Insurers need to plan beyond immediate needs. In China, demand for term life and health insurance showed a significant increase after the SARS outbreak in 2002. COVID-19 will likely create a similar uptake from consumers across the globe. Of course, the world now is much more digitized and widespread, physical-distancing and lockdown measures have pushed most insurers to accelerate their digital-transformation efforts.
Data and analytic capabilities can underpin a wide variety of initiatives to provide the personalized and convenient experience that will define insurers’ competitive advantage in the years to come. Insurers are increasingly adopting these capabilities as the insurance distribution model is fundamentally changing and migrating to digital channels faster— not just toward self-service but also toward remote, pro-active outreach through phone, social media, professional and other channels.
Personalization
Data and analytic can enable insurers to offer the personalized services customers have come to expect.
Microsegment marketing:
Create microsegments based on customer data and couple segmentation with a data management platform to personalise offers across channels.
Timely human assistance:
Identify customers struggling in real time and provide assistance—over chatbots, social media chat tools, outbound calls, or in person—to improve customer engagement and minimize potential drop-off from policy benefits, such as purchase or increase in coverage.
Brokers recommendations:
Recommend brokers to new customer leads based on profiles, product expertise, customer lead-behaviour, availability, and so forth to maximise the conversion rate.
Convenience
Convenience can also be facilitated by data and analytics.
Omnichannel integration:
Capture customer preferences and inputs in real time and feed this information to all available channels to create a seamless experience.
Streamlined and automated underwriting:
Remove questions with little impact on the underwriting decision and where possible, automate those decisions to enable instant policy approvals.
Even for insurers that have experienced major successes in deploying discrete data and analytic use cases, developing more comprehensive, top-down capabilities and scaling to the rest of the organisation will not be easy. Industrialised delivery takes time to organize up front. However, it can result in seamless, integrated releases and competitive differentiation in the months and years to come.