Top 3 Takeaways from Insurance Innovators

When you’re talking to a call center, what’s the one thing you most dread hearing? “Let me transfer your call.”

This is because there’s a high likelihood that the call will get dropped while it’s getting transferred. If you do manage to get transferred successfully, you know you’re going to have to repeat everything all over again. And if you’re really lucky, you might get transferred three or four times before you manage to speak to the right department. 

At Insurance Innovators USA 2023, a conference in Nashville, TN from April 17-18, there were a number of topics that insurers were interested in. One of the top things was a focus on customer experience. Another topic was around data: how to sort it, use it, and leverage it. A final topic to highlight was trust.  

Customer experience 

Insurers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. They are having to reduce costs while increasing revenues. As such, insurers are focusing on providing a better customer experience to not only retain existing customers but to attract new ones, all while reducing human effort. They are wanting to do this via two primary ways: a holistic customer journey and automation. 

Insurers have a hard time providing a holistic customer journey. This is because there are disparate systems that work in isolation from one another. Often these systems are on legacy technologies that don’t allow for easy integration with other systems. The ideal in providing a holistic customer journey is to have all the relevant information in the hands of the right customer service agents at the right time. That way, you don’t have to repeat yourself 3-4 times just to get your inquiry addressed. 

Current customer service processes involve a lot of manual effort, whether it’s rekeying information from a form/document into a backend system or having to do certain activities to move the workflow from one stage to the next. Automation is being seen as essential to not only reduce costs, but to provide customers with a more efficient process. Response times to customer inquiries could be reduced from two days to minutes or even seconds. 

Data 

There are two different ways that insurers are interested in data. The first is in leveraging AI. AI is seen as being critical in automating some complex, manual processes. This can range from extracting data from documents where the format is unknown to helping customers with the logical next best action. There was also some discussion on how we can use technologies like ChatGPT to provide automated chatbots to handle routine customer inquiries. 

At the other end of the spectrum, there was a lot of emphasis on just getting the data right. To use AI, you need data to train and test your AI models. However, this has been a challenge for most insurers. As previously mentioned, data is often trapped in legacy systems, and it’s not easily shared between systems. Insurers are wondering how the data can be joined up and leveraged. We had conversations with several insurers who said they needed help just to get the basics right.  

Trust 

A relatively unexpected theme that came up over and over was that of trust. The most obvious area of trust was in data. Insurers want to be able to trust the data, so they know the decisions they make—whether at the underwriting level or the operational level—are the right decisions. 

A second area was in building trust with customers. In recent times, we’ve noticed that insurers are trying to change customers’ existing perceptions of insurance companies. To do this, insurers know they’ll need customers to trust that they have their best interests in mind. This needs to cover everything from their insurance products to customer interactions. 

A third area of trust was in their employees. To drive innovation, you need to embed a culture of innovation. Insurers need to trust that their employees will have great ideas and know what needs to be done at the operational level. This will enable and empower employees to do the right thing for the insurer and the customer. 

Final thoughts 

There were many other topics that were covered at Insurance Innovators USA 2023. These are just the ones that I found kept coming up on a recurrent basis across the sessions.

If you are an insurer looking for help with providing a better customer journey, sorting and leveraging your data, or building trust with your customers and employees, visit us here to learn more about how we can help.