Maximizing Policyholder Retention: CX Strategies for Insurance Contact Centers

But the benefits of customer experience go beyond intangibles like delivering higher levels of satisfaction and setting yourself apart from the competition—modern insurance call centers can reap benefits in almost all areas from offering better customer experience.

According to McKinsey, companies that “consistently offer best-in-class customer experiences” see a range of benefits, including:

• being 80% more likely to retain customers and sustain customer loyalty
• seeing greater success with cross-selling and upselling
• achieving higher NPS scores and customer referrals
• reducing CAC and improving CSAT
• achieving a 100% increase in annual premium growth compared to companies with lower CX

Not only does improved CX make a difference for your customers, but that improved customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty make a tangible difference toward your customer retention, acquisition costs, profits, growth, marketing efficiency, and more.

Of course, knowing that you need to create better customer experiences and actually knowing how to do so are two different things.

Today’s customers have higher expectations, more demands, and less flexibility when those expectations aren’t met. After all, with more choices for insurance on the market, customers don’t need to be flexible—if you can’t meet their expectations, they’ll simply find someone else who can. According to some research, as many as 92% of customers will switch to another brand if they have three (or fewer!) bad experiences.

But what exactly do customers today expect from their insurance providers? Customers in 2023 want:

• comprehensive choices and flexible policy options suited to their situation
• efficient and flexible services
• quick service, whether related to claims, policy processing, or customer services
• convenient digital options that fit their busy lifestyle
• friendly and knowledgeable help when they have questions or concerns

To get ahead—and stay ahead—in today’s market, insurers need to prioritize the customer experience, providing effortless, convenient, and customized experiences that put the customer in the driver’s seat.

90% of customers expect it, but 78% feel that it rarely, if ever, happens in their experiences with brands. What is it?

Omnichannel support.

An omnichannel strategy uses advanced technology and integrated data and customer management, and contact systems to allow agents to offer customers a seamless experience.

With omnichannel, customers can contact your brand through any channel, and the next agent who speaks to them will have their entire history—past purchases, customer service requests, website page views, billing and payments, and more. This allows agents to deliver streamlined experiences and a higher level of personalization and prevents the customer from having to repeat themselves or provide an entire history each time they call.

For insurance providers, omnichannel is more important than ever to stand out from the crowd. A recent report showed that millennials—the largest customer group today—contact insurers 2.5x more than other customer groups through social media and twice as much as other groups via mobile. For insurers to win over this generation—and younger ones—a seamless digital experience is necessary.

Omnichannel strategies not only support that seamless digital experience but also provide more straightforward, cost-effective, and personalized options for connecting and interacting with customers, leading to greater retention, brand loyalty, and effectiveness.

An omnichannel approach isn’t just useful for boosting customer satisfaction with a streamlined experience, though. It also provides a more integrated way to use both customer-shared and experiential data to support retention.

Customer data—when used well—can be a strong driver of retention, personalization, customer satisfaction, purchase value, and more. However, more insurers aren’t doing enough to collect it, analyze it, or implement it. Consider, for example, that with the right data, you can:

• communicate with customers at integral times throughout the year rather than just when renewal season is approaching
• deliver more personalized quotes or insurance policies from the beginning
• offer hyper-relevant interactions and experiences designed to increase conversions and retention

Not only does more accurate data lead to better experiences and higher conversions and retention, but it also builds trust and loyalty to your insurance company—which in turn feeds into more renewals and higher retention rates. It’s a positive feedback loop that keeps on giving—but it starts with your data. As a result, insurers need to increase their focus on gathering, analyzing, and implementing customer data.

This can start with collating and analyzing experiential data from customers—such as website interactions, previous renewals, or customer service requests—and making it easy for customers to share additional data with their insurer for more personalized service and better quotes. Once the data is obtained, it must be integrated into the customer experience for personalized offers, communication, and policies to strengthen retention and loyalty.

Personalization begins with data—but it shouldn’t stop there. Creating personalized experiences is one of the biggest drivers of positive customer experiences today and is a major contributor to customer retention and loyalty. Consider some of the recent data:

As a result, insurance call centers that prioritize personalization stand to improve retention, engagement, revenue, marketing efficiency, and more. Even better—personalization doesn’t have to be massive, and it can be integrated into almost any stage of the marketing or customer journey.

For example, insurers might consider:

• using omnichannel solutions to deliver personalized quotes and policy documents to callers who recently viewed standard policies online
• offering personalized policy upgrades based on known changes in a customer’s life situation
• recommending relevant offers for packaged insurance bundles or add-ons based on the customer’s situation
• enabling automatic premium adjustments based on data from customer behavior
• using aggregated data to create customer segments and provide more relevant communications, or create more targeted marketing to look-alike segments

And these are just a few examples! The important thing to note is that the only wrong way to do personalization is not to do it. Whether you have a small or large personalization scheme, creating personalized offers, policies, communications, and interactions is key to providing exceptional customer experiences.

Customers today expect a digital experience—and they can expect it because most companies are already giving it to them.

Of course, there are the giants like Amazon or Netflix that provide digital-first experiences, but brands across all industries are conforming to today’s digital expectations. From e-commerce to banking, education to healthcare, industries must respond to consumer expectations through digital experiences.

Unfortunately, many insurers are lagging behind the curve. Fortunately, that paves the way for great insurance agencies and companies to stand out by providing exceptional digital experiences. For many customers, digital experiences are a key decision factor when considering brands to work with and insurance providers:

As a result, insurance providers are on the hook to speed their digital transformation and provide customers with the experiences they expect. Digital transformation in insurance may look like:

• providing digital intake forms and allowing customers to onboard online or remotely
• offering a variety of support options, such as live chat, video calling, texting, and so on
• allowing customers to initiate and process claims through online portals
• providing digital reminders for policy updates, renewals, and so on
• creating easy and convenient payment and policy renewal processes

Digital transformation changes the experience for customers, but it should also improve backend workflows, making processes even more efficient for customers and employees alike. For example, insurers could be leveraging modern technology more fully to create integrated ecosystems, automate claims processing, improve self-service options, and fully embrace digital and mobile channels.

While every company and industry should analyze their customer journey to identify and improve key customer touchpoints, with insurers, there’s one touchpoint that tends to make or break the entire experience: making a claim.

A whopping 83% of customers who were dissatisfied with the insurance claim process they’d experienced planned to switch—or had already switched—to another insurer. As a result, insurers have a lot to lose if the process of making a claim is a hassle or otherwise disappointing—and a lot to gain if you can wow your customers with a convenient, straightforward claims process.

What does good CX look like for insurance claims? In short, it follows the same rules as other customer experiences—make it fast, make it easy, and make it convenient.

In a recent study, McKinsey found five qualities as key to driving customer satisfaction in a claims process:

• the speed of the claims process
• ease of communication throughout the process
• insurance employees’ knowledge and professionalism
• insurance employees’ friendliness and courtesy
• the transparency and ease of the process as a whole

The study further found—perhaps more surprisingly—that the settlement amount the claim resulted in actually turned out to be less important to customers than the ease, flexibility, and service of the claim process overall.

Insurers who want to improve retention through CX should take a closer look at the entirety of the claims process and identify:

• What and where are the key touchpoints in this process?
• Where do backlogs usually occur in this process, and how can they be alleviated?
• How can we improve communication throughout the process?
• How frequently do clients have to contact us about open claims, and how can we reduce that number?
• How long does the claims process usually take, from start to finish, and what steps can we automate or speed up to reduce that amount of time?
• What is the average CSAT after speaking about a claim with one of our representatives, and how can this be improved?

Whenever possible, the claims process should be digitized to improve speed and convenience. As a key touchpoint for insurance provider loyalty, focusing on this process will yield outsized returns.

Ultimately, all of these improvements are designed to create a more customer-centric strategy and operational plan for your business. Ideally, though, insurers who are looking to maximize policyholder retention and satisfaction shouldn’t take an ad-hoc approach to customer experience.

Instead, you should develop a customer-centric culture that places the needs and preferences of your customers at the forefront of all business and product decisions. Rather than focusing on new technologies or personalization or any other singular tactic for its own sake, consider how it fits into a broader strategy of customer excellence and experience.

For example, consider how self-service options support a customer-centric model. The data is clear: customers want to be able to get answers to their questions or take care of small problems without having to contact support:

So, customers clearly need and want self-service. Not only does it create a more streamlined experience for your company—after all, self-service options are available 24/7 for customers, don’t require additional staff, and can serve many customers at once—they also provide a streamlined, convenient, and easy experience for your audience.

Any CX or digital transformation strategy should take into account what customers want, how to most effectively provide it to them, and how customer-centric the solution is.

Finally, all of this may seem like an outsized amount of work—and for many companies, especially smaller insurance agencies who are used to working with local teams and clients and not on a larger scale—it is.

That doesn’t make it impossible or exempt you from needing to strengthen your customer experience to keep up. For many smaller businesses (and large ones, too!), outsourcing your customer support or aspects of your customer experience can make the difference between lagging behind others in your industry and creating standout customer experiences that skyrocket your business’ growth and profitability.

For example, at ROI CX Solutions, our customer experience experts support insurance agencies and companies through:

• 24/7 customer support
• personalized service that blends in seamlessly with your in-house team
• HIPAA and PCI compliance and other data privacy standards to protect your client’s data
• inbound or outbound call center support
• cross-selling or upselling
• experience with a variety of insurance types, from health and dental to life, home, and more
• omnichannel solutions for seamless and exceptional customer service

Partnering with an outsourced customer service provider doesn’t just take some customer service tasks off your plate—it also connects you with a team of experts that can provide strategic support, technological solutions, and round-the-clock service to scale your support and deliver on customer expectations.