Digital Transformation, Continuous Experimentation and the Customer Conundrum for Incumbents

Digital Transformation (DT) is the re-imagination of your core business that takes into account customer expectations in the modern technological landscape.

While DT is a relentless journey for incumbents and it will keep evolving as both “customer acquisition” and “customer retention” becomes equally critical in the fast changing landscape of customer behavior and meeting/exceeding their expectations

To be more precisely, delivering a simplified “Customer experience” (CX) is becoming more business critical and the biggest competitive differentiator in this highly commoditized market.

Insurance carriers have always found it tough to be responsive enough to understand customer behavior and expectations, hence their response is slow in this context in compare to most of the other industries.

Continuous Experimentation is one of the best way to iterate & respond to customer needs, but why insurance carriers are still finding it challenging to adapt into their DNA ?

The two dimension of challenges Insurers are facing towards Continuous Experimentation approach are:

1.    Within the confined space, how to consistently conceptualize & deliver innovation to customers and rapidly improve the creativity of employees. Confined spaces in form (or any combination) of these issues:

• Organizational Culture & Change Readiness
•  Legacy Centric IT Landscape hampering time & speed to market
• Poor Insights from tons of data captured over last 2-3 decades.
• Regulations & Compliances (insurance is one of the most regulatory intrusive industry and will remain so)
• Tendency to Play Safe 
• Quick availability of reinsurance support for newer ideas (to certain extent it also leads to idea possessiveness too)
• Employee Experiences (also how to attract and retain Tech and New Mind-set talent)
• Leadership Vision

 2.    Opportunities outside these confined space (around and outside the box)

• Digital Twin or continued incremental digitalization
• Buy or Build (it used to be back office core IT systems, now it’s also around customer focused tech)
• Right Partnership model with InsurTech and EmergingTech vendors (e.g Co-develop, Co-invest or Early Pilots)
• Cannibalizing old products with newer & innovative offerings
• Deriving “digital insights” and “content intelligence” across the entire insurance value chain to gain operational efficiency and cost effectiveness

Frankly, neither there is any silver bullet available to solve these issues, nor these can be solved overnight or in the short period of time. Essentially, the change needs to start from top, in form to long term planning and calling it out loudly that "Yes, these are the problem".

Instead, some honest question needs soul searching within the organization and it leadership:

• Do we have our organization engine that is responsive faster and how responsive it is in tune to the internal and external change?
• How do we deal with the rigidities of this organization that prevent this connection of internal decision making in tune and speed with the change?
• Are we using right technology and are we investing enough in the technology to build to future otherwise the short term will become shorter,
• Do we have the right people, are we able to develop the right people in tune to the internal & external change and speed of decision making, and how good are we at it?
• Are we able to remove the barriers hampering employee experiences and better organizational culture? 

Post calling out these categorically, they need to draw a plan to fix these with the basic attitude that every day is a new day. Considering perpetual uncertainty as a part of life, entire leadership needs to look their assumption about the future and see:

• What fits what they have 
• What doesn't fit

 The 3 key question they need to ask continuously and seek answers for:

• What is the future opportunity and therefore;
• What is it they need and
• What is it they don’t have

It requires consistent revaluation and further discussion among themselves to understand, re-strategize or re-align accordingly.

This will in turn help to them to further orchestrate, where to devote their energies and focus? 

• Where to take risks and bets.
• Speed of decision making

In the industry where empathy towards customer is quintessential, in the industry where we are supposed to use data to draw insights and software to operationalize solutions for various business problems, it is important to understand the definition of creativity, the human minds and its creativity needs to be channelized into creating higher value hence innovation.

This would certainly require leadership to interact more with folks who are in actual scene with the customers and can provide seamless information and unfiltered data and enabling the leadership to cut the hierarchical layer’s out.

Creativity in today's essence essentially means new ideas, that’s productivity this includes new products, new ways of selling, new ways of doing innovation and continuously experimenting to figure out what fits customer needs.

There are and will always be some or other business problem at both the dimensions, leadership must focus on "What we can do, will do and should do" to find right solutions & products to stay relevant.

#digitaltransformation #customerexperience #continuousexperiement #leadership #strategicplanning #digitalinsights #contentintelligence