Insurers tend to think about their agent and customer portals like medieval European castles: an impenetrable environment, where a monarch controls everyone’s experiences and determines who goes in or out through one heavily guarded doorway.
But modern, omnichannel experiences challenge this image. Today’s portal is just one touchpoint within a longer string of experiences, triggering communications that occur far away from the portal, in many different environments, with multiple “ways in.”
The Emerging FNOL Journey
Consider the modern FNOL experience: A policyholder involved in an auto accident opens a mobile app (the “portal”), clicks “Been in an accident?”, and starts answering a string of simple questions.
Alternately, the policyholder might choose to call the insurer and begin answering questions posed by an automated IVR voice agent. The system might send the policyholder a link via text message, which brings them back to the mobile app. Or an SMS chatbot might begin taking down information about the claim. If the policyholder needs roadside assistance, a link might open an Uber-like map showing current locations of the accident and the inbound tow truck.
As the policyholder moves further into the process, they might receive an email outlining what will be happening when, and what the next steps are, offering an SMS chat. All these channels (email, app, SMS) might provide options to speak with a CSR who can see the most up-to-date claim information.
We have moved far beyond the notion of a “portal.” While the above example is not yet typical, both policyholder and agent portals are becoming more real-time, on-demand, and omnichannel.
Overcoming Hurdles
Some characteristics of this journey that challenge traditional notions of the “portal” include:
- Choice: Consumers choose how much to use the portal. They can enter and exit the portal as a channel at will, bouncing from one touchpoint to another.
- Omnichannel: One channel can seamlessly open up another: phone-to-SMS, portal-to-chatbot, email-to-SMS. Where the “portal” ends and another channel begins becomes blurry.
- Mobile: These experiences are mobile-native, taking advantage of SMS and geolocation.
This situation poses challenges for insurers:
- Security. Multi-factor authentication may be straightforward on the login page of a traditional portal. But what happens when data is being collected by robotic voice agents or chatbots on a mobile phone? Insurers effectively delegate security and fraud prevention to Apple or Android devices. Insurer security teams need to carefully follow the experience journey to ensure that vulnerabilities are effectively identified.
- Dependency and Consistency. Rather than being orchestrated out of a single platform, the technology behind this level of omnichannel orchestration usually consists of a diverse ecosystem of tools, databases, exchanges, and a mixture of home-built and purchased solutions. Insurers are challenged with managing the co-dependencies of these solutions and the consistency of their maturity and sophistication.
- Simultaneity. The ease by which a policyholder can freely switch between channels — flipping from voice to chat, or chat to app, means that information collected in one channel must be made available to the systems governing every other channel immediately, in real time.
Data governance is key to overcoming these challenges. A secure but accessible data management platform, CRM, or CDP can provide a singular source of up-to-date information that all these channels can rely on. Data standards can enforce the consistency and portability of information from one system to another. In each case, the single-channel movement of data to and from a portal must transform into a managed ecosystem of several channels relying on a central source of truth.
This focus on customer experience means that tomorrow’s portals will be less like fortified medieval castles and more like modern American shopping malls, with many entry points, lots of choices, and plenty of movement. Let’s hope insurers can keep pace.
For more on the trends in this space, please read Aite-Novarica Group’s report Customer Journey Mapping: Key Issues and Best Practices.
Add new comment