The advent of Internet and mobile apps has generated social media sites that provide ratings on customer experience based on user feedback. In particular, for the insurance industry, customer centricity and experience is evolving and the renewed impetus has been new channels of interaction like the web and mobile apps.

Real-time analytics to understand customer preferences, propensity to buy certain products and a certain type of marketing to implement targeted campaigns are used for large amount of structured or unstructured data, both internal and external. Insurance companies can learn from social media applications to provide relevant and contextual information to the user.

Traditionally, the interaction was primarily with an agent or a call center via phone or face to face. Today interaction is through multiple channels: insurers need to address customer experience solutions in a complete way.Today,customer expectations require thinking through all touch points and designing appropriate interactions and ensuring a consistent experience with quality customer data. An ideal design should be proactive and anticipate customer needs rather than react to a customer request.

The customer experience design must cover all touch points starting with shopping, buying, policy servicing and claims handling.

Finally, designing the customer experience should not just be an IT initiative that looks at bringing in new technologies like rich UI, mobile, big data and cloud. It should start with senior management articulating the company’s vision for transforming the customer experience to the next level. Business and IT then need to create an operating model and roadmap with prioritized capabilities and an incremental delivery plan that improves the customer experience in a measurable way.