People often talk about the customer experience and the engagement model. This is an easier task when a business has regular interactions with its customers like banks and retailers. However, for insurers, this is a challenge.
First of all, insurers have infrequent interactions with their customers. When there is interaction, the insurance company is usually asking for money at renewal or dealing with a loss such as a car accident.
Secondly, insurance companies face a saturated market. Honestly who needs a second car insurance policy!
Finally, in today’s hyper-connected world, it is real-time or no-time. Customers initiate and interact across multiple channels.
To overcome these challenges, the goal for insurers is to create an ideal customer engagement at each and every interaction. This means that insurers need to be able to provide relevant and insightful advice, recommendations, services and offers at exactly the right time with the right message.
To achieve effective, decision-driven marketing includes:
- Data management – Supporting effectively real-time interactions and real-time decisions; data must be comprehensive and must provide a single-view customer profile
- Predictive analytics –Having the ability to combine analytics and models with business processing is critical to success for deploying the decision-making insights into operational environments
- Marketing tools – Planning, executing and monitoring inbound and outbound marketing strategies, campaigns and results
- Channel management – Having the ability to support and manage an ever-expanding number of diverse channels
- Speed – Managing customer interactions, data, sophisticated analytics, integration with core systems cohesively in real-time to provide “next best advice”.
While the bar for customer engagement excellence is largely being set by companies outside the insurance industry, the leading insurers of today and more importantly tomorrow, will be those that view real-time interaction and decision capabilities as fundamental to their future growth.
The benefits of real-time, decision-driven marketing capabilities are significant. To learn more either download the white paper or register for a webinar on October 2nd at 2pm EST with Deb Smallwood, Founder of Strategy Meet Action.
I’m Stuart Rose, Global Insurance Marketing Principal at SAS. For further discussions, connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
