Most insurers offer similar products and services, which makes it challenging to attract new customers and retain them. As an industry, insurance is low-touch, and insurers seldom interact with their customers. A report shows that the top companies have an average customer retention rate of 93 - 95 percent, while insurance companies have an average of 84 percent.

This is part 2 of a 2-part series "Trust: The Key Ingredient for a Successful Insurance Customer Journey." In Part 1 of our blog series, we discussed how important it is for an insurer to display and build trust in any customer experience. The trust factor has continued to rise and is becoming much more significant. The buyer's journey is to garner trust. Buyers prior to 2010 usually rated insurance companies' trustworthiness and confidence level based on their responses to their inquiries. He validated information he collected from friends and relatives that were already existing customers. During that time, there was very little information about the insurer's finances in the public domain, so he had to rely on hearsay. In that process, the buyer zeroed in on a particular insurer or seller.

This is part 1 of a 2-part series "Trust: The Key Ingredient for a Successful Insurance Customer Journey." Today, everyone in the business world is talking about the customer journey and experiences starting from E-commerce, banking, and many other industries. So, what is customer experience? What is new about it?

The past two decades of the insurance industry has seen a lot of experimentation of distribution models: Max Life starting with a multi-level marketing model, Aviva trying to build both agency and bancassurance channels simultaneously, Canara HSBC starting with only bancassurance model and experimented with an agency in between, Pramerica Life & HDFC Life replicated agency sales channels to target a cluster of consumers formed, basis occupation or usage of common services.

In the post-CoVID-19 era, a tremendous amount of focus, time, and energy has been invested in understanding the customer or policyholder based on the insurer's proprietary data and the data collected by many other research agencies. The customer is deeply analyzed and offered customized or personalization, as we call, solutions and offerings. However, the investment made by insurers has only been focused on 5% of the number of policies sold or approximately 11 Lacs policyholders, that are sold by direct sales, web aggregators, and online sales. This begs the question, why are insurers only investing in distribution channels that represent 5% of the number of policies sold?

In my earlier blog, “Data-Driven Insurance: The New Normal in the Post-Pandemic World,” I concluded that in the future, the insurance industry would be data-driven. Not only data-driven, but we’ll see the use of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Image Recognition, and Natural Language Processing BOTs will be the buzz words in the corridors of the Insurance industry.

This is the age of data. This pandemic has forced us to find new ways to get our work done without putting ourselves in danger. Consumer buying behaviours have changed in order to adjust to this new normal in the post-pandemic world. Before we talk about the changes in the business to navigate in the next two years, we should have a glimpse of the insurance business: What, How, and Why of the insurance business.