Digitise customer touchpoints across the physical and digital landscape to deliver a superb customer experience

The key driver for digitising customer touchpoints is about being accommodative to the customer, no matter how customers want to interact with their insurance carriers. Subsequently, every interaction between the parties has to be on each customer’s terms—meeting customers when and where they want to be. Digitising customer touchpoints therefore has to make life simple for the customer by simplifying or minimising transitions across all channels of communications.

Kyung Bae, solutions architect of Airkit, will speak during a panel session titled “Digitize customer touchpoints across the physical and digital landscape to deliver a superb customer experience”, which will be held as part of Day 1 of Claims Innovation USA on July 13, 2021.

The debate will consider how to deliver a digital claims experience and the successful strategies for moving to digital-first “contactless” interactions to increase insurance customer engagement. It will define a personalised claims experience and how to achieve the right combination of automation and the human touch; identify key factors to successfully implement a touchless claims system; how to ensure companies have a robust data strategy and that each touch point in the customer journey is integrated and seamless; and clarify the practical steps needed to transform legacy core systems into digital platforms that support deeper connectivity with customers.

The conversation, with the theme of “Deliver Excellent Customer Experience in Claims” will also reveal how the internet of things and connected devices can enable a shift from reactive response to proactive prevention of losses; and discuss how this can be leveraged to improve customer experience.

Ahead of the event Bae spoke to Intelligent Insurer about some of the points he will raise.

What are the most successful strategies for moving to digital-first “contactless” interactions?

The typical problem is the vertical nature of these types of processes. The strategy to be more customer-centric is to separate the underlying process from the customer’s needs—focusing on what makes life easier for the customer. This involves using data to support processes.

When a customer enters a process, they might need to enter information the carrier already has—about a claim, for example. In order to be more focused on the customer’s needs, the carrier should use the assets it already has to simplify the process as much as possible. Making the customer provide information the carrier already has just makes the experience worse.

While the carrier needs to collect as much information as possible to make the right decisions, it needs to be mindful of how that impacts the customer experience. I have seen people having to go through some process with a company of which they are a current customer, and having to enter their information again. That’s very silly!

It should be an iterative process where the goal is to simplify and limit the interaction so that the customer thinks the whole process was easy to do. Data becomes a vital aspect of that.

How do you define a personalised claims experience and achieve the right combination of automation and the human touch?

Meeting customers where they want to be is part of this. When you call in and you are presented with an interactive voice response experience, many people try to get through it as quickly as possible to talk to someone. Depending on the product—a life claim versus a car or home claim—the experience will be different. For a life claim you may want to speak to a person.

It’s about having all of the data available as part of that. This allows for a quick interaction, and it makes the carrier more sympathetic to a customer. Carriers need to adjust to how a customer engages: if the offer is to fill in a form on a website, or to make contact through a website, I might do it if it’s quicker, but other customers may not wish to do this.

How do you identify key factors to successfully implement a touchless claims system?

This is where analytics comes into play. If you have an existing process and are able to track the customer interactions with the process, you can use that data to identify areas of difficulty and make some adjustments to the interaction with the customer.

Key factors are understanding what is going on, and then having the ability to adjust.

How do you ensure you have a robust data strategy and that each touch point in the customer journey is integrated and seamless?

First, you must ensure that you have a data strategy. One of the key points is to ensure that you have the data to support the process. What makes your data strategy robust? This is dependent on your goals. One is simplicity for the customer, and the other is using all your data to adjust your process.

If you have a claims process that requests 15 pieces of information and you find trends based on demographics, you might find that there are similarities in how the responses are entered. You can use the correlation data as a means to drive the data in your process without having to ask the customer, simplifying the processes.

Data strategy must include data access considerations, as any process needs to be able to access data (keeping security in mind). This might require an application programming interface (API). Having access to the data through an API makes your data strategy more robust.

Another angle is to ensure that you have access to all the data. In many companies where I’ve worked, data was siloed to their various processes. Having all that data available from anywhere would be part of the strategy to ensure that your touchpoints in your process are seamless, allowing you to pull in data when you need it. This makes the experience easier as the customer doesn’t have to enter it again.

What are the practical steps needed to transform legacy core systems into digital platforms that support deeper connectivity with customers?

Good question. When you think about trying to transform legacy systems into digital platforms my first reaction would be: don’t do that! Legacy systems weren’t meant for what you are trying to transform them into. Build out a separate customer experience platform independent of your legacy core systems, and then build an interface between them to allow the customer experience platform to interact with them.

Essentially, this means creating a digital platform that is geared towards customer experience as well as having the data integration you need. Legacy systems are still needed, but if you try to transform them it’s going to be a long road to achieve what companies are trying to do today.

What would you like delegates to take away from your presentation?

We’re in a time where companies are required to meet the customer where they want to be met. The main point is that customer experience becomes a first-tier technology requirement for engagement. It has to be one of the most important aspects of how a company allocates spending. When companies start to create their technology budgets, they need to focus on customer experience.

This is the starting point for digitising customer touchpoints across the physical and digital landscape to deliver a superb customer experience.

Kyung Bae, solutions architect at Airkit, is speaking at Intelligent Insurer’s Claims Innovation USA Virtual Event (July 13–15). The event brings together 60+ expert speakers on claims transformation and is free to attend for insurers and brokers/agents.  Register now to access 15+ hours of content live and on demand.