Insurers are now increasingly under the spotlight to bring to market new, more relevant, timely and affordable products, and to prioritise optimising the end-to-end customer experience.
Providing a positive customer experience is no longer just about offering great service. It’s increasingly a way for companies to distinguish their brand values and customer loyalty – particularly in crowded and highly competitive markets such as the insurance sector.
Over the last few years – particularly during the global pandemic – consumers have become even more savvy and discerning about insurance buying and with household incomes now being squeezed hard, it is incumbent on insurance providers to really listen to their customers and have a strong understanding of which products they actually want and need.
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Differentiation and relevance are critical and those products and services must be transparent, rolled out quickly and efficiently, and be easily accessible through multi-channel distribution with the minimum of fuss and duplicative process.
The most successful companies today build their entire business around the customer – and it is clear across all industries that the experience companies provide is as important as their products or services. The reality is, however, slightly different in that there remains a mis-match between customer expectations and what many businesses are actually delivering.
Customers must have the ability to make informed buying decisions
So what does this mean for insurers? For many years, customers often viewed insurance as a commodity product they had to purchase based on availability. But as customers have become more sophisticated with a range of insurance needs, providers have had to adapt to meet those changing demands in terms of being nimbler, working faster and smarter, and making the delivery of superior customer experience their absolute priority. It sounds straightforward but insurers often find that they need the support of a trusted partner like Duck Creek Technologies to turn that vision into reality.
Our Chief Product Officer, Jess Keeney, recently recorded a short video in which she talks about how Duck Creek works with insurance companies to help them on their customer and user experience journey including the pivotal role that technology plays as a key business enabler in helping to expedite and enhance that process for the benefit of not just the organisations themselves but also their current and prospective customers.
Jess commented: “It is a bit of a misnomer to say that customer and user experience isn’t important or becoming increasingly important. Customer experience has always been extremely important but the insurance industry is really starting to understand that the experience is what their end users are focusing on in making their buying decisions – and because of that, Duck Creek has really reinforced how we focus on both the insurance provider and how we give them visibility as to what their customers need to do in our systems but also that we deliver to those insurers an experience that is purposely built for their end users who in turn can make the most informed purchase decisions.
That is why the experience and how you focus on it has become a pivotal turning point in the insurance industry. People now want the same exact experience that they are used to in their daily lives – technology has become pervasive and in order to have the same experience as they expect to have with any of their consumer technologies that they use on a regular basis, you have to meet those standards and deliver them. And that is why at Duck Creek we focus very specifically on the user experience in making sure that our customers and our customers’ customers are able to both get what they want and do this as efficiently as possible, and return to buy more.”
In the video, Jess discusses a range of issues including why customers are often asked to give repeat information that they have already provided to their insurer; whether it is a fair observation to say that automation in the process implies less of a human touch for the policyholder; whether speed to market compromises the positive experience for the end user; and how Duck Creek’s user experience and speed to market benefit insurers financially in the current economic environment.
Watch the full video here:
