scalable, open-source coretech platform. The common denominator to achieving all of these goals is a new type of core systems platform that’s becoming known as coretech. Coretech offers the open APIs you need to connect with internal and external data sources and partners. It also provides the intuitive tools that enable your business users to test, learn, and iterate just like a tech company. Advanced solutions also supply the automation capabilities and scalability necessary for continuously building out the platform, ultimately unifying your previously disparate systems and maximizing your core systems investment.
In short, meeting new customer acquisition realities is about developing the right strategies, investing in the right coretech solution, establishing the right partner relationships, and giving your distributors the right tools to get their jobs done.
For more on this topic, check out the recent webinar Life Insurance Reimagined: How to Target and Convert Customers.
