Criticality of enhanced CX (customer experience) in insurance industry

Digital disruption has shaken the centuries old business models and insurance business is one of them. This industry is witnessing transformation as new age Insuretech companies are trying to compete with existing insurers which are in operations for decades if not centuries. Customers are amazed by the seamless experience provided to them by these Insuretech companies and this is forcing the older players to rethink their approach and re-prioritize investment in digital transformation of their organizations.

The digital is not the only reason for forcing the insurance industry to expedite the transform, there are other reasons as well, such as emergence of new segments, changing customer behaviors, etc.

Few illustrated examples are:

• Newer segment of customers aka millennials who want to buy the policy in seconds by doing its own research over internet
• Customers looking for personalized offerings in terms of product features
• Women becoming key decision makers as they are now more financial independent
• Overall household affluence is going upwards, especially in Asian countries

The new generation workforce is tech savvy and usually adept at social media. This segment is influenced by user experience of the product and services they are looking to acquire and give considerable thoughts in decision making on UX. On the other hand, they abandon the product in case the user experience is not what was expected. The insurance companies are at receiving end here as their renewal business will be greatly impacted if large customer base is churning on regular basis.

The customer churn can be controlled by below mentioned UX (user experience) pointers:

• Enable end to end digitization of customer journeys
• Personalized experience
• Prompt query / grievance resolution
• Seamless claim settlement

As per McKinsey, “More than 70% customers, base their opinion of a business on the quality of its CX (customer experience)”.

There are specific use cases of user experience, if implemented will enhance overall customer loyalty such as:

Personalization

• Customer gets personalized message at the exact right moment in time at the customer journey, e.g. specific message for prospect, customer, renew the policy, customer feedback etc.
• Tailored services are offered to prospects considering its query, demographics, persona, age-group, income etc. as input variables

Omnichannel and always on platform

• Customer can access the brand 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on mobile, website, POS, social channels (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) and gets seamless experience

Customer services

• Customer is able to connect with chatbot and gets the response on queries at any time of the day
• Each customer interaction triggers customer feedback request and customer response is automatically fed into customer sentiment analysis engine for overall trend analysis and taking action, if needed

Contribution of software quality engineering team in achieving great customer experience

Software testing team can add lot of value in ensuring great user experience to insurance customers. It can help insurance organizations to

• Accelerate product launches
• Conformity to regularity compliances adherences
• Validation of user journeys for different personas
• Digital experience on multiple platforms

Quality engineering is very important to overall success and getting ROI on customer experience investment on mobile app, website, connected device, or any other digital engagement on omnichannel platforms.

Rightly crafted quality engineering strategies help uncover & fix the issues in the digital customer journeys, interfaces with other applications and other issues impacting user experience. Considering these points quality engineering team is enabler for achieving amazing customer experience in insurance sector.