Why customer experience trumps efficiency in digital transformation

There isn’t an insurance business in the land that isn’t talking about digital transformation. Whether it is AI, robotics or platforms, the majority of the industry is confident it’s heading towards a brightly lit, digital future.

And the motivation for transformation? We are told its customer experience, providing an interaction that is quick, clean and gets the job done with minimal fuss.

But for all the effort made, the customer experience in insurance is fundamentally the same as it was ten or fifteen years ago – it’s still call centre-based. I think that is because, while the stated driver for digital change may be the customer, its primary purpose has been to reduce costs.

And it is that efficiency-first approach that has resulted in many organisations looking to webforms to digitise their customer-facing processes.

Webforms do a decent job leveraging digitalisation to automate the beginning of processes normally done manually. Yet any claim coming from a webform still requires the capable hands of an operations employee who will then perform the rest of the process and communicate the outcome to the customer. In addition, webforms can’t converse reducing them, essentially, to digital monologue. Customers today expect more than impersonal and clunky interactions.

While customers want a quick, hassle-free experience, it is clear that many want that done through conversation of some kind. 

Conversations are comforting, familiar and create a sense of engagement that a static form can never replicate. 

A true digital experience is one that takes all the benefits of a one to one conversation and automates them using conversational process automation or CPA. That is the world webforms were trying to create but as they arose from a need to create efficiency rather than a better customer experience, they have, ultimately, failed.

Source: https://www.spixii.com/about-cpa 

CPA leverages a chatbot conversational interface to deliver an efficient customer experience, thinking about the customer first while saving cost. It allows for the execution of high-value customer-facing processes, integrated into insurance platforms and systems and complying with security and audit requirements.

And that is why the adoption of CPA across the industry will, I believe, bring the digital change that so many seek. More and more, they can replicate the conversational style and effectiveness of a human call handler for the vast majority of recurrent insurance interactions – from quote and buy through to claim notification. 

CPA has the capacity to handle call volumes that only a very large, very expensive call centre could match. Of course, there are limits to what CPA can currently do but it is improving all the time - getting smarter at predicting queries, reacting to something that doesn’t fit into the box and leading the customer through complex processes. Webforms, for all their value, can never do that. 

As we collect more and more data through CPA, performance becomes more accurate and according to a report from IT advisory firm Gartner, by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis. 

The combination of processes automation and creating superior customer experience drive efficiencies. A recent report by McKinsey estimates that in the claims process alone, automation could reduce the cost of that journey by as much as 30%.

For insurance to be part of that digital future and to reap its rewards, it has to have customer experience as its main motivator, replicating all the value that a one to one conversation brings, putting the customer in control of their experience and in a way that keeps costs to a minimum.

If we persist in letting costs-saving alone drive transformation, we are going to end up with fancier, more expensive tools than webforms that will deliver marginal efficiency while continuing to leave customers frustrated. And that would be a failure of purpose and progress. 

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About Renaud Million

Renaud Million is the CEO of Spixii, a leading conversational automation platform for insurance customer-facing processes.

Prior to Spixii, Million worked as an actuarial consultant for EY in London, advising large insurance companies. The work gave him an understanding of insurance processes and the friction to solve for the end customer.

Million holds a master’s in operational research and management sciences at Lancaster University and a master’s in engineering from Arts et Métiers ParisTech.

Million was named young actuarial professional of the year for 2017 by Insurance ERM, and in 2018 he co-wrote “The InsurTech Book: The Insurance Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and FinTech Visionaries.”

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