Reinventing the insurance customer experience

It is now more important than ever for insurers to deliver an exemplary customer experience across digital channels. Customers increasingly expect the same self-service options and proactive care from their insurance provider as they do from all other services, and yet, the gap between customer expectations and digital offerings persists in insurance. According to Airkit’s 2021 State of Digital CX Report, 40% of consumers surveyed stated they are likely to switch their insurance company for better digital CX. 

It’s clear that providing an exceptional digital experience is imperative for consumers, and businesses that fail to meet customer expectations will fall behind as their customers embrace digitally-savvier providers. Today, Airkit is taking an exciting step in better preparing our insurance customers to meet those expectations. 

The digital insurance experience continues to fall short.

We know that insurers are struggling to keep up with consumer demands, but what is it that makes building these digital journeys so challenging? 

Carving out resources

First off, creating digital workflows is no walk in the park. Many organizations were not initially built to be digital-first, so much of the infrastructure required to engineer interactions that mimic those customers are getting from the likes of Amazon and Uber is not yet in place. 

According to Solartis, three key challenges facing insurers looking to digitally transform are integrating with legacy systems, a lack of resources, and a lack of IT expertise. Many insurers can’t afford to uproot their existing digital solutions and don’t have access to the technical talent it would require to build these customer experiences from scratch. The question becomes, how do you find a solution that works with the tools and systems you already have in place, doesn’t require a team of engineers to manage, and won’t break the bank? 

Factoring in security and compliance

A second roadblock for insurers is security. When serving up hyper-personalized or automated experiences, customers need to be able to trust their insurers to handle their personal information securely in the digital space. Forrester’s recent State of Digital Insurance 2021 Report stated, “Issues from security to design skills are impeding insurers’ efforts. Security concerns, customer experience design, and data issues are the biggest inhibitors. This is understandable, as insurers are attempting to deliver personalized customer experience — for example, personal risk coaching — while extracting data from monolithic legacy systems in a safe and scalable way.”

Providing personalized, digital self-service options cannot come at the expense of security. Instead, things like compliance and fraud prevention must be built into each digital experience to ensure customers’ personal information is protected every step of the way. 

Building with intention

Lastly, just because insurers are ticking the digital box doesn’t mean they’re providing exceptional digital service. In fact, adding digital channels but failing to build a seamless customer journey is almost worse than having no digital offerings at all. Based on Airkit’s findings, over 40% of consumers are at risk of churn within insurance. Consumers are “likely” to “very likely” to jump ship to another provider with better digital service offerings.

One of the most common customer complaints in regard to contacting customer service is that their conversations across various channels, such as SMS, text, email, and web, are not connected. As a result, customers are forced to repeatedly re-identify themselves on each channel of engagement. Many of these conversational technologies exist in siloes, so building personalized or contextual experiences requires coordinating with different teams and across different systems to access the necessary customer information. Without the right CX solution, connecting these systems and personnel can be time-consuming and costly. 

And, it’s no small effort to create digital experiences that drive customer action at the last mile. According to Tom Super, Head of Property and Casualty Insurance Intelligence at JD Power, and based on findings from a recent Insurance Digital Experience Study, “While many insurers are hitting the mark on the digital basics, few are using digital in new ways to drive growth and engagement.” What is the point of devoting time, money, and talent on going digital, only to fail to drive your customers to action and ultimately increase revenue? 

Airkit’s suite of digital insurance solutions

Airkit’s Digital Customer Experience Automation platform is transforming the digital insurance experience. Here’s how Airkit overcomes the above challenges and increases insurers’ abilities to meet customer expectations. 

Airkit makes building exceptional digital experiences easy.

From enrollment to policy and claims administration and renewals, Airkit offers a comprehensive suite of self-service digital insurance solutions and provides rapidly configurable, pre-built customer journeys, such as first notice of loss (FNOL), claims and payment status updates, and appointment scheduling. This solution suite also integrates with your existing core systems like quoting, underwriting, enrollment, billing/financial, policy, claims, contact center, and CRM, enabling you to build better CX faster. 

Airkit makes digital transactions secure. 

With Airkit, there’s no sacrificing security for service. Airkit’s comprehensive, out-of-the-box security and compliance framework is continuously updated with security, compliance, and privacy certifications. The platform helps prevent fraud with secure pre-call data collection and validation, provides secure self-service for billing and payment transactions with pre-built integrations with Stripe and Plaid, and meets all regulatory requirements.

Airkit empowers insurers to drive customer action at the last mile. 

Digital IVR deflection workflows allow insurers to accelerate customer care while increasing agent efficiency. Self‑service digital journeys, such as guiding customers to a form or URL via SMS, reduce the volume of routine requests routed to your contact center and free up agents for more complex customer service interactions. In turn, customers get faster issue resolutions for account changes, beneficiary updates, and claim status, ultimately improving your CSAT. Using Airkit, insurers are digitizing formerly paper processes with dynamic, reflexive forms, increasing the speed and rate of completion.

Best practices to meet the digital experience mark

Here are best practices to keep in mind when constructing your digital experience strategy with Airkit. 

1. Provide digital self-service for your high-volume, repetitive, manual customer requests. In Airkit’s recent report, nearly half of survey respondents calling into their provider said their most common customer service need was to request a status update. To save agent handling time and get customers to resolution faster, deflect these calls to a digital experience. You can also offer self-service scheduling for callbacks that reduce call wait times and increase connect rates. 
2. Build omnichannel digital journeys. Provide multiple entry points into your digital experience so you can meet customers where they are, whether that’s an SMS workflow triggered when a customer dials into your IVR or a scanned QR code for a contactless experience. You can also use omnichannel service to nudge experiences to completion. For the purpose of this example, let’s look at the life policy enrollment process, during which customers need to fill out an Evidence of Insurability form. These tend to be paper-based and drive 30-40% NIGO error rates. Airkit can digitize this entire process, and then send customers SMS reminders to fill out their forms if they drop off.
3. Use reflexive, dynamic forms to go paperless. Why force your customers to print out forms at the library or FedEx, when they can fill out a form on their mobile device? Reflexive capabilities give a digital form the ability to react to a customer’s responses or profile information. For example, if a customer smokes, you can serve them additional questions in an Evidence of Insurability form. If they do not, the form skips to the next section. You can also serve different versions of forms depending on where your customer is located to comply with state regulations. 
4. Integrate with your existing tools and systems. Flow information to and from your existing systems and your digital experiences. Doing so reduces customer load (through pre-filled information), ensures a contextual journey, and improves form completion rates. Pre-filling information based on a correlated phone number gets your 30-40% NIGO rates down to 0%.

Want to try a digital insurance experience with Airkit? See how Airkit is automating the policy and claims process in this demo workflow. 

Airkit customers succeed in the digital space

Since entering the market in the past year, Airkit has helped Fortune 500 carriers, international insurers, and US states automate claims processing, accelerate policy enrollment, eliminate paper, and prevent fraud in response to the pandemic. Most recently, MetLife automated customer enrollment for life insurance. After digitizing its Statement of Health paper process, the insurer saw 99% of submissions completed online instead of paper, 50% higher completion rates, and 0% NIGO (accommodating state by state form variations). 

Other Airkit customers typically see the following results: 

• The ability to launch digital journeys 10x faster.
• Lowering of overall costs to serve by 40% through digital deflection of high volume, repetitive call requests. 
• 0% not in good order (NIGO) with Smart Data Capture that pre-populates customer data. 
• Increase in CSAT by 30%.
• 2x increase in sales efficiency.

Conclusion

Whether your objective is to fully digitize the customer lifecycle or to respond to pressures on your contact center, Airkit enables you to scale your digital objectives. You can get a live look at how Airkit is helping Fortune 500 insurers build exceptional digital customer journeys on October 21st. Register for the product demo here.