INTERVIEW
Delivering true customer personalisation in insurance: the state of play and the strategies for success
Andrew Stevens, Head of Enterprise Product Marketing & Portfolio Strategy, Quadient
Personalisation is increasingly important for insurers looking to retain customers and to attract new ones. How well do you think our industry is doing on this? And what are some of the key areas that still need to be addressed?
Personalisation, and communications with customers in general within the insurance industry, could best be described as a curate’s egg – good in parts, bad in others. There’s been a significant effort made in recent years in specific areas, but there continue to be glaring holes in others. Compared to the more transactional world of banking, the insurance industry remains a few years behind at present.
Perhaps the most obvious example continues to be the struggle to personalise the critical written interactions in ways that enhance customer relationships. Generic inbound forms continue to be prevalent, despite being transformed in adjacent industries where interactive digital workflows now personalise experiences and reduce the amount of duplicated data input. Similarly, outbound communications – especially around policies – continue to lack the personalisation required to engage customers effectively with clear and unambiguous language that resonates with their personal circumstances. More also needs to be done, to listen to customers’ needs and ensure that communication can be delivered via their channel of choice at all times.
What are the possibilities for the sector in creating more personalised experiences – what will true personalisation look like?
Too many experiences are built around internal processes or reducing the exposure to risk that may occur through breaches of regulations; these experiences almost always end up being generic and protective in nature – in effect the “customer” in these transformations is the business or departmental head, not the policy holder. True personalisation requires a very simple but profound mind shift: whenever there is a connection with the customer, their needs must always come first.
This means understanding the customer from the perspectives of their background, the context of their current situation, and their potential limitations, and then connecting with them on a level that takes all of these into account and then personalises the interaction accordingly.
The end result is a communication that serves to enhance the relationship with the insurer because it is understandable by that customer and is only relevant to that customer. This means ensuring that the tone of voice and terminology used are appropriate, that any previous interactions have been taken into account and are referenced, and that any call to action can be clearly understood.
And this personalisation needs to extend across the organisation. There’s little benefit in any customer receiving a highly personalised and clear experience from one team and then being forced through a generic process and poor jargon-filled experience in the next one. As humans, we generally only have room for one CX score per company in our heads, so a generic and poor experience received from one department will always bring that overall score down!
It’s not enough to have personalised interactions on one channel if the customer goes to a different channel and has a totally different, unconnected experience… What do insurers need to be doing to integrate different channels and connect the dots?
You’re absolutely right, and unfortunately this channel variance happens at nearly every insurer, to the detriment of the customer experience.
The channel should always be a simple mechanism to deliver the message, allowing the insurer and customer to connect through the customer’s preferred communication method.
Unfortunately, in many cases the concept of a channel has become intertwined with a whole team of engineers and business specialists that manage the technology that underpins it. When this happens, “the” message is replaced with “as close a version of the message as this channel is able to create”. And with the proliferation of digital channels in recent years, this had led to a wide variation in the experiences offered – partly because each of the channel-specific technologies is limited in its personalisation capabilities, and partly because the duplication of effort in changing messages across so many IT teams leads to unwelcome costs and unacceptable timeframes.
The problem only gets resolved when channel-specific technologies are replaced with a single omnichannel personalisation and communication platform that can be managed by a single team for both physical and digital connections. Doing things this way improves the speed-to-market and transforms the possibilities for insurers to personalise every experience, ensuring that the quality of the personalisation and interaction isn’t compromised by the channel chosen.
Insurance companies are full of people who genuinely care about and want to help their customers. How does IT need to develop to really allow that care to shine through to the customer?
I agree that insurance companies do genuinely care. Unfortunately, they frequently fall at the final hurdle when it comes to showing how much they care because the technical products that connect with the customer in a personalised way are limiting the business – often for the reasons that we’ve already spoken about.
IT leaders have always had a responsibility to find and implement technology that simplifies and empowers their organisation while supporting the company goals and strategies. When it comes to personalisation, the technology stacks didn’t meet those strategies and so business heads frequently worked around the IT department and drove the purchase of point solutions that solved individual departmental problems… and ultimately created the problems we have today, where an over-abundance of channel-specific technology has ended up limiting the business in so many other ways.
It’s time for IT leaders to get back in front of the problem and put programs in place to consolidate the current jumble of technology into a single dedicated solution that all teams can benefit from. This supports the technical teams from a tech stack perspective but will also have transformational results for the operational model in each line of business, as IT can empower individual teams to control their own communication content without the need for a large technical presence and budget for every business-as-usual change. Change lead times can drop from weeks to hours with a single IT-owned, business-managed platform for all channels.
Meeting the needs of vulnerable customers is vitally important and is getting increased attention following the European Accessibility Act (EAA). Where are the key opportunities to increase accessibility for vulnerable customers through personalisation?
While I understand and appreciate the question, and would almost certainly have asked it the same way if the roles had been reversed, I think there’s something really telling here about the language we use on this topic – we tend to see “opportunities” to increase accessibility for vulnerable or disabled customers, or use other similarly positive words to describe the future potential. The real question should be “why is this an opportunity and not something that we all do as party of our daily business?” Surely, if anyone needs a personalised touch and should already have been prioritised, it’s a customer group with a recognised set of specialist needs.
Again, the root of the problem is in the technology. Many products that were purchased during the earlier part of the digital revolution focused on a “one-size fits all” approach in order to get to market quickly. Unfortunately, one– size never fits all, and many customers with different needs were accidentally abandoned due to functional accessibility limitations, left seeking incredibly basic features like the ability to read any digital communication at all rather than looking for such niceties as personalisation and a positive experience.
We’re now in a position where regulations have caught up with us, and again we’re seeing many insurers doing the absolute minimum required to meet the new rules rather than treating this as an opportunity to transform. However, the forward-thinking businesses are using their newly found ability to communicate properly with vulnerable and disabled customers as a platform to reach new heights, with additional personalisation and new content being added to interactions that highlight a customer’s options in a way that will be meaningful to them. Regulations are only a challenge if we see them that way – if we change our thought processes to put the customer first then they can often be a fantastic opportunity to differentiate from the peer group and take a considerable portion of an underserved market!
Where can automation and AI assist in delivering a more personalised experience?
I have so many conversations about automation and AI where it becomes apparent very early that these are seen as technology-driven opportunities, i.e. if we could just put more automation and AI into the insurance company, surely that means things will be better, right?
Sadly, technology-led transformations like this rarely achieve the intended results.
The best example of this is in the use of generative AI to personalise communications – surely a no-brainer in this space. On a personal use basis, it might make sense and we may naturally translate this into it being appropriate for insurance companies (let’s face it, we’ve all used ChatGPT to help us with our work once or twice!), but there are few insurance leaders that would risk letting AI build every policy individually and send it to the customer – the negative publicity created by a single embarrassing failure would almost outweigh the enormous potential fines or financial exposure.
But if our aim is to build better outcomes for our customer, and to personalise the connections with them in a compliant and accurate manner, there’s still plenty of scope for AI to assist. We just need to do this responsibly.
We expect to continue seeing the need to create templates or blueprints for every communication, if only to ensure that basic regulatory information is always added and can be quality-controlled to guarantee compliance. But where those templates are designed entirely manually today, AI can certainly assist the content experts in rapidly generating different ways of explaining topics that would resonate with different customer segments, or in translating that content so that it is available in multiple languages. Doing so can reduce the workload on professional copywriters and the need for skilled and experienced content creators, empowering other departmental professionals to design compliant communications.
It’s also likely to be incredibly valuable in integrating the data that is required to make personalisation decisions (such as identifying which segment a customer may fit into), in supporting individual contact centre employees with recommended text to personalise individual interactions, and in automating the migration of content from the legacy channel-specific products into a modern omnichannel solution.
It may sound a little futuristic at times, but the finest customer communication solutions already support these capabilities today. We’ll continue to see advancements in this space in the coming months and years as AI augments the skills of employees in personalising these critical connections with customers further.
Meet Quadient’s team at Insurance Innovators Nordics! As market leaders in customer experience management, they’ll showcase how their technology empowers insurance companies to deliver personalized, seamless, and compliant communications across all customer touchpoints.
Andrew Stevens, Head of Enterprise Product Marketing & Portfolio Strategy, Quadient
With nearly two decades of experience at one of the world’s largest financial institutions, Andrew Stevens has earned a global reputation as a customer experience and communication expert. He has successfully advised on, defined, and executed numerous transformation programs across multiple countries, consistently delivering measurable results.
In his current role as Head of Enterprise Product Marketing & Portfolio Strategy for Quadient Digital, Andrew leverages his extensive expertise in both the technology and operational aspects of the BFSI sector to ensure that Quadient’s industry-leading solutions continue to meet the needs of today’s ever-evolving financial landscape.