Cleaning Up Your Data Can Improve Your Customer Experience, Your Retention Rates, and Your Bottom Line
If you’re looking to shore up revenue leaks at your insurance company, you’re not only looking at a task that can be tackled by your accounting or management team – it’s just as critical to get the support of experts who are versed in digital transformation for insurance providers.
Why? Chances are, you pay too much to maintain a legacy data storage structure that keeps data siloed and prevents your employees from efficiently accessing the information they need.
Worse, revenue lost from bad data practices starts as a leak that quickly floods your organization. Data inefficiencies translate to bad customer experiences and directly affect your ability to retain customers or recruit new ones.
And as you know, customer retention in insurance is supposed to be easy: it’s an industry that benefits greatly from customers’ inertia. But, with the insurance landscape changing more quickly than ever, you make sure you deliver an experience that doesn’t send your customers looking elsewhere for faster claims support or better customer service. To stay in the game, you need to wow your customers.
Not to mention the fact that the technology that improves customer experiences is also great at improving employee productivity – a happy marriage of priorities that you can achieve through digital transformation around three common sources of revenue leaks.
1. Stop Paying Too Much for Inefficient, Siloed Data Storage
When was the last time you evaluated your data storage costs? If you still rely on on-prem server storage, you may be able to cut costs by transitioning to a cloud-based or hybrid data storage model that requires less overhead management and removes barriers to accessing on-site data for remote staff.
If you’re at one of the many insurance companies that still relies on legacy infrastructure for data storage, you probably are familiar with the challenges this presents internally first-hand: accessing data takes time, and this delay directly leads to more time representatives spend on the phone with customers. It’s easy to see how the cost of an outdated approach to data storage results in customer (and employee) churn.
If shifting to fully cloud-based operations is too challenging at the moment, consider adopting a hybrid data storage solution that will give your team the visibility they need into the data they rely on for their core responsibilities.
This process will also set you up to begin your automation journey: with your most important data cleaned and unified, you’ll have the opportunity to achieve more through automation and new technologies.
2. Don’t Waste Your Team’s Time on Work that’s Better Done Through Automation
Great customer support is consistent, fast, and genuinely useful. When a policyholder has a question about their coverage, they shouldn’t have to hunt for a phone number on your website, call your company, and wait in a queue to confirm information that’s already available in writing.
Your employees’ time can be better used on more productive tasks. By implementing plug-and-play support, insurance companies can save time and refocus their resources on problems that require a human touch. This can improve your customer service experience, which helps bolster your retention rate and in turn shores up this common revenue leak.
Rather than paying your people to spend their time on tasks that don’t do a lot for the company and that would be better delivered through automation, leverage your data to improve operational efficiency throughout your company. This includes customer touchpoints at the very top of the funnel.
3. Leverage the Data You Have to Reduce the Number of Incomplete Applications in Your Records
Consider your current onboarding experience. Perhaps they visit your website, enter the information required to receive a quote, and then click “Submit.” On the next screen, they see a prompt to call your team to secure that quote. Perhaps they’re busy or want to think it over, and they close the window. In this all too common scenario, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to get that prospect to sign up for a policy.
Even if your company is currently committed to having customers speak with a representative before signing up, you can still streamline that person’s journey from receiving a quote to paying their first premium.
By leveraging the data they’ve input and following up with a personalized email campaign, you can win that prospect back and get them to convert. To do this successfully, you’ll need to have an integrated data system that has the ability to forward the email of each person who completed a quote request but bailed before signing.
Reengaging these leads and demonstrating to them that you have the ability to deliver an excellent customer experience will help reduce the number of folks that fall out of the top of your funnel (and boost your revenue over time).
4. Cleaner Data Improves Employee and Customer Experiences Across the Board
Insurance companies that have been around for decades have the distinct advantage of holding a tremendous cache of customer data, but the true benefit is that established insurance providers know their customers. The challenge for this group today is to demonstrate their care for customers, as well as their expertise, across digital channels.
By transforming how you approach your data, you have the opportunity to plug the gaps that lead to customer churn and deliver a better employee experience with less operational friction day-to-day.
To find out how the experts at Apexon can help you on your digital transformation journey, contact us today.
