At Duck Creek’s Formation conference last March, we announced our strategic alliance with Glia and that we have chosen to resell Glia’s Digital Customer Service (DCS) platform as part of the Duck Creek Suite. This is a special relationship – one in which we believe will bring immense value to our customers, particularly when integrated with our suite of SaaS core system applications. In having spoken with my colleagues and the Glia team (both informally, as well as part of the latest (Conversations on the Creek podcast episode), I wanted to take a few moments to unpack why we believe there is such a great opportunity for the insurance industry to leverage DCS technology to enhance the customer and producer experience, and what this announcement means to you, our customers.
It all starts with the fact that we all now live in an on-screen world. Broadly speaking, recent research finds that 85% of US citizens are online everyday, 81% regularly use video calling, and 79% interact digitally with financial services companies frequently or occasionally. When customers (or producers) need help, it’s now become instinctual for them to start by visiting your website and seeing if there is a self-service option to solve their immediate needs. Some customers may then wish to chat online, while others may wish to speak via voice or video. Different customers will have different personal preferences – for example, perhaps you may find that your Gen Z customers are more likely to want a digital everything experience, while perhaps the millennial or generationally experienced customers tend to prefer to connect via phone after starting digitally or vice versa.
This new paradigm begs the following questions: while a prospective insured is on your website and can’t figure out how to complete a quote or purchase the right coverage, are you giving them all the options to get assistance? Are you providing a seamless experience when they are looking to switch from chatting with a CSR online to then speaking to a CSR via digital audio, or are you forcing your potential customer to dial a 10-digit phone number and repeat the same conversation all over again with a new rep?
Bringing multiple forms of customer communication into a unified experience is precisely what our new offering Duck Creek Digital Customer Service powered by Glia is all about. It enables insurers to meet your customers and producers on their screens with real-time chat, co-browsing, screen-sharing, voice, video, and AI-powered bots so that you can sell more policies, improve customer satisfaction and agent/broker brand loyalty, and reduce the time and costs of servicing your customers and producers. Our offering can be deployed on any digital property including your public-facing websites, secure producer and policyholder portals and mobile apps, and Glia’s pre-built Anywhere Integrations can be easily embedded into the Duck Creek Suite, allowing you to rapidly get to market.
One thing to note – it’s not that human touch is going away – not at all! If anything, being able to provide that human touchpoint is more crucial than ever – just now, the technology exists that facilitates more choice for how the customer interacts with your CSRs, and your CSRs can now focus on resolving a customer’s most challenging issues rather than the mundane ones that can be solved via self-service.
Other Use Cases Across the Insurance Lifecycle
For your agents, brokers and other intermediaries, Duck Creek Digital Customer Service powered by Glia can allow you to do real-time underwriting. Imagine one of your agents is trying to bind coverage for a prospect, and they have some questions and need assistance. Instead of having to go back and forth on email, or schedule a phone call, now your agents and brokers can connect with your agency support team or underwriter help desk directly inside of Duck Creek Producer in real time. They can start by chatting, and then upgrade to screenshare, video or voice as needed.
Similarly, for your customers – there are numerous possibilities – whether they have questions about completing a quote, making policy changes, filing a claim or paying a bill – now you can guide them on a single screen during their moment of need.
At Duck Creek, we have invested heavily over the past few years in our Design System and low-code configuration tools such as Page Builder, which allow anyone at an insurer to easily design persona-optimized pages to meet the needs of various end users across multiple devices. Today, when combined with Duck Creek Digital Customer Service powered by Glia, insurers will now have even more options at their disposal to provide even richer end user experiences and build the new standard of insurance.
In sum, we believe our strategic alliance with Glia will allow insurers to improve how they engage with policyholders and agents in today’s increasingly digital world; the end result of which will be more collaborative, frictionless experiences for all. We’re incredibly excited about our expanded partnership, and we look forward to helping you reinvent how you serve your producers and customers.
