How to Use Data to Improve The Customer Experience

If you’re an agent, you’ve probably dealt with the frustration of trying to grow your business with a carrier but sometimes it just doesn’t work out. You’ve been trying to send more business to them, but something is just not working.

You want to help, but you know there’s an issue, and you don’t know what it is.

This is a bad customer experience for both the agent and the policyholder, because nobody has visibility into what’s happening. It’s like blindfolding a pit crew in a race. And results in a bad customer experience all around.

Let’s look at a piece of customer experience data that would be helpful in this case: speed data — data about speed of interaction, a type of behavioral data based on responsiveness, or lack thereof. It gives you visibility into what’s happening, and how relationships are evolving.

Let’s take a look and try to leave with some practical examples of ways that you can use this data yourself.

What is it?

This data is generated by your communication and decision-making with the carrier. It includes data points such as:

• Open rate: How many of your submissions are being opened?
• Engage rate: How many of your submissions are being acted on?
• Time to open: How long is it taking for your submissions to be opened?
• Time to engage: How long does it take carriers to engage with your submissions?
• Time to decision: How long is it taking either side to make a decision?
• Number of questions: How many questions are being asked to reach a decision?
• Number of interactions: How many back-and-forths are required to reach a conclusion

Data like this adds up to tell you about the overall points of friction in the relationship.

Where does it come from?

New technology results in new data. This particular data is created by measuring all of the interactions between you and your partners.

The best new kinds of data are the ones that help you manage your business more effectively. Here’s some actual (redacted) data, and then we’ll walk through some of it.

For example, look at the last carrier in the list. They’re only engaging with 43% of the submissions. And when they do, it’s taking them almost three days to do anything with it. By that time they’ve already been beaten to the punch by more responsive carriers.

The amount of time it takes for carriers to respond varies widely. For example, further down this list of carriers there were two carriers that were taking over 10 days to respond to submissions. Do you think these carriers are winning lots of business?

How to use it

This kind of data, available every day, helps you fix customer experience. Here are some actual examples of ways that agents are using this data today:

• High open rates, short time to engage? Everything looks great.
• Low open rates? The carrier isn’t prioritizing your business, you should talk to your marketing rep.

Now, what if we take a more traditional metric such as hit rate and declination rate, and look at them next to this new data?

Short times to open, but long times to engage, or high declinations? The carrier wants business, but you might be sending business that they’re not really interested in.

• Long time to open and low hit rate? They’re probably not responding quickly enough.

How to get it

Until recently, the only way to collect this type of data was to force everyone to log all of their activity. Not fun for anyone, and it decreased speed.

As technological capabilities continue to advance in insurance, you will enjoy much richer, more varied data that will help you manage your business.