Best Practices for Earning Insurance Customer Loyalty

Part 1: How IAM Helps Make a Personal Connection 

Demand for exceptional, personalized customer experience is a top motivator for digital transformation for nearly every industry – and insurance is no exception. But let’s face it, knowing your users and providing personalization is no easy task. According to the Gartner “2019 Financial Services Consumer Trust Survey,” only 25% of insurers have a single view of their customers. 

Whether you're tailoring policies to fit customer lifestyles or introducing a new payment plan, you’re constantly striving to win customer loyalty and get ahead of the competition. On top of this, you need to keep up with regulatory demands and rising customer expectations for your area of specialization.

In this four-part blog series, we’ll show you how identity and access management (IAM) can drive real business value and help you provide the best coverage to as many people as possible. 

We'll start with personalization and how you can gain a single view of your consumers – the cornerstone to any viable IAM strategy.

Customer Expectations: It’s Personal 

An Accenture “2019 Global Financial Services Consumer Study” found that 64% of consumers are interested in insurance premiums that are tied to personal behavior. Car insurance premiums, for example, have traditionally taken a historical view of the driver but haven’t always reflected their current behavior. As a result, leading insurance providers are now starting to offer usage-based insurance (UBI), also known as pay as you drive (PAYD), pay how you drive (PHYD), and mileage-based auto insurance. Costs depend on the type of vehicle used measured against time, distance, behavior and place. 

This offering can be a win-win for insurers and policyholders. Linking insurance premiums to driving performance enables insurers price premiums more accurately, while policy-holders could potentially save on costs. Another reason why insurers are leaning toward UBI is to also gain market share for consumers who don’t own vehicles and want a “pay-as-you-go” model when renting vehicles. 

Health insurance providers are also seeing a rise in personalized expectations, with wearables paving the way. The global wearable devices market is expected to reach $62.82 billion by 2025, and healthcare insurers are finding opportunities with consumers willing to share personal data in exchange for value-added services. Data from fitness trackers and wearable monitors can help insurers more accurately rate a patient’s risk for illness. And patients who take preventative measures to improve their health can benefit from lower insurance premiums.

With the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), health institutions have started to integrate device data into patient portals. And, as you can guess, the collection of this data requires aggregation of patient attributes from multiple sources to form a single view for better patient outcomes. 

The Takeaway: Personalization Starts with a Single View

Personalization offers value for both you and your policyholders and is seen as a major differentiating factor when it comes to consumers selecting a provider. But this requires seamless sharing of customer data to create continuous offers based on consumer needs – and that requires a single view of the user. 

It sounds easy, but it’s not. That’s because you likely have disparate customer data residing in multiple locations across your organization. So how can you achieve a single view of customers? A modern IAM platform enables you to orchestrate digital identities in real time, so a customer, their connected things, and all the services they use are consolidated into a single user profile. By doing so, you can improve customer experiences, save time, and increase revenue. 

Five Steps You Can Take to Gain a Single View of Users

1. Think like your customer, and then define your go-to-market approach. Start by taking a journey-based view of customer interactions. By getting the whole picture of the customer journey from end to end and spanning multiple channels, you can build for success. Modern IAM provides your  customers with frictionless capabilities, simplifying registration anywhere and from any device, streamlining access from multiple channels/accounts, and enabling collection of personal data over time to help you tailor the user experience. 
2. Identify consumer data sources. Chances are, you have rich consumer data residing in silos throughout multiple lines of business. Removing these silos and encouraging cross-sell activities will help overcome this challenge. Explain the value to your marketing, sales, customer service, claims, and compliance departments. Identify the data needed by each department and how they plan to use it. 
3. Identify technology needs for interoperability. Take a look at existing technologies that have integration points into other systems. Look for gaps and for modern tools that have extensive integration and open architectures that can scale. The goal is to consolidate and synchronize user data from disparate sources, including databases, directories, files, CRMs, and social media. 
4. Merge disparate consumer data sources. Ensure your IAM is capable of consolidating and managing customer data at scale. With a modern IAM platform, you can create a single, secure, and consolidated store of customer identities that can be synchronized automatically. A modern IAM platform can manage the identities of customers and all of their identity relationships, devices, and things to build a complete 360-degree view of customers and how they interact with your company across every channel.
5. Involve your consumers. Through a modern IAM platform, consumers can control how they wish their identity to be managed, as well as triggering subsequent steps that relate to their decisions. Involving your users from the start will save you time and money as a result of fewer support calls. And, you’ll be confident that your data is accurate, so you can make better decisions and offer timely, personalized offerings. 

In addition to aggregating personal consumer data to personalize your offerings, regulatory requirements task you with keeping consumer data safe. In part 2 of this blog series, we’ll discuss regulatory pressures and how you can turn compliance into competitive advantage.

Can’t wait to learn more? Read Modernizing the Insurance Industry with IAM.