In today’s consumer-focused market, customer experience (CX) is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ feature, but a pressing necessity. It’s noteworthy that customers are willing to spend 15% to 18% more for a rewarding CX. This emphasizes the significant impact of customer experience in insurance on purchasing behavior. While industries like retail and eCommerce have managed to keep up with the changing trends, the insurance sector is still taking baby steps in this direction. As a result, CX has emerged as a competitive differentiator that can set insurers apart.
Traditionally, the insurance industry focused on risk assessment and underwriting. However, in today’s shifting landscape, insurers must focus on delivering exceptional customer experience. To achieve such an effect, insurers will have to leverage technologies like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to facilitate a customer-centric environment.
As such, insurance CRM systems, personalized to meet the unique needs of the business, enable insurers to put the customer at the forefront. Let’s explore how CRM solutions can transform each touchpoint along the policyholder journey and help insurers foster long-term loyalty.
How Personalized Insurance CRM Solutions Can Transform Policyholder Experience?
Here’s a look at how customized insurance CRM solutions can benefit the industry:
1. Detailed Customer Insights
To offer a winning customer experience in insurance, insurers need to obtain a 360-degree view of the policyholders. It acts as a window to the customer’s needs, preferences, and behaviors. Such variables can be instrumental in personalizing the CX.
A customized insurance CRM solution allows insurers to capture relevant details and finetune products and strategies accordingly. For instance, companies may offer health insurance for spouses as an add-on product to married policyholders. However, such an offering would have no value for someone who is unmarried. This example is purely illustrative, but it emphasizes how insurers need customizable CRM systems to accept data such as marital status to capitalize on certain value propositions by enhancing the CX.
Similarly, insurance companies can recalibrate customer service and policy depending on factors like associated risk, claims patterns, previous interactions and their outcomes, and more. The resulting cross-sectional analysis of the customer allows insurers to tailor products and services, strategies, and more – effectively elevating the CX.
2. Smoother Sales and Marketing Processes
As seen above, the inputs from the CRM software for insurance companies can be drivers of action or change. The transition becomes even more impactful for dynamic processes such as those involved in sales and marketing. In this context, CRM in insurance is at the heart of all operations, carefully orchestrating all activities, from awareness to purchase to retention, and breaking through organizational silos while doing so.
Even though the underlying processes are broadly the same, different insurers may deploy different strategies to meet their sales and marketing objectives. As a result, insurers cannot resort to whitelabel CRM solutions that come with generic modules. What they need is a customized CRM tool with top-notch features to adapt to the changing business requirements.
Once such a hub resting on the foundations of the best insurance CRM software is set in place, it will be easier for insurers to engage with customers or potential customers meaningfully. At the same time, the sales and marketing campaigns can draw from customer data to introduce personalization at every touchpoint. All in all, it is a recipe for a rich CX.
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3. Efficient Claims Management
Claims management is a critical component of managing the CX. After all, all the outreach, nurturing, and engagement goes out the window if insurers fail to deliver when a policyholder raises a claim. Fortunately, CRM in the insurance industry can be an effective tool for handling claims.
For starters, it can capture and organize a wealth of policy-related and customer data and make it accessible to all stakeholders. Centralizing such data expedites claims handling as insurers no longer have to piece information from disparate sources. It also ensures accuracy as the CRM software for insurance companies acts as a single source of truth. Further, top CRM software for insurance agents also offers the capability to automate claims workflows and even approvals. Such data-driven streamlining of tasks makes claims processing faster, more efficient, and more accurate.
Naturally, transforming the claims settlement cycle to decrease turnaround time and minimize errors would boost CX and customer satisfaction.
4. Proactive Customer Service
We’ve already discussed how customized CRM in the insurance industry can improve CX during the sales and marketing stages of a customer’s lifecycle. It is now time to discover its value in improving customer service.
The role of customer service intensifies when viewed from the angle of policyholder retention, especially since the insurance sector has become increasingly saturated and hypercompetitive. With customer loyalties flipping like a switch, insurance companies can turn to customized CRM in the insurance industry to tip the scales in their favor.
As mentioned, customized insurance CRM systems keep track of previous interactions, claims frequency, outcomes, customer feedback, and more. Such data sets offer insights into the best available strategy to address customer concerns or service them. It also compiles all the metrics and markers for measuring the performance of your customer service team in relation to the CX. Insurers can leverage such insightful data to automate customer service processes and make customer service available 24/7. It also instills consistency in how insurers handle complaints or feedback.
In Conclusion
To sum up, the best insurance CRM software will have a compounding effect on improving the CX. Such an effect originates from sharper customer insights, sales and marketing campaign optimizations, seamless claims management, and proactive customer support. Its impact hits a crescendo when insurers leverage customized CRM systems that offer flexibility to accommodate business requirements. Configuring customizable insurance CRM solutions and tailoring the workflows that go with them will propel the CX to new heights. Improved CX would then increase profitability, foster customer loyalty, and even inspire employee productivity. Such a chain reaction is bound to benefit the insurance company in multiple ways!
Case in Focus
A renowned health insurance provider based out of the US was ailing from procedural bottlenecks and performance impediments. The primary reason behind the problem rested in a disparate network of applications. It also robbed customer data of credibility and failed to offer a holistic view of policyholders as they move between sales, marketing, and claims cycles. We realized that implementing a custom Salesforce CRM could be the panacea for these symptoms. Sure enough, once the Salesforce CRM system was in place, the resulting centralization allowed the insurer to taste success. This transformation stands as a compelling case study in leveraging CRM technology to enhance customer experience.