Building intimacy: Engaging, retaining and delighting insurance customers across channels

About this article

The digital economy is in full force, with the pandemic only elevating the importance of digital transformation and innovation at scale. Modern-day insurance businesses are seeing their traditional business models fall short of balancing real-time risk in response to ever-changing market trends and consumer expectations. Building resilience to account for unpredictable market changes, while maintaining relevance and remaining connected to the customer, is a key challenge faced by insurance businesses today.

This article provides insurance companies with an overview on paving the way with a modernized customer experience. It explores the value of data-driven innovation and product personalization in strengthening the relationship between an insurance company and its customers; and shows how businesses can leverage Google’s unique cloud-based technologies to scale a profitable business.

Introduction

Customers are loyal to one thing, and that’s their needs. Transactional experiences (i.e. taking money in exchange for products or services) address the immediate needs of a customer — but, in order to practice resilience and build long lasting relationships that delight and engage, customer experience must reflect a deep understanding of the dynamic ‘whys’ of their behavior. It should be reliable, helpful, efficient, and provide value for money.

Netflix’s pivot from a mail-order DVD model to a media streaming model is a well-known example of adapting to fit consumer expectations and market trends. Insurance carriers may not need to make as dramatic a pivot, however there are certainly parallels in needing to rethink customer engagement in order to conquer the customer journey.

Chapter 1: The challenges hindering the insurance industry

Using data to craft a personalized customer strategy is an ongoing task with several industry challenges that must be considered in order to move forward.

Evolving customer needs

As expectations increase and needs change over time, customer behaviors evolve. In the digital age of immediacy, the demand is rising for seamless, personalized, and modernized insurance services. Furthermore, the impact of the environment, economy, culture, and world events must be taken into consideration when performing a comprehensive assessment of needs and future risks.

Consumer privacy

Consumers have decided: privacy matters, and the tech powerhouses of the world agree. The death of the 3rd party cookie, alongside the recent iOS update that’s all about transparent data, means that enterprises have had to re-imagine the way they create the consumer experience. Tracking browser cookies to better the customer experience is no longer a viable option.

With Google planning to phase out 3rd party cookies in the Chrome browser by 2023, enterprises have to take action now to find a new solution.

Data silos

Today, information comes from multiple sources, often meaning it is decentralized and isolated. Insurance carriers have several customer touch points and are frequently exchanging information via documents, text and voice conversations, and applications. That information lives in various forms such as hand-written notes, digital files, and structured and unstructured data; all of which are often disconnected, inaccurate, and incomplete.

This makes it increasingly hard for organizations, and in particular data scientists, to build comprehensive AI / machine learning (ML) models that drive relevant business outcomes and connected customer experiences.

However, with challenge comes opportunity. The time to move to one integrated data strategy that offers a holistic understanding of customer behavior is here. Businesses need to invest in self-learning mechanisms that provide actionable recommendations in real time to drive better results for both consumers and business. From API management to data warehousing and virtual customer service agents, Google Cloud unlocks access to technologies that help deepen the understanding of today’s customers while staying ahead of their growing demands.

Let’s take a look at how insurance companies can do things faster, larger, and more efficiently with Google Cloud’s innovative technology that’s paving the way for the industry and for consumer-business relationships.

Chapter 2: Understanding customer needs to master personalization

One in two millennials have discovered and purchased from a brand they had little knowledge of previously, by searching on their smartphones. This shows a shift in consumer behavior. No longer does brand trust depend only on the reputation of a brand or the presence of brick and mortar. Today, transparency, reviews, social commitment, environmental values, and simplicity are large factors of the buying decision.

What looks like online browsing is often a want to fulfill immediate needs. Understanding consumers’ decision-making moments is becoming very important for insurance companies. Behind this idea is the reality that over the last 10 years, digital devices have fundamentally changed the way consumers and providers interact. People, particularly Gen Y and Gen Z, turn to digital devices to act on a need: a need to learn, do, discover, or buy.

According to phone usage data, Americans check their phones more than 150 times a day. They may be checking email, texts, social media, or messages on many platforms. They act when and where they want to, or when and where they’re motivated to, no longer limited by when they can, as everything is in the palm of their hands. These are the moments to win your customers.

Chapter 3: A closer look at the customer journey

What does a typical customer journey for auto insurance look like? Generally, they move through four life moments.

• Researching insurance coverage (I-want-to-know moments)
• Shopping for quotes (I-want-more-value moments)
• Consideration (I-want-to-compare moments)
• Binding (I-want-to-buy moments)

Now, let’s apply this to a real-life scenario: Clara, a customer in the want to know moment who’s searching for car insurance, browses online to find auto insurance rates for teens. This sends a trigger to Angie, a local insurance agent, who then sends automated, contextualized ads to Clara’s social media channels including YouTube and Instagram.

Clara engages with the personalized content and browses through reviews and community information. Within a day or two, she searches Angie’s details and immediately spots them on the first page of search results. Clara schedules a virtual appointment with Angie.

In the appointment, Clara shares her need to insure the car and learn more about teen car insurance. By augmenting Google’s differentiated data and AI / ML capabilities into real world conversations, Angie now has deeper insight about Clara’s risk profile. Angie then leverages Google’s knowledge graphs to offer dynamic pricing that is tailored to Clara’s needs. This want more value moment triggers Angie to send a personalized email with relevant content and suggests a bundled auto policy.

Clara browses the relevant content that Angie has sent to her and/ considers her options in a want to compare moment. After thoughtfully comparing rates with other carriers and her experience with Angie, Clara decides to go with Angie’s company for the proactive, competitive, caring, and engaging service she received. This want to buy moment is crucial.

To seize these opportunities, businesses need to understand customers’ intentions, and provide instant and useful product and service information when and where they need it. These small moments are the biggest opportunities to win new customers.

By understanding individual circumstances and addressing intent and needs with a 1:1 experience, insurance businesses can successfully connect with their customers.

Creating a holistic experience by mapping out the customer journey

Having a high level of customer intelligence means tracking the customer journey, across every channel, and creating an in-depth understanding of each customer, their location, and the context of their situation. The easiest way to do this is with a knowledge graph.

A knowledge graph is a detailed collection of structured data about entities in the real world. To build a knowledge graph, we need to start where the customers are in their journey. Considering customers may be on any channels including web, smartphone, or talking with CSR or real-time agents, shifting unstructured data into a structured format and interpreting its meaning, is a must for knowledge graphs.

With the help of Google Cloud Platform, businesses can easily integrate leading data and AI services with their current state of customer journey, regardless of the channel. Businesses can leverage innovative, privacy-safe data features like enterprise first party data, Search, Ads, Maps, and YouTube to create a seamless omnichannel experience that acquires, retains, and delights customers — just like Toyota Canada.

Chapter 4: Taking control of consumer insights

Before insurance companies can reach the point of an integrated and personalized customer experience, digital media, comprehensive data and an AI / ML strategy must be considered. To bring to life such an experience and to appear relevant and useful in the moments that matter, businesses need to understand the underlying needs of their customers; ones that are discovered by real-time data, and ones that lead to the creation of usage-based insurance products.

Learning about customers in real time during their journey allows businesses to create data-led strategies and make informed recommendations for consumers’ next steps. This solution brings together customer data from various touch points including call centers, web front ends, mobile, and internal and external data sources like CRM, Google Search, Ads, and Google’s public datasets. Connecting these different data sources is important for understanding the ‘whys’ of consumer behavior.

Google Trends helps businesses establish genuine customer connections through meaningful opportunities. Tapping into the power of Google Trends with enterprise data helps leverage business insights on the customer, brand, competition, and industry. As more and more businesses are adopting customer-centric product design, gaining actionable insights in near real time becomes a differentiating factor in the insurance marketplace.

BigQuery

However, understanding, transforming, and curating all these datasets in a typical data lake platform is particularly challenging with products that constantly shift with customer needs. Businesses need to move to a data platform that is open, flexible, intelligent, and proven to easily integrate with partner ecosystems.

Google’s BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi-cloud data warehouse designed for business agility and reducing the complexity of data operations. It seamlessly connects and transfers data from major CRM and SaaS data providers like Salesforce and Facebook.

Contact Center AI (CCAI)

Google’s conversational AI (CCAI) seamlessly integrates with major telephone and contact center solutions — Avaya, Genesys, Cisco, Twilio, and Salesforce — to enable near real time visibility into customer sentiments, possible recommendations, and gaps in the customer experience.

Augmenting AI on top of existing customer touch points, and democratizing insights across organizations using partner-developed business intelligence tools like Looker and Tableau, allows insurance businesses to see the benefits of AI almost immediately. It does this by enabling one integrated data and AI / ML platform to manage a seamless and holistic end-to-end customer journey that is tailored to 1:1 needs.

Getting to know your customers with Google Cloud

To reach your full business potential in the insurance industry, you need to know your customer. You need both internal and external data, mixed with machine learning models that empower experimentation, to unlock real-time customer insights that deliver better results and keep you ahead of customer expectations.

Leveraging data-fueled innovation to meet evolving customer needs will help you conquer the personalized and connected customer experience. The Google Cloud ecosystem — including Google Search, Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Cloud Platform — can help you establish relevance with customers in the digital age, and at the end of the day, accelerate digital transformation.

In summary, the benefits of Google Cloud for enterprises are:

• Building usage-based insurance products with app modernization tools
• Effective and efficient marketing campaign and audience activation
• An automated, connected omnichannel experience between your customer and agent
• Understanding customers’ needs and providing meaningful actionable service when and where they need it
• Higher brand engagement, customer lifetime value, and revenue generation
• Customer intelligence knowledge graph enables:
• Visibility into customers’ activities in near real time during their journey
• The development of a comprehensive set of ML models that enhance first party data to drive business results
• A head-start on the challenge and opportunity within markets by analyzing first party data along with real-world data