rience,” says Mark Breading, partner,
Strategy Meets Action.
Those initiatives include technology
investments, from the back office to customer-facing systems, as well as changes
to processes and personnel. At larger
carriers, it is increasingly common to
find a chief customer experience officer.
Yet as a whole, insurers’ efforts fail to
meet consumers’ expectations. According to Capgemini, only 34 percent of
Gen Y customers have a positive overall
experience with insurers. Specific to the
digital channel, less than 30 percent of all
customers have a positive experience.
“There are individual insurance companies out there that are doing a good
job, but when you look at the overall
industry, it is falling short,” Cassidy says.
Finding Success
Succeeding in creating a good experience for the digital customer starts with
taking the right approach.
“Joining a social media site primar-
ily to try to sell products is a common
mistake,” Rabkin says. “The right way to
use social
media and
to network
is to pro-
mote the
insurance
company’s
overall
brand and
its reputa-
tion within
the medi-
asphere.’
That
includes focusing on providing informa-
tion and services, not selling products. It
includes monitoring and responding to
comments, but not getting into argu-
In 2013, Florida-based Security First
Insurance launched a platform called
SMC4, which stands for Social Media
Capture, Control, Communication,
and Compliance. Built on IBM Content
Analytics and the IBM FileNet Content
Management system, SMC4 analyzes
social channels and then prioritizes,
categorizes, and routes messages from
customers to the appropriate company
representative.
In 2015, the company added the
ability to respond via text messaging.
“Text messaging is the most reliable
form of communication in a disaster,
and in many cases text messages will go
through when traditional phone calls
will not,” says Marissa Buckley, vice
president of marketing.
The system also integrates software
from Wordle to create “word clouds,”
images created from keywords used by
customers in messages over a certain
time period. Common keywords used in
multiple inbound messages are added to
the image and sized, based on how frequently each word is used. (See Graphic
1, above.)
“If there is a major road blockage or a
specific area with major damage, we can
identify the issue quickly and visually
simply by looking at the word-cloud re-
port,” Buckley says. “It is another way for
us to better leverage incoming messages
to improve the service we offer custom-
ers and become even more proactive.”
Building Relationships
Research shows that customers are
interested in building an information-and service-based relationship with their
insurer. “Customers want detail and
advice from their insurer, whether it is
information to use in the purchasing decision or alerts about impending risks,”
Cassidy says.
Writing homeowners’ insurance in
hurricane-prone states, Security First
Insurance recognized that residents were
concerned about how a projected storm
track would impact them. In 2014, the
company enhanced its mobile app, Security First Mobile, to allow users—both
Shane Cassidy
Graphic 1
