Customer experience pains? Insurance to the rescue!

Companies worldwide are more and more focused on addressing and optimizing the customer journey. It’s a keyword that we encounter on a daily basis. But what is it? Here’s a great definition I found in SurveyMonkey: “The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.”

What’s important in this definition is that it requires an understanding of customers’ “real-world” journeys, which by nature can include different pain points. To overcome pain points, they have to be mapped, analyzed and handled, even if they cannot be resolved. While we can’t always control what goes wrong, we can control how we react – and that’s what makes the difference in the customer experience. Even small differences in customers’ journeys, especially as a response to something that went wrong, can have a significant impact on the experience as a whole.

Insurance is rapidly becoming a new enabler to address “real-world” pains, which have different connotations for different people, and even for the same person at different times and in different situations. For example: you finally decide to treat yourself to your dream skiing trip. You purchase a package 10 months in advance to get a better deal but are concerned there will not be enough snow and slopes may be closed. Insurance can come to the rescue through a snow guarantee protection product, allowing you to cancel or rebook your trip with full refund if there isn’t enough snow. However, if you were going camping, a snow guarantee would definitely be unsuitable; in this case your insurance rescue would be through a rainy-day protection product.

These examples indicate the direction for insurance of the future: providing personalised products that come to the rescue by resolving specific, individual pain points throughout the entire customer journey, from start to end.

This can be achieved with the integration of automation, digitisation, AI and machine learning technologies, which are turning insurance into a real solution for individual customer experience pains, as well as cutting costs, boosting sales and improving service efficiency. As a KPMG report on Powering Insurance with AI notes: “AI powered customer journey mapping and understanding customer behavior are proving to be critical tools to creating positive customer experiences and to building data sets with insights that are driving sales.”

Insurance to the rescue is a paradigm shift in the perception of the insurance industry. With relevant, personalised solutions, consumers will be encouraged to purchase insurance not out of fear and dread, but rather from a sense of receiving real protection, along with a delightful experience.

About the Author
Jonathan Arad is Director of Product Management at Setoo. For the past decade, every role he’s filled has had one common denominator – rolling-out and supporting products that address consumer needs and solve their problems and pains. At Setoo, Jonathan is leveraging the power of insurance to come to the rescue and help e businesses tackle their consumers’ pains.