COVID-19 and the resulting move to a digital-first environment have accelerated both the demand and the expectation from consumers that organizations will help them buy, change and administer the products they provide. There’s a lot of research coming out of the insurance industry now which corroborates the warning of ‘digitize or die’, and there are a lot of insurtechs hitting the market which is transforming the rules of customer engagement. That’s why it’s vital to keep in mind the concept of an omnichannel experience. Let’s learn, in particular, what a technology-driven omnichannel experience means for insurers and consumers. Here are some insights from Hugh Pelling, Senior Account Director at Blue Prism, into this.
“The big juggernauts are having to go through that change now to keep up. “If they’re going to remain competitive, it’s absolutely fundamental that these organizations provide ease of access and customer retention, which I think is all linked into that customer effort score. When the customer effort is high, the gut reflex of a customer is always to look for another provider, [able] to provide those tech-savvy solutions that enable customers to easily procure new policies or to swap policies midterm.”
Let’s look at an example of why intelligent automation is integral to developing an omnichannel experience. Pelling and the team are working at the moment with a client whose motor insurance renewals journey is particularly complex and predicated on the voice channel. The key drivers of crafting an omnichannel experience include reduced customer efforts, reduced cost to serve, reduced service times, and increased revenue. Given that combination of requirements, the logical approach Blue Prism is exploring with this client is that of self-service – which will utilize chatbots or virtual assistants to guide people through the renewals process.
“They can select a particular process or renewals activity, that they wish to complete and this can be driven and guided by a virtual assistant or chatbot, but it’s also completed by our digital workers in the background, bypassing human intervention altogether. That’s a great example of how our platform comes pre-built with skills capability and channel capability pre-populated within the platform. The skills element is the ability to understand what the client’s process request is, to understand their communication, and support that using skills such as natural language processing (NLP), but also to guide that customer in real-time through the use of a chatbot or a virtual assistant. The channel capability is [multi-faceted]. We’ve got chat and we’ve got self-serve pre-built into the system and that can be triggered in a number of ways, for instance, from a handheld device or digital self-serve – i.e. logging into the portal via your laptop.”
