Losing Sight of the Customer in Customer Experience
There's your ###@@! frictionless customer experience!!
As a strategist in the insurance core system space, I talk to a lot of Insurtechs in the Life, Accident and Health (LA&H) segment. Some originally planned to create end to end core solutions based on expertise in P&C or front end development, and have now pivoted to focus on the “Customer Experience". Most will tell you they are focusing on the most important part of the service experience. Others will tell you quietly, LA&H core processing is just too heavy a lift with too high a set of customer expectations for most startups. I do agree but even just focusing on the real-time customer experience is a heavy lift and requires seamless connections to the back office core system. And it's usually the seams where customer experiences become customer nightmares.
Good customer experience requires three things:
a strong understanding of the customer and their expectations;
a clear understanding of the commercial and operational contract between the customer and the service provider;
a process/technology platform that can fulfill that contract.
Most insurtech technology vendors focus on the third bullet and insurtech insurers will try to address all three. And like most places where technology, commercial business and people intersect, the devil is in the detail.
I've recently come across three examples of what happens when you don't address these details.
The first example from the retail industry covers all three points. There has been recent press about retailers removing or limiting self-checkout stations in their stores and while there were reasons around good customer service, the compelling reason is primarily higher retail shrink i.e. loss. Using the three points about customer experience as a lens they:
Assumed customer would be able and happy to replace their paid employee with their own efforts
Assumed they could change the social contract about how stores work in person unilaterally, based on the success of on-line self-service.
Deployed technology that requires some learning to use on a good day and is badly broken on most other days.
It’s dangerous to make customer assumptions about how they want to deal with you, change your social contract unilaterally and implement badly.
The second example is illustrated by a post Lisa Wardlaw made about her trials in trying to get her car body repaired after an accident. It illustrates the second rule in not correctly operationalizing the rules of the agreement. I recommend you read it through but the net is her car was covered for repair, the insurer recommended repair shops in her area none of which would work on her make/model, rejected shops that would, and a year of customer disservice followed
The third example is an experience I had in filing a death claim for a family member for a small group policy and is a good example of violating rule 3. No purpose-built portal but easy enough to download and fill out a form, mailing it in with a scan of the death certificate. Old school tech but good enough, I thought. Over the course of six weeks and three calls, I was told the form was not in good order and I didn’t send the death certificate (I did). In both calls the CSR fixed the problem on their end. It turns out data was “getting stuck” between systems and needed a “push”. Doing a little back channel snooping, the large insurer was using RPA between older systems and this kind of failure was pretty common.
The common denominator here is providing good customer experience is more than deploying cutting-edge technology and disrupting existing business processes. It’s actually meeting the customer where they are, ensuring you are fulfilling your commercial and social contract, and doing it right the first time. I started my insurance career at a mutual life insurer and the prime directive I learned is, fulfill your promise to the customer and make it easy for them at a time when life is probably very difficult.
