Most insurers’ view of their policyholders is in isolation - one policyholder at a time, with the possibility that more than one individual in a household may have different or multiple policies from the same insurer. As such, the premium impact of the household is larger than that of the individuals.

Today, customers expect a personalized, unique experience. Millennials not only expect a superior experience but also expect their service provider to know in advance about the kind of treatment they prefer to receive. A critical step in delivering a unique experience is to know what your existing customers think about you and your services.

Virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa as well as other speech synthesis techniques have solved many customer use cases by offloading repetitive and mundane searches or activities. Customer-oriented businesses leverage this technique to provide better operational efficiency and improve customer experience. They can then run analytics over the voice/audio content to derive predictions.

Insurers have been using data to improve the customer experience of their policyholders for quite a while now. This data is typically explicit data that is gathered by asking policyholder specific questions. By gathering implicit data, insurers can now understand the sentiment of their customers at any given point of time during their customer journey, without even asking them.

Insurers have a near-constant stream of unstructured data at their disposal that can be used to drive growth by improving policyholder retention and identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities. One of the challenges for insurers is sorting through this mountain of unstructured data quickly to gain an accurate understanding of the sentiment of their customers in real time.

Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company recently hosted a unique insurance summit focused on putting customer experience first. The event titled Future Perfect-Customer First Insurance Industry Summit 2018 was a full-day event that was attended by 21 of the 24 insurance companies that operate in India. While the focus was life insurance, the summit also saw participation from a few general insurance carriers.

Customer Experience (CX) has seen a paradigm shift from just a good-to-have-function to one of the key differentiators and now a core strategy function for many organizations. CX is no longer limited to knowing what your customers feel about you, instead it includes taking essential actions to enhance a customer’s overall experience (by converting an unhappy customer to a happy one). Companies are offering best-in-class customer experiences over their competitors to grow faster and to be more profitable.

The times of simple service fulfillment are long gone. Now customers demand for not only immediacy in service, but also for a superior customer experience. A lot of this can be attributed to a person’s metamotivation – a term coined by Abraham Maslow to describe the motivation of people who have crossed all key stages of the Maslow’s Hierarchy and are now reaching out to be the best that they can be.

While Net Promoter Score (NPS®) programs are conducted to understand how happy or unhappy your customers are with your services, one of the main objectives of implementing these programs is to convert detractors into promoters. To achieve this, an EPIC customer experience throughout their customer journey is imperative.

The strongest indication of an EPIC customer experience is when the customer comes back to you for repeat business. But unlike in the past, today a very large number of customer interactions occur online, thus making the task of measuring customer happiness/satisfaction/likelihood more dependent on reaching out to them for feedback and insights. There are several methods available for organizations to measure customer satisfaction, each one of them is different from the other.

A 2016 Report by Econsultancy and Adobe on ‘Digital Marketing Trends’ rated Customer Experience as the most exciting opportunity for organizations to improve customer loyalty. That the two are related is a no brainer, but how deeply one affects the other needs to be evaluated at length.