Insurers must ‘disrupt their own markets’

An insurance customers’ journey should be of the utmost importance to insurers as they seek to increasingly leverage the online market.

That was the view of a panel of insurance experts at the IIS Conference currently taking place in London.

Michael Spiteri, a partner at PwC, said: “We know customers expect more. They talk to each other on a regular basis. They seek information and they have a voice and know how to use it.”

He added that insurers should not wait for disruption to come to them, but instead should think about how they might change and disrupt their own markets by offering customers different products that would build trust and confidence.

Danny van der Eijk, an executive board member at Achmea, explained that people are still hesitant as a customer’s journey is not consistent from beginning to end.

“If you make a call and then go online, or vice versa, you have very different experiences and that doesn’t support trust,” he said.

Within legacy systems, he added that the customer journey is inconsistent because insurers continue to lack data which could provide the journey over a lifetime cycle and from a consumer point of view there are too many interruptions.

Stephen Pendry, senior director of the financial services industry at Salesforce, agreed with Eijk: “I agree completely about consistency. But it’s not complete with most websites. I can do research but there is no click to buy button. That is really holding back adoption of a complete process.”