Last week, ITC – the world’s largest InsureTech event – took place in Las Vegas. It brought together industry executives, technology entrepreneurs, and investors to initiate discussion on innovation in insurance. After more than a year of the pandemic – which forced the conference to go virtual in 2020 – ITC 2021 returned to in-person from October 4th to October 6th to focus on the theme “Data Transformation and Digital Innovation.” ValueMomentum was proud to be a title sponsor of the event. The conference platform allowed ValueMomentum to showcase the innovative work of insurer clients and the contributions of technology partners – Mendix and MuleSoft – in the area of insurance customer experience.
Delivering on Customer Experience in Insurance
Customer experience is undoubtedly the new competitive battleground for all businesses, across industries. Within insurance, customer experience can refer to the experience of the policyholder, the agent, the broker, the partner, or the internal employees. To address the needs of these customers, ValueMomentum invited its insurer clients – Abby Hosseini (CIO, Mercury Insurance), Soheil Zohreh (EVP of Technology, Hiscox) and Jamie Kinsley (SVP, Technology & Product Management, TMHCC) – to discuss how they might deliver the right customer experiences to their customers, in a break-out session titled “Delivering Differentiated Customer Experiences in a Digital Era.” The session was moderated by ValueMomentum’s Head of Insurance, James Carlucci.
The speakers began the discussion by defining customer experience. They identified brokers, agents, independent agents, carriers, direct, underwriters, and partners as the different types of customers they serve. After identifying their customers, the speakers spoke about how they might deliver differentiated customer experiences. This can be summarized in three steps:
- Cluster customers into different customer groups based on their needs and requirements.
- Identify the expectations of the customer groups.
- Fulfill customer requirements to deliver an experience that matches their expectations.
This exercise of clustering customers into different groups helped the insurers immensely. They could focus on the interests of each group, thus improving the customer experience. As for the expectations of each group, this depended on different factors.
Jamie Kinsley of TMHCC noted that for her group of customers, common expectations were ease of access, ease of use, and fast, self-processing resources. Other speakers echoed Kinsley’s observations. To fulfill these expectations, the speakers discussed what each expectation required. For Kinsley, delivering to her customers meant having best in class coverages, simple applications to quote, and ultra-flexible quote templates.
As with any project, measuring the success of the customer experience is of upmost importance. To this end, Hosseini, Zohreh and Kinsley shared the success metrics they found successful. These included regular surveys with customers, one-on-one interviews, quote-to-issue rates, increased number of submissions, and decreased number of support tickets.
Technology is Key in Offering Differentiated Customer Experiences
Although Mercury, Hiscox and Tokio Marine HCC have different groups of customers and different expectations from these customer groups, they found similarities in experience. The thoughtful way in which each company engaged with their customers, understood their customers’ needs, and leveraged technology to drive differentiated customer experiences, enabled them to successfully deliver to all their customer groups.
As the first big in-person event since the pandemic began, ITC proved to be a success for the ValueMomentum team. The event allowed interaction with insurer partners, helped build relationships with new clients, and offered opportunities to share experience and perspective on important industry topics. Ultimately, the event allowed ValueMomentum to both learn from and share ideas with leaders in the insurance and technology space.
ValueMomentum is excited to drive innovation in insurance and leverage technology to help insurers deliver on their Core, Digital, and Data initiatives!