Summary
This report explores the strategic drivers for the adoption of AI and automation to enhance the customer experience in general insurance and how these technologies can help close the gap that exists between customer expectations of digital interactions with their insurers, and the insurers’ ability to meet them that Verint have defined as the Engagement Capacity Gap™. It is based on industry research, interviews with Tim Yorke, the Former COO of AXA, Lee Dainty, Commercial Claims Director at RSA and Dr Chris Humphris, VP Digital First Engagement EMEA at Verint, and contributions from Liz Ryan, Head of Claims Performance & Insights, Zurich Insurance and Steve Bell, VP, EMEA Solutions Consulting at Verint Systems.
Meeting the customer experience challenge
Customer experience, and especially the digital customer experience, has become the key differentiator and driver of competitive advantage in general insurance. The pandemic drove people to digital channels and has accelerated an escalation in customer expectations (largely driven by improving CX in other sectors) that was already difficult to keep pace with. The end of dual pricing and the race to the bottom on pricing happily orchestrated by the aggregators is over, and the next 1-2 years will see CX, and especially claims experience, become a key differentiator and driver of retention, which is now the key KPI: historically, acquisition has taken precedence over retention, and has been the main barometer of business performance: this is no longer the case for market leaders.
Tim Yorke:
Because of the pricing regulation changes you can’t just go and suck in a load of business by pricing it low and then managing up because the rules have changed. So now retention becomes absolutely critical.
Verint’s The State of CX Trends 2021 report confirms that CX has eclipsed both price and product/service as drivers of brand loyalty:
AI and automation are increasingly seen as the key to delivering differentiating digital customer experiences: the wider availability and accessibility of external data sources, coupled with higher quality and more easily accessible internal data, and the evolving tech capabilities to both leverage and extract actionable customer insight, means that the foundations for realising the potential strategic value of intelligent automation are increasingly in place.
This is unlocking investment in these technologies. However, automation and AI is not a panacea, especially in insurance where human interaction remains essential to some interactions – a successful automation strategy is as much about what you don’t automate as it is about what you do automate.
Dr Chris Humphris:
Automation that is poorly integrated into the customer journey, plus chatbots created with too little attention to conversational design, have led to ...
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