Retaining existing customers is much easier and more economical than acquiring new ones. Hence, an insurer’s success hinges on its ability to deliver professional Insurance Customer Service in order to retain those existing customers. The insurance industry is more of a people’s business. This means that every insurance operation touchpoint should be rooted in customers’ expectations and promote better customer service.
However, in the modern day, Insurance Customer Service has its own set of pain points in the insurance industry. These pain points are attributed to many factors that have disrupted the industry. These factors include digital innovation, the emergence of a direct-to-consumer sales model, competitive pricing pressure, and others.
Insurers are making strides to improve insurance customer service and be at par with customers’ evolving expectations. However, the volatile market conditions, regulatory reforms, and hyper-competitive industry are creating a rough terrain for insurers. This is making it difficult for insurers to overcome their customer service pain points and deliver long-term and exemplary customer service.
Such difficulties are prompting insurers to rely on insurance BPO. Essentially, insurance BPO providers iron out a carrier’s internal process challenges. This helps an insurer to deal with the external factors that trigger Insurance Customer Service challenges.
In this article, we will explore the top customer service pain points faced by insurers and how insurance BPO services providers can help deal with those.
Here’s a look at the most critical customer pain points that insurance BPO providers can help to overcome.
A majority of insurers choose to depend on agents to broadcast and sell policies to customers. However, modern-day customers cannot be easily convinced by the pitching of middlemen.
Agents prefer their own research, talk to a faceless insurer’s representative, and then make their decision. This is termed the direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales model. Insurers lack such unbiased channels that can help customers make purchase decisions.
It is true that insurers have invested in multiple mediums of communication to appeal to a wide range of customers. However, they have failed to ensure consistency in Insurance Customer Service quality across all the communication mediums.
This is because the agent who is more adept at using a phone is not suitable to interact with customers over emails or chat support. Such a service-level inconsistency arouses confusion in customers about brands’ commitment toward their clients.
A rise in consumerism has resulted in evolving customer expectations in the insurance industry. They need more personalization in policy terms. Modern-day insurance customers expect Ecommerce-grade, quick, transparent, and trackable customer service experience in their query resolution.
However, insurers lack insights into each of their customers’ unique expectations. Such a lack of insights impeded insurers’ ability to proactively reach customers, curate policies for customers at risk, and provide personal attention to their clients.
Customers get habituated to a certain kind of service provided by an insurer’s existing staff. Any deviation in it causes confusion among customers. Such confusion swiftly lands them at a competing insurer’s door.
However, the in-house contact center of insurers typically faces a high rate of attrition. Moreover, insurers fail to retain experienced personnel. A longer tenured professional knows every detail about insurers’ wide clientele. This lets them set a certain service standard. New recruits find it hard to match that kind of standard within a short span of time.
This results in a downgrade in insurance customer service that ultimately leads to insurers losing customers.
There is no doubting the fact that usage of technology is critical to improve operational efficiency in the insurance industry. This has a direct bearing on the insurance customer service standard.
However, technology is not always an answer to insurance customer service at a personal level. Customers do not always dial in with generic queries on their policies. They have unique queries about ad-hoc policy changes because of a customer’s sudden financial upheaval of a downturn. Customers may also seek suggestions about policies that suit their financial health or lifestyle.
In such cases, automated bots are no match to human intelligence. Experienced agents parse through insurers’ existing customer base to understand individual clients. They suggest policies that are strictly aligned with customers’ expectations.
Insurance Business Process Outsourcing is the Answer to Potential Customer Pain Points—know How. Lack of customer insights, shortage of staff with deep-dive knowledge on specific domains, inconsistent service quality, and other factors trigger the major insurance customer service pain points in the insurance industry.
Customers expect tailored insurance coverages to suit their unique needs at every stage of their lives. Insurers need insights into such customers to know about the nature of their needs.
Insurance BPO providers leverage advanced analytics solutions to draw actionable insights from existing customers’ databases. Insurers use this data to understand each customer’s unique needs at a given point in time.
Third-party providers bank on call center conversations with customers. These conversations are applied to propensity data analytics models. It further generates actionable insights into consumers’ changing needs. Insurers bank on these insights to proactively suggest modifications in policy terms to customers. Such a proactive act reinstates an insurer’s commitment towards the insured.
Insurance processes have their own sets of challenges. This is why it is not always feasible for a single agent to respond to queries on all these processes.
Third-party providers house professional expertise specific to insurance operations such as claims management, renewal processing, loss run report ordering, etc.
For instance, third-party providers assign the right blend of human experts and technology to provide exemplary customer experience during claims prevention, First Notification of Loss (FNOL), loss evaluation, claims settlement, and others.
Renewal processing experts streamline and execute all the tasks for insurance underwriters. They gather all the loss run reports, examine new events in reports, and promptly inform underwriters. The experts clearly communicate all the changes in the renewed policies to customers on behalf of insurers.
Directing queries to the right resource is the key to maintaining consistent insurance customer service across multiple mediums of communication.
Insurance business process outsourcing partners use advanced contact center software that transform messages into cases. These cases are then triaged based on insurance operation and priority. The triaged cases are then automatically routed to specialist agents across all the mediums of communication.
Insurance BPO providers present the right tech stack and strategies that set insurers on the right foot for the D2C model.
Their work starts with overhauling insurers’ websites. They introduce elements like messengers, chatbots, and quote engines, among others. These features are programmed to respond to visitors’ queries about products instantly.
They create a team of resources with deep-dive industry knowledge. These resources aid customers starting from a query to the final purchase of an insurance policy.
This article is penned by experts at Insurance Backoffice Pro, an industry-leading insurance BPO service provider. We have successfully partnered with over 50 agencies, MGAs, insurance carriers, and brokers to provide back-office solutions. These solutions streamlined insurance operations and optimized operational costs.
Partner with us to witness an instant boost in your operational efficiency and insurance customer service capability.
We understand that a streamlined operation is the main driver of a seamless insurance customer service. As a prominent insurance business process outsourcing partner across the U.S., we begin by standardizing all the backend operations. This helps you to identify all the process loopholes that were impeding a quality customer service delivery.
We had improved the entire insurance claims process starting from FNOL to the clearance stage. Our call center experts helped the client handle influx of claims-related queries. We triaged the entire insurance claims process that ensured a consistent level of customer experience.
Partner with Insurance Backoffice Pro today and experience improvements in operational efficiency and customer service capability. Click here to get started.
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