In today’s hyper-connected world, the major difficulty is to predict changes in the behaviour of the target. In recent years the biggest impact has been caused by mobile technologies that have radically changed consumer attitudes, fragmenting the costumer journey into micro-moments.
This theory of micro-moments represents a great opportunity for insurers because it multiplies the touchpoints with which they interact with customers, even in the phases prior to price evaluation. Thanks to the theory of micro-moments, today we can understand the user’s customer journey, the progressive maturation of a choice that starts upstream of the decision-making process and gradually refines its evaluations up to those moments prior to a purchase, whether online or offline or through an omnichannel journey.
Among the trends that have shaped the insurance customer’s digital journey so far, are: the mobile customer experience, do-it-yourself, omnichannel services, customer-centric innovation and going paperless. However, if we further analyze the technological and social trends underway, we can imagine that the future customer journey will be guided by developments that will affect the key aspects of the interaction between insurers and customers. There will be many moments that insurers can take advantage of to get in touch with the customer, and each touchpoint will become an opportunity to influence consumer decisions through new models, such as Smart Technologies. A research study conducted for RGI by Celent, Oliver Wyman Group, showed that over a third of insurance consumers would prefer to use virtual assistants to interact with their company rather than talking to a human operator. In addition, better use of the data available to the insurer will lead to a better understanding of consumers and the creation of customized products or services to meet their needs.
Given these changes, data will be the most important asset that can be used to respond to evolutions in the future customer journey, Data today is generated exponentially and is destined to grow with the use of the internet and mobile devices.
Every day more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated through the IoT world, i.e. mobiles, Smart TVs, connected cars, planes, etc. A mass of data that is potentially a very valuable source of information, yet its use remains largely unexplored due to the costs of management and processing, and reliability and uncertainty of use because of the protection of privacy and sensitive data.
In their traditional activities, insurers already collect a large amount of data (demographic, medical, credit, etc.) which has the advantage of being validated and low cost and yet still remains underutilized: even today 50% of companies use little or no data for analysis and/or underwriting.
A greater use of data would reap considerable benefits for the insurance business because such information could be used to: have more insight into its customers (insurers could save up to 43% of the time spent by users who perform data processing for reporting and monitoring activities), create predictive models to be used in underwriting (recommendation tools which, based on the history of user-insurer interactions, provide for the customer’s future purchases or interests and offer products/services with a up and cross selling approach), and save time and costs (according to Gartner, in 2020 chatbots and conversational interfaces will represent 85% of customer service interactions).
RGI will deal with these and other topics of innovation during the event scheduled for the 20th Annual Assicurazioni (12-13 November 2018) organized by Il Sole 24 Ore.
