Why should insurance companies invest in digital channels (web and mobile apps)
Omnichannel customer experience gives insurance companies the ability to grow and develop. Learn what rewards insurers can reap with digitalization, what channels to develop, and how to do this successfully.
We rarely think about what digitalization really means, considering it is just a set of simple “online” capabilities. Unfortunately, digitalization has become a buzzword, but its meaning turns out to be more serious than we expect. Using the right digital technology can bring new opportunities and values to versatile businesses, including the insurance sector. So, what are the best digital tools that can bring success to insurers?
Before painting a picture, let’s translate what we understand by “digital channels.” There’s nothing really hard: digital channels are paths and platforms for communication between a business and its customers. For insurers, the most suitable paths are custom-designed mobile applications and web portals.
Learn more about digital channels for insurance
Benefits of digital channels for the insurance industry
To acknowledge the importance of investing in digital channels, let’s find out what rewards insurers, and their customers can reap. Below you will see the key benefits of digital channels, but keep in mind that each company is unique, and it should develop its strategy and approach to digital technology adoption.
Increase customer engagement
Automating and increasing customer engagement is probably one of the most important rewards insurers get with digital channels like mobile and web apps, revolutionizing the insurance business model. Today, people want to contact an insurer as quickly as possible in various cases: buy a travel policy, submit a claim, make an appointment with a doctor, etc. However, call centers don’t satisfy customers with the speed of solving the abovementioned issues as people have to wait several hours to days for a resolution. In contrast, web portals, mobile apps, or chatbots can be contacted instantly when the case happens.
Automate engagement with clients
This is automation at its best: customers get notifications once their appointment is created, processed, or completed as well as when they need to renew a policy. There’s no need to contact a call center in order to send some photos of damages — everything can be sent directly in the mobile app. However, it’s important to note that just simply developing a custom app is not enough. Insurance mobile or web app development is a serious project that requires rethinking business processes, identifying goals, and mapping user journeys. We’ll focus on these points in a different section.
Become branchless and paper-free
Going to an insurance agency office to buy a travel policy is like you are living in the last century. Almost all interactions with an agent can be replaced with an AI-powered chatbot or other digital capabilities (mobile/web). For insurers, it means they don’t need to house all their business processes in buildings — that calls for the ability to maintain business with a minimum number of branches. The same goes for papers — all documents like policy agreements, medical records, and claims are stored in a digital format. That’s a huge eco-friendly trend followed by millions of businesses nowadays.
Reduce the load to the call center
Automated interactions and sales processes mean cost reduction by offering users real-time access to insurance products and services. With a mobile app at customers’ fingertips, call centers get much fewer calls; therefore, the load, as well as costs, can be easily reduced.
Increase efficiency and transparency of interaction with customers
Loyal customers are those who are satisfied with a service. So, what do insurance consumers want? Actually, not that much: quick response, ability to file a claim and get paid online, and on-time information required. Mobile apps and web portals with self-service functionalities provide users with all that is mentioned. Transparent communication features, efficient workflows, and a high level of service — all allow for retaining customers and attracting new ones.
Offer product-specific features to clients
Various product-specific features can be developed depending on the type of insurance the company provides. For example, health insurers can provide their customers with the ability to make an appointment with a doctor on a convenient date, choose the nearest clinic, and keep all the history inside the mobile/web app. Another good feature of car insurance is making an appointment with the technician in case your car has been damaged due to an accident.
Expert recommendations for insurers: How to build a digital channel that will meet all your requirements?
As promised, in this section, we’ll focus on the prerequisites for building a digital channel that will meet your business goals and expectations. An in-depth product discovery should be made no matter what channel you consider developing: a mobile app, a web portal, or a chatbot integrated with a messenger. So, here are the key steps that should be followed before the development starts. For insurance companies with limited in-house IT resources, it’s better to search for a professional software development vendor to create an app.
- Start with stating your problem. As an insurance agency, you definitely have the established order of business processes that all need to be thoroughly explored. Your customers can also say a lot — there will be many people who don’t like waiting for a reply from a call center operator or don’t know how to purchase a policy online. All feedback can be of great benefit in identifying the issues and defining the best digital ways to solve those.
- Define business objectives. That may sound like, “We’d like 50% of customer inquiries to be made via a mobile app” or “We’d like to sell more services on a web portal.” Business goals will differ from agency to agency, but all will be focused on improvements driving growth and revenue. Clear goals help software vendors design the appropriate project roadmap, select the right technology tools, and rethink their business processes.
- Conduct research. An in-depth analysis of existing software and IT infrastructure is needed to identify weaknesses and outline opportunities the new software or features could bring. In addition, the analysis can uncover at what stages users feel most stressed or confused using the current software systems or services provided by an insurance provider.
- Analyze competitors. If you want to gain a competitive edge, you should know what your competitors do wrong and right. That’s why it’s essential to explore your competitors’ pain points and the good features they provide their customers with. Probably, you’ll be inspired by some ideas or functionalities your company doesn’t have.
- Generate hypotheses. That’s all about collecting starting points of evidence about what interaction with your company will satisfy your customers as well as meet your goals. UI/UX researchers held interviews with users to discover what problems they had at each step of communication with an insurance company.
- Create buyer persona descriptions. Your customers have a different life and job experiences, pains, goals, and expectations. Therefore, they are your buyer personas. Describe similar categories of people to understand better what they want, need, and expect from your services. Furthermore, customer journeys should be created to show what users would like to get during interaction with the insurance services provider.
- Describe business processes. Once all stages of product discovery are completed, the company’s business processes should be aligned with customer journeys, which becomes a ground for candidate architecture and user experience design.
- Create user stories. After the research, describe the features that need to be developed. The descriptions should be written from the buyer personas’ perspective. That is called a user story — it shows how a new functionality will benefit customers.
Final Thoughts
The future of the insurance sector is a personalized approach to a customer where all the interaction with the latter is individualized through custom-built digital channels. By implementing omnichannel customer experience, insurers can sell more products and services, automate sales, marketing, and other operations, increase revenue, and reduce manual and paperwork. However, investing in mobile/web apps and chatbots requires significant resources: UX/UI specialists, solution/software architects, developers, and test engineers to build a high-quality solution. Although such projects are complex and long-term, they can bring fundamental business values, so consider digital channel development if you’d like to reap digitalization rewards.
