Customer engagement remains an area where insurers can invest. It’s among the least mature functional areas for insurers across the industry, with substantial variation in deployment rates for technologies: some capabilities, like web/email and 360° customer views, are fairly widespread, while others are still emerging. Many insurers are piloting chatbots, but data capabilities like behavior and value monitoring could be better explored.
Insurers’ relative lack of maturity in customer engagement may be a by-product of the fact that across the industry, customer experience lacks clear best practices: it may be the purview of marketing, technology, or customer service teams, and team sizes and ownership also vary.
The Novarica 100 Framework includes 12 capabilities in each of eight functional areas: product development, marketing, distribution, underwriting, customer engagement, billing, claims, and finance/operations. These capabilities are divided evenly into four digital, four data, and four core functions. There are also four additional capabilities specific to the operations of IT to round out the even 100.
Digital capabilities in customer engagement include web self-service with email support, mobile self-service with SMS reminders, and chatbots, which are among the most-piloted technologies across the industry.
Data and analytics customer engagement capabilities cover various kinds of modeling to predict retention rates, define tiered service levels for more valuable customers, and understand customer behavior for more effective cross-sell or upsell.
Customer engagement core capabilities include 360° customer view and CCM systems to manage customer communications across channels, as well as taxonomies to manage customer preferences and common service front ends.
As Novarica has seen with marketing and distribution capabilities, effective web presence is mandatory for insurer customer engagement. Mobile and SMS capabilities are becoming more common, but they aren’t yet true table stakes. Insurers are also very interested in chatbots, which are among the most piloted capabilities across the industry.
Customer engagement data capabilities are among the least mature across the industry. Retention modeling is the most frequently deployed; value modeling and behavior modeling are roughly equal but both less frequent. AI and machine learning could augment all three areas, but insurers are more likely to be exploring these technologies for underwriting than for customer engagement.
Core capabilities, like digital capabilities, are bifurcated: 360° customer views and common service front ends are deployed at more than half of all insurers, but omni-channel CCM and customer preference taxonomies are much less widespread. Insurers are piloting these capabilities, however, which will likely continue to increase in importance as customer experience expectations are increasingly informed by other industries.
The N100 framework is also available as a self-rating tool for insurers; if you’re a Novarica client or Research Council member interested in benchmarking your company, feel free to contact [email protected] to receive a copy.
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