EIS joined with AWS and Celent to host a “Virtual Round Table” on the topics of customer centricity and efficiency. A big shout out to Celent’s Karlyn Carnahan, and Bill Severini from AWS. We were joined by a cross section of executives with titles that included VP Global Claims, Chief Digital Officer, Director of Digital Experience, Director of Strategic Distribution, Chief Architect, Director of R&D from P&C carriers in the United States and Europe.
We discussed why P&C carriers are focusing on customer experience, how they are measuring and monitoring user acceptance and the success of the programs, as well as the challenges in implementing these new strategies. Further, as claims loss expense skyrockets, how are carriers using a focus on customer centricity to acquire, retain, and upsell customers in challenging markets.
What we learned and discussed
- Carriers who focus on customer experience routinely outperform CX laggards by 80%
- 77% of insurance companies say they have invested in customer experience
- Agents are customers too, and they need digital ecosystems to optimize their performance
- The relatively new role of the Chief Customer Experience Officer (CCEO) is focused on creating a 360-degree view of the customer, measuring satisfaction through Net Promoter Scores (NPS transactional as well as traditional), and using other techniques such as journey mapping to identify the gaps in the customer experience.
Based on some of Celent’s research, we now know that customers’ expectations are for optimal communication. They get great support from their other vendors like Amazon and Netflix, and expect a multichannel customer experience, including digital channels, virtual, and real agents.
The Customer’s POV
- Know me
- Help me protect myself
- Help me prevent losses and recover from losses
- Talk to me
- Involve me
- Make it fast and easy
- Keep it cheap
Delivering on these expectations requires the orchestration of data across a broad set of digital capabilities. It can’t be done using only the applications found in a traditional insurance core systems architecture. It requires many kinds of technologies to deliver: mobile, cloud, data and analytics, chatbots, advice engines, esignature, social integration, gamification, natural language processing, and integrations to backend core and non-core systems, to name a few.
But here’s the problem: If you’re going to go down this path, you’re going to need to assemble an ecosystem of digital capabilities. And the good news is that with the explosion of insurtech startups, there is a wide range of providers and solutions to choose from, both traditional and nontraditional. The bad news is that if you have to identify each capability, sort through the vendors, and implement and integrate them one at a time, the size of your IT department will double, and any speed to market capabilities you’ve developed will come crashing to a halt.
So what is a carrier to do?
This is where the power of a modern core system begins to show tremendous benefit. Many core system vendors have focused heavily over the last few years on creating a wide variety of integration techniques to drive ease and speed of integration, including creating open APIs. If you’re one of the lucky carriers that has already completed your core system replacement, you’re probably ahead of the curve — assuming you chose a solution with open APIs.
Open APIs simplify the process of integration. Some vendors are working on replatforming to a microservices architecture, which, long term, holds out a promise of fast and agile integration, allowing you to easily add and delete providers, almost like pulling out one Lego and replacing it with another.
Some core system vendors have begun to build out their own digital ecosystem, a set of vendors across traditional carrier applications and emerging technologies, that have been pre-integrated with the core system. We’ve seen vendors partner with drone services, artificial intelligence providers, CRM solutions, and a wide variety of other tools. Using a preassembled digital ecosystem certainly helps ease the integration path. However, you’re limited to the vendors the core system provider has partnered with.
The long-term solution will likely be a shift to a microservices architecture combined with agile implementation and DevOps, with much of the solution run in the cloud, supported by a strong set of data assets that can be used across multiple solutions.
Customer experience and efficiency go hand-in-hand when you have systems that work together as mentioned above. Monitoring of business processes is critical, but monitoring business activity across all core systems and channels is challenging. Using NPS scores that are more transactional can deliver important insights.
At EIS we support ambitious insurers who want to deliver customer centricity with optimal efficiency. Our Policy Admin platform is microservices based, modular, including Business Activity Monitoring embedded in our CustomerCore omnichannel Customer 360 Module, SaaS delivered with point solutions that streamline claims with eFNOL and AI/ML Claims Fraud Detection.
