With disruption hitting financial services businesses from all angles – fintech challenger brands, online aggregators, not to mention macro-economic factors and regulatory stress – it’s no surprise banks and insurers are going all in on customer experience.
But if seamless insurance customer journeys are the end goal, there’s a vital step these companies need to take before they can get there.
Insurance Trailblazers are learning that they can only offer excellent customer experience when they have great internal relationships as a foundation. In other words, they have to get their own house in order and develop the internal relationships that are central to customer success.
Luckily, the same strategy can improve internal and external relationships: connecting the front, middle and back offices.
We’ve created an in-depth guide called Creating Connected Insurers, which explores how to improve customer experience in the insurance industry. In this blog, we’ll tackle one key theme — why (and how) insurers are tackling customer experience from the outside in.
Why visibility is essential
If your front, middle and back offices are siloed, you’ll experience it first and foremost as a lack of visibility. Front-line teams don’t know what the back office is working on, and vice versa. Paperwork gets lost, and deals get stuck in the pipeline – and you don’t notice until it’s too late.
Legacy processes and tech are usually to blame. They’re fragmented, keeping visibility low, transactions slow, and innovation nearly impossible.
But with an end-to-end platform like Salesforce, insurers can simplify, strengthen and connect the front, middle and back office around a single 360-degree view of the customer.
Features like the Insurance Console App in Financial Services Cloud help. It gives users easy access to customer policy, coverage and claims data in intuitive dashboards.
Likewise, adding intelligence to your platform with Lightning Flow means agents and customer service representatives can manage requests more efficiently. Not only will they have at-a-glance access to the data they need, but cases will be intelligently routed based on their ability to handle them.
All of this adds up to a more connected, efficient, better-informed process. Your people know who they need to collaborate with, and they waste less time asking around for missing information.
With the help of the Salesforce platform, financial services organisations have been able to achieve:
+38% improved productivity
+46% faster collaboration
+41% faster decision-making
The importance of technology
In today’s competitive market, customer journeys must be frictionless — and this is where technology comes in.
Legacy systems, siloed product data, and a complex architecture comprising multiple systems of record reduce the quality of service insurers can offer.
By using technology to streamline processes, insurers can make routine tasks easier for employees while improving interactions for prospects and policyholders. Plus, insurers can cut costs at the same time. It’s a win-win.
Technology enables service reps to leverage automation in contact centres and empowers customers with better information — faster.
61% of insurers plan to increase their investment in digital technologies and channels, according to research by Accenture.
If you’re an insurer who isn’t planning to invest in digital, you risk losing customers who will seek smoother experiences elsewhere.
The forgotten link: build better broker relationships
Your sales channel is the middle ground between your internal employee relationships and your relationships with end customers. As more sales move online, insurers rely more and more on brokers, aggregators, and other intermediaries.
Building strong relationships here is a major priority for firms that want to capitalise on these high-volume sales channels.
There are a few ways a customer experience platform can help. One of these is unifying data on individual broker performance, so relationship managers and product owners can keep on top of issues and grab opportunities to drive new business.
And when you can create custom apps and portals, your brokers get in-the-moment, self-service access to the data they need to close a deal.
Learn more about building better relationships – between employees, brokers and customers – in our Creating Connected Insurers guide.
Creating Connected Insurers
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