The Insurance Industry can reposition by incorporating new digital technologies and improving customer experience. Here are a few tips.
The Pandemic and Financial Pandemonium
Consider for a moment that you are the Chief Revenue Officer of a leading Insurance Agency, responsible for year-over-year revenue increases. The world has been in the midst of a pandemic for more than a year, impacting jobs, healthcare, travel, mortgage loan repayments, etc., wreaking havoc on the global insurance industry and risk assessment, in general.
How are you going to refocus and continue to produce market-leading revenues when all the financial planning you have done is no longer based on pre-pandemic reality?
Move from Reaction to Proaction
In an excellent article about how Insurers should navigate the pandemic going forward[1], Neal Baumann, one of the co-authors of Deloitte’s 2021 Insurance Outlook: Accelerating recovery from the pandemic while pivoting to thrive [2], emphasizes the importance of:
1) Embracing Digital
2) Truly Understanding the Customer
3) Utilizing Automation, and
4) Future-proofing the operating model by investing in Digital Technologies.
Among many other tips to further prepare for the future, Baumann advises:
- Support customers: Pivot from responding to customer and broker queries, to helping them through these challenging times.
- Operationalize for the new normal: Implement digital, AI/machine learning…to enable effective ways of working—for employees, customers, and brokers…
These six proactive action items sound like expensive, time-consuming endeavors!
And yet, when I read the advice of Baumann, the industry thought-leader and Head of Deloitte’s Global Insurance practice and the Global Financial Services Industry Consulting practice, I smiled!!!
Meet your Policy Holders Face-to-Face
I smiled because my intention was to write an objective post about how insurance companies could take their first steps toward adapting to the “new normal”.
I wanted to draw parallels between the impact of the pandemic on policy holders and other personal and public disasters that result in insurance claims, such as a water main break, a hurricane or a major crash of financial markets.
My key take-away was to Meet your existing customers face-to-face (F2F) – masked and socially-distanced, of course – and to use digital technology to gain insights!
Yet, one advice column later, my entire focus was on Deloitte’s tips. Here’s why:
Reveal’s F2F.AI Solution Addresses 6 of Deloitte’s Top Repositioning Tips
Recognizing the void in monitoring customer experience in face-to-face encounters, such as in stores, in bank branches and in off-premises meetings with insurance agents, Reveal set about developing a technology that could capture and analyze these interactions, practically in real time.
Reveal F2F.AI provides automated, digital, analytical insights from face-to-face interactions and transactions. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Reveal’s F2F.AI produces audio playback, transcripts in multiple languages, customer sentiment, key words, and a wide range of cross-indicators on an enterprise scale.
Essentially, this means that an Insurance Agency employing F2F.AI as part of its repositioning program will be able to fine-tune its market insights, based on face-to-face meetings with its policy holders, on a daily basis.
Using this simple, but robust tool, agents can get to know their customers better, thereby being able to provide the personalized advice and support they want in a timely manner.
Drive Performance Improvement and Strategic Repositioning
As a bonus, an enlightened agency can gain insights into sales pitches and customer support techniques that are successful and profitable. These may be shared with agents to improve everyone’s performance, while continuously gaining further insights.
Digital analytics are also helpful to operational management, enabling better strategic planning and innovation, based on market demand and satisfaction.
So, in one plug-and-play solution, Reveal F2F.AI embraces digital, automation, AI, Future-proofing, and understanding and supporting customers.
Oh, and don’t forget to meet your customers Face-to-Face. This is Reveal’s expertise and the most personal and impactful domain for all service businesses.
[1] “How insurers can move from respond, to recover and thrive in the wake of COVID-19: Beyond crisis management”. Neal Baumann. https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/financial-services/articles/how-insurers-can-move-from-respond-to-recover-thrive-in-wake-of-covid-19.html
[2] “2021 Insurance Outlook: Accelerating recovery from the pandemic while pivoting to thrive”. Shaw and Baumann. December 3, 2020. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-services/financial-services-industry-outlooks/insurance-industry-outlook.html. In the report, Deloitte cites a 3-phase program for recovering from the COVID-19 crisis—respond, recover, and thrive.
