How insurers are achieving customer service excellence

Insurers and insurance customers alike are reprioritising their finances as situational and economic pressures are forcing businesses and consumers to review the overall effectiveness of their spending. Insurance Times has reported that 43% of insurance customers are now cancelling policies as part of their own cost cutting efforts, while 68% of CIOs in the insurance sector are spending more on application modernisation this year in comparison to previous years (Gartner).

Despite the current emphasis on digital transformation within the industry, many insurance organisations are still at the early adoption stage. Digital transformation plays an essential role in maintaining customer satisfaction and winning and retaining customers which can motivate businesses to invest. 

Additionally, consumers expect a high level of digitisation from their insurance provider, 63% of insurance customers believe that it is important that their insurer provides personalised service (Gartner). With consumers streamlining their existing policies to cut costs, it is imperative for insurance providers to demonstrate the value of their services to existing customers by providing seamless experiences across technologies, apps, communications, and customer service. The insurance customer experience must therefore start with a customer-centric approach and to stay competitive, insurers must take the right technology-related steps.  

The current focus on customer expectations means that insurance firms must personalise their services but also operate with greater agility and efficiency. With consumers expecting customised products and services to be the norm, insurers need to be able to spend time on such high value tasks rather than the traditionally time-consuming tasks such as claims-processing. The digitisation of such tasks can reduce the amount of time employees need to spend on them, allowing them to focus on higher value services.  

Lack of efficiency has become a major deterrent for customers, with 72% of consumers saying that they will remain loyal to companies that provide a faster service, insurers cannot afford to continue with inefficient service (Salesforce). This is forcing insurers to re-think processes and modernise the way they do business, especially in today’s uncertain climate, where falling behind the pace of change is not a viable option. To keep up, the right tools and technology are needed to take out  paper, reduce phone calls, and enable the delivery of outstanding customer service. 

The frequent waves of disruption we have seen over the last number of years have not only driven a need for greater resilience across insurance operating models, but they are also forcing insurers to become more agile in their ability to flex and meet changing customer requirements. So far, we have seen the industry deliver a wide range of responses such as the shift to remote working during the pandemic. This has reflected varying levels of technology investment, while offering innovative ideas for how offshoring and outsourcing version 2.0 can potentially improve the overall customer experience.  

Insurers have also been forced to question their supply chains, with many moving towards digitising the claims handling process however there is a need to strike the right balance between human and digital servicing, with 49% of insurance consumers trusting a human advisor when making a claim compared to 12% of consumers who trust an automated service when making a claim (Gartner). Increasing the efficiency and agility of your insurance firm through digital transformation will help improve the customer experience, by allowing employees to focus on value-add work.  

At Kainos we understand the importance of transformation and are focussed on enabling our customers to save time and eliminate paper-based processes. Migrating and modernising outdated legacy systems using the best public cloud platforms helps them achieve greater process efficiencies, all while dramatically reducing their carbon emissions – which is becoming increasingly important to consumers. Digitising admin-heavy processes like claims processing, customer communications, finance, and HR through intelligent automation (IA) and artificial intelligence (AI), helps free up their teams for more customer-focussed tasks.