Customer intelligence will help an insurance company deepen its customer insights, choreograph its customer interactions and continuously improve its marketing performance. Unfortunately for all the progress made in recent years on customer relationship management and getting to know customers better, insurance companies are still not focusing on customers as much as they should be. To change this philosophy, insurers need to consider data, analytics and embrace an omni-channel strategy.

Firstly, to gain insight into what customers will do in the future, a company must understand what they have done in the past. Analytics can be used to manage historical customer data and understand the behavior patterns of not just their best, but also understand who are their worst – and unprofitable – customers.

Secondly, customers want to feel that their insurer understands them. They expect to be properly communicated with and treated consistently. Marketing efforts, therefore, must be well-orchestrated and synchronized across multiple channels.

But better customer intelligence is just one part of the customer-centricity story. To make it a winning story, insurance providers must also have robust strategies and processes in place to retain existing customers and acquire new ones; find new ways to maximize customer profitability through effective sales channels; and have more precise segmentation and better communications.

In other words, they must fully embrace customer relationship management, and deploy it within a business analytics framework. Such a framework will allow the insurer to maximize customer intelligence to get the best return from campaigns; optimize customer campaigns and channels by automatically tracking each campaign element; implement complex customer interaction strategies, such as multichannel and event-triggered campaigns; and create, deliver and track high-volume, opt-in, personalized e-mail marketing campaigns based on a thorough understanding of the customer.

One insurance company that understand the value of customer intelligence is the insurance aggregator website, Confused.com. SAS Analytics has enable them to better understand and segment millions of customers contacts resulting in higher acquisition rates, improved retention, lower marketing costs together with an opportunity to optimize campaigns across multi-distribution channels. Read more about the Confused.com case study

A truly customer-centric organization that improves the customer experience will reap the rewards. Putting customer and analytics at the centre will result in increased loyalty, revenues and profitability.

I’m Stuart Rose, Global Insurance Marketing Director at SAS. For further discussions, connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.