Are insurers actually meeting client expectations?
While many industries have invested in customer service early on, most insurers are still lagging behind, held back by outdated legacy systems that require increased maintenance and struggle to make sense out of new data streams. Yet, we’re no longer captains exchanging money on a promise to protect our vessels and freight. We can now reach our laptops, tablets, and smartphones, exchange information and receive instant feedback.
Despite the insurance business not having significantly changed over the past 100 years, the past decade has seen a significant shift towards customer centricity through digitization of sales and servicing. Creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences for users is definitely key in catching up.
Most companies seem to have realized they’re no longer just competing with organizations in their industry, but rather against everyone. Whether they’re flying to Barcelona, ordering food through Deliveroo or Uber Eats, shopping on Zalando; customers have come to expect the same ease and fluency from their financial service providers. So as an organization you will have to cater to those expectations.
Chatbots, and to a broader extent conversational user interfaces, provide ample opportunities for incumbent insurers to decrease their throughput-time, streamline customer journeys and massively increase customer satisfaction. Conversational solutions can be applied for a number of use cases within insurance, most evidently for Q&A, lead generation and claims declaration.
At Bothrs, we’ve had the opportunity to work with one of the largest Belgian insurers to develop a chatbot with very ambitious automation targets. The true beauty finds itself in… Well the entire process (including the kickstart through our signature design sprint 😏) only took us a few months, thus saving heaps of developing time!
This experience enabled us to list some key takeaways, which we think will come in useful for anyone working on a similar project.
- Just ask them!
People don’t give a flying damn about the number of questions they’re going to be asked to answer. They just want their experience to take less time than the traditional way of handling insurance matters. Is your team in doubt as to whether you should ask your customer one or two more questions? Just do it!
- Ship it.
Being focused on a long-term goal doesn’t mean you need to risk all resources from the start. Only running some user tests during your design sprint won’t cut it in terms of validation! You need actual users to try the new experience and adapt your product based on their feedback. - Focus, focus, focus!
You can do anything, but not everything. Not even if you’re called Elon Musk! It’s very easy to get distracted by opportunities. Prioritizing opportunities will most likely require resources you’ll need to take out from that thing you once called focus. The same applies to those lean and mean side projects you keep on introducing to your team.
Focus is key and you should learn to say no! - Don’t limbo into the lingo.
Since only 4% of your customers will know what you’re talking about, refrain from using the same old terminology written in your policies and contracts. Despite being completely made up and random, this metric is probably closer to reality than you might think.
For example, customers experience great difficulty in understanding the word “urgent”. As about 60% of people deem their situation to be urgent, you’re going to have to apply some nudging, gamification techniques and potentially even find a workaround to divert customers away from their initial choice. - Tear down the walls
Don’t get caught up in the classic IT versus business discussions, but rather assemble a multi-disciplinary team composed of people from both departments, supplemented with external experts. And bear in mind, you should get a SPOC in every critical department early on to effectuate a swift and smooth outcome!
Ready to build your own intelligent insurance bot? Get in touch!