Cheryl is the Senior Director of Operations Advisory at ReSource Pro.
CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS ARE RISING
The customer experience has come a long way since the days of small call centers and paper mail. Insurance buyers are demanding more from their insurance companies, including faster, higher quality service and 24/7 digital support.
Delivering on these expectations requires insurance organizations to not only engage in conversations with their customers to better understand their needs, but to seek out new ways to increase the efficiency of their operations. Let’s explore five strategies your organization can use to build a customer experience that boosts loyalty and retention.
1. GATHER CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
Whether you’re sending out surveys to your customers, conducting interviews, or holding focus groups, it’s key that your organization consistently capture customer feedback, also known as voice of the customer (VOC). VOC helps you better understand the needs of your clients and can also enable you calculate a net promoter score (NPS), which can be used to benchmark your organization’s customer experience against others in your market.
2. BE CONSISTENT AND RELIABLE
Errors, disruptions, and delays are frustrating experiences for customers. In addition to creating an action plan for service recovery—which includes apologizing to the customer and fixing the issue—you should look for ways to prevent future occurrences, such as by monitoring the quality of client deliverables.
3. IMPLEMENT AUTOMATION
Sometimes, an excess of administrative tasks, even simple ones like data entry or document gathering, can pose a major time drain for your staff, preventing them from addressing client needs. The good news is that these same processes can often be streamlined, if not fully automated, with the use of robotic process automation (RPA) and other technology like AI and machine learning.
Leveraging these tools is a matter of identifying where best to apply them, finding the right experts to develop a solution, and in some cases, preparing your workforce for automation.
4. LEVERAGE LEAN METHODOLOGY
If you want to find out whether there are hidden inefficiencies in your business processes, consider implementing lean. Lean is a management system designed to help you drive continuous improvement in your organization and eliminate problems in your service delivery process.
The first step toward achieving these goals is value stream mapping (VSM), which involves creating a map of the step-by-step process by which your organization delivers a product or service. This not only allows you to gain a clear view of the volume of steps involved in the process, but to understand how a single step can impact those both before and after it.
5. FIND THE RIGHT BUSINESS PARTNER
If your insurance organization needs help upgrading its customer experience, consider seeking out a business partner with a deep understanding of insurance operations and customer needs.
ReSource Pro can help you identify areas for operational improvement and propose solutions, or take the strain off your teams by taking on time-consuming tasks, enabling you to achieve profitable growth and provide elevated service to your clients. Ready to build an exceptional customer experience? Let’s talk.