I’ve been thinking about what I can do, as an insurance agent, to offer my customers the best experience possible during this pandemic. This is because I believe that a seamless customer experience will help build my reputation in the insurance industry, retain my existing customer base, and gain new customers. As a result, I’ll be ensuring business continuity for myself in all sorts of challenging situations.
So, I called on my friend Naomi for advice on how I can achieve this. Naomi has been an insurance agent longer than me, and her career is doing much better than mine, so I figured she’d have some of the answers I’m looking for. Coincidentally, during our call, I found out that she’s also been looking for a way to improve her customer experience for the same reasons as mine.
As we discussed our issue, we figured out that we were facing a common challenge – the ever-changing and rising customer expectations. Our customers still expect us to offer them exceptional service, even during this pandemic when we can’t meet them and serve them in person. They still need to adjust and renew their existing policies, file claims, get quotations, and new coverages. Since this is the case, we need to find a solution that will ensure these expectations are met and we provide the best customer experience possible.
So, we tasked ourselves to do some research to learn what we can do to solve this problem. Through our research, we learnt that gone are the days of traditional customer service. We’re now living in a digital era. A time when a high percentage of our customers are digitally savvy and know the crucial role that digitization plays in improving customer service. As a result, they expect their agents to also be digitally savvy, and to adopt digitization to serve them remotely.
With this in mind, we went ahead and did further research on how we can enhance their experience through digital transformation during this pandemic by meeting their expectations. This is what we found out:
Speed
The bulk of insurance processes for most insurance agents are manual and paper-based. Unfortunately, Naomi and I also fall in this category. However, we’re working on changing our old ways of working through digital transformation. Digital transformation will automate many tasks and help speed up the time we take to serve our customers. As a result, we’ll achieve customer satisfaction and improve customer experience.
Innovation
There are many digitization trends out there, but we can’t follow them all. So, we need to be innovative by adopting the one that will best solve our problems. The solution we choose will have to be one that makes a difference through the entire customer journey. From comparing and choosing the most suitable products for our customers’ needs, to walking with our customers through the claims process. Basically, this solution will have to create new ways of building relationships with our customers and, as a result, lead to improved customer experience.
Customer ownership
Customer ownership plays a very important role in our growth, whether we are just starting out, have some experience, or are seasoned insurance agents. When we acknowledge our customers’ needs and concerns, they’ll feel heard and understood. This is essential to great customer service, which leads to improved customer experience.
Digital transformation is key to achieving customer ownership, because it helps us to provide swift and customized solutions to our customers. For example, it enables us to automate reminders for when our customers’ policy renewals are due. As a result, we can contact our customers about their renewals on time instead of waiting for them to come to us. This demonstrates to the customer that we care about them, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Effectiveness and efficiency
A good digital solution will consolidate multiple insurers and insurance products in one place. It will also store customers’ records in one database. This should help us work more effectively. We’ll have instant access to accurate prices and quotations. We’ll also be able to instantly pull up customer records. Our processes will, therefore, become more efficient, which will lead to improved customer experience.
Conclusion
We’re living in an age where a large percentage of our insurance customers are tech-savvy. Therefore, we should assume that these customers expect us to use technology to offer them the best customer service possible even during challenging times when we can’t physically meet with them. So, we should jump on the digital bandwagon to ensure speed, innovation, customer ownership, and effectiveness and efficiency during this pandemic when we’re practicing physical distancing. This is how we’ll improve customer experience and grow in our insurance businesses.
In your opinion, how else can digital transformation help in boosting your customer experience? Please share with us in the comments.
To get a digital solution that will help you improve your customer experience during and beyond this pandemic, talk to Agencify by sending an email to info@agencify.insure.
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