Insurers are Zeroing in on Hyper-Personalisation to Differentiate Themselves

Did you know that 72% of customer experience leaders agree that personalisation increases loyalty? However, only 54% of these leaders realise that customers consider most attempts at personalisation as generic. Hyper-personalisation entails offering experiences that feel genuine. Insurance companies need to focus on ensuring that customers feel heard, seen, and cared for individually to build lasting relationships.

What is Hyper-Personalisation in Insurance?

Personalised insurance encompasses offering tailored recommendations and value propositions with uniform omnichannel experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.

Traditionally, insurance recommendations were based on a company’s risk tolerance and the assessment of individual customers. However, the rapidly changing nature of people’s health, finances, and needs has created a demand for dynamic and customer-centric insurance products. And customers are ready to share. More than 80% of customers say they are willing to share some personal information to get personalised experiences from brands, which could be in the form of tailored offerings, recommendations, services, and interactions. In fact, 69% of clients said in a survey that they were comfortable sharing even intricate details of their health and lifestyle to get lower insurance premiums and rebates. The takeaway here is that customers need an incentive to share their personal information. The incentive could be better value, lower costs, and quicker turnaround times for their queries.

Tips to Get Personal

One of the trends among younger generations is DINK, which is an acronym for double income, no kids. This has now expanded to DINKWAD to add “with a dog”. That means young couples may have a pet that they consider part of the family. Such couples may appreciate insurance companies that offer health insurance that extends to their pets. Thinking unconventionally is key when catering to the wide range of needs of the increasingly individualistic generations.

Here is a look at 3 important factors to hyper-personalise your offerings:

#1 - Understand the Customer

The first step to forging lasting customer relationships is to understand your target group. For this, insurance companies can harness the power of data analysis. Gaining insights into customer needs, preferences, and financial behaviours can help you identify opportunities to interact and engage with them. This can lay the foundation for offering relevant advice, developing tailored insurance solutions, and making insurance products more accessible to your customer base.

Personalised insurance must also accommodate generational differences. For instance, the addressable cohort for insurance companies is changing from Millennials to Gen Z and soon Gen Alpha will be a part of it. Machine learning and analytics can identify neural network-based patterns to pinpoint the changing needs of the target customer base. This can build trust and loyalty.

Real-time insights can provide a deeper understanding of current issues. Cross-industry collaborations can be a treasure trove for analysing the risk associated with each customer. For instance, healthcare data can determine the chances of a patient developing a chronic illness.

Make the Most of Data Analytics

In the age of digitisation, the distance between providers and customers seems to be increasing. However, digital channels are a massive source of data that can deliver deep insights that human interactions may fail to uncover. As tech-savvy users become a major part of the consumer base, the trust in digital interactions and automated responses is also increasing. A data-driven approach helps businesses offer the same quality of services across channels, such as mobile apps, emails, and on-call.

InsurTech solutions with advanced analytics collate and deliver relevant insights in digestible forms. They use various kinds of data, such as contextual data, explicit data, behavioural data, and third-party data. These insights can drive decision-making, interaction agendas, marketing plans and customer-centrism.

#2 - Meaningfully Engage the Customer

Insurance customers actively interact with the brand only once or twice a year. Their sense of loyalty is weak. Customers of the digital era discover, enquire, and compare brands online. They may switch brands after a single negative experience. Insurance providers must ensure that their brand image and agenda align with their audience’s preferences. For instance, marketing auto insurance to an undergraduate might not be the best idea. However, short-term health, career, or education insurance might be useful. Using the right channels and ideas to interact with the customer is essential for meaningfully engaging the target audience.

Boost Conversion Rates with Targeted Engagement

Identifying what a customer may need is tricky without information of their financial situations and plans. Analysing their spending behaviours and engagement patterns across digital platforms can offer valuable insights. While analytics assess a customer’s current data to classify their behaviours and patterns, predictive models are a great way to predict their requirements. Analytics-powered InsurTech solutions facilitate hype-personalisation by helping insurance providers recognise the most suitable ways to get discovered by the target audience and tactfully marketing the products that the customer might need. Tailored recommendations can be instrumental in pushing customers further in the conversion funnel.

#3 - Personalise Across Customer Lifecycle

As consumers grow personally and professionally, their financial needs and priorities change. Having rigid customer personas can trigger a customer exit as soon as their needs change. Hyper-personalisation takes care of evolving purchasing patterns, engagement techniques, and insurance products as needs evolve. Leveraging digital and predictive technologies enables customer databases to have fluid personas. This allows insurance providers to ideate and test novel ideas on diverse audiences and assess how they resonate with users. Consistently evaluating and optimising customer touchpoints is essential to offering refined hyper-personalised experiences. This also makes it important for insurance companies to start thinking about flexible products.

Develop Responsive Customer Solutions

Insurance products and services must evolve with changing customer needs. InsurTech can help identify current and future needs. Advanced technologies play a key role in facilitating risk assessment and enabling insurance providers to develop flexible products. Responsive products and interfaces may extend the life of a customer with the insurance company. For instance, as Millennials get occupied with raising kids and focusing on retirement, insurance companies can ease their lives by offering riders that extend a policy to their loved ones.

Usage-based insurance solutions, such as auto insurance aligned with driving behaviours and life insurance based on lifestyles, are beneficial for the customer and the insurance company. They give a clear picture of the risk involved and encourage positive user behaviour for subsidised premiums.

Further, tech-savvy consumers value embedded insurance and self-service. Responding to their requirements for seamless access and ease of use is also necessary for insurance providers.

Hyper-Personalise or Become Extinct

A focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences increases the success rate of customer acquisition, talent retention, and achievement of business goals for a financial institution. Personalised insurance with solutions that resonate with customers can drive sustained business success. Hyper-personalisation offers a competitive advantage to insurance companies in elevating customer engagement and satisfaction, where the financial planning of every individual is distinct. Investing in the right technology can be instrumental in facilitating personalisation and improving customer experience. Partnering with an experienced InsurTech solutions provider such as Zopper can be a game-changer for insurance providers. Machine learning, advanced analytics, and AI enable insurance companies to offer personalised insurance. These technologies also empower insurance providers to respond swiftly and prepare for the evolving needs of the customers.

Maintaining customer privacy has become paramount amid all the data sharing and analysis. Insurance companies often do not have the expertise for this, while meeting all the compliance requirements for optimally extracting information from heaps of data. This is where a reliable and experienced InsurTech solutions provider comes in. A strategic partnership with an InsurTech expert can reduce complexity and enable insurance companies to offer hyper-personalisation at scale.

Bibliography: (Last Accessed on September 12, 2024)

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