Moving the Customer Effort to Zero: How Insurance Companies Can Create Effortless User Experiences

By: Brian Levine, VP of Strategy and Analytics, Mobiquity

No one wants or expects a car or home accident to happen, but when it does, a customer’s last concern should be cutting through red tape to make a claim, talk to their insurance provider, wait for approvals, or receive a check for repairs and damages.

Research supports this by showing that — surprise, surprise — bad customer experiences hurt insurance companies and good customer experiences makes customers more loyal to their insurance providers:

• 26 percent of US insurance customers will switch their insurance providers, based solely on one bad experience with a call center
• US insurance customers who are dissatisfied are 40 percent more likely to tell others about their poor experience
• On the flip side of this, one European report stated that 91% of UK insurance customers say good digital customer service makes them more loyal

Think about it: every inquiry your call center triages represents a failure to bring customer effort and time commitment to zero. If you add up all of the average time your call center agents and customers spend on billing, renewal, auto change, and claims tracking calls per customer, it largely outnumbers the time spent on first notice of loss. It just makes sense to get these common touch points right with every customer since they are the experiences that by and large shape customer experience with your brand.

Back to Basics: Ways to Transform Your Customer Effort to Zero

The real work should be focusing on the things your customers need to do every day — pay bills, check on claims, make policy changes, and purchase insurance. So, how do you make these tasks easier to do?

Here are some of the easiest, day-to-day experiences that you can improve for your insurance customers:

Digital Options = Better Customer Experiences

There are a number of digital and technology solutions that can support your customers — and your employees — with these day-to-day tasks.

Here are a few examples of ways that digital options can enhance your customer experience, moving their effort to zero:

• Mobile app: Give your users the ability to interact with you quickly and efficiently via your mobile app. Provide them with the tools they need when an accident occurs, and with regular communication to keep them safer in the car and at home.
• Conversational AI: Voice capabilities such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, as well as website chatbots can reduce the burden on your staff by answering easier customer questions with smart technology.
• Web optimization: Is your website optimized to support the customer? Or is your web design geared toward selling and, as such, ignoring your precious, existing customers? New business is important, but not if it means your existing customer base is forgotten. This will create far more damage for your business than you intend — and this is easily avoidable with a website built to create zero effort for the customer.
• Agile DevOps: Revamping your digital strategy with agile DevOps enables frictionless delivery of services to your customer, which will boost engagement, increase scalability, and reduce your total cost of ownership.

The stakes have never been higher in keeping insurance customers happy. The good news is, technology can be an asset in setting you apart from your competition. If you’re ready to start thinking about how you can move customer effort to zero, let’s chat.

Originally published at https://www.mobiquity.com.