Many of us can still remember how our parents would visit their local insurance agent, or even have the agent over to their homes a few times each year. The internet saw huge advancements, but rapid digitization meant insurance was often sold and fulfilled by large, sometimes impersonal companies. The sum of our interaction, unless we had a claim, was all too often an anniversary email.
But the pendulum has now swung back again. There are many customers in our digital age who see benefit in working directly with trusted insurance professionals.
Today, consumers expect a deeply personalized offering served up across multiple channels and available around the clock. The only way for insurance agencies to deliver this level of personalized customer experience is to have one version of the data truth, available to each agent across the organization. And this requires robust, unified systems.
Today’s insurance customers expect a state-of-the-art customer experience that has been designed to meet their specific needs. They expect a personalized service from quote to claim for as long as they remain a client.
We know that how a business interacts and engages with customers has a significant impact when it comes to attracting and retaining clients. In fact, according to Accenture, insurance businesses that offer personalized services and products see an 81 percent increase in customer retention and an 89 percent increase in customer engagement.
However, while all insurance agencies might aim to deliver a personalized service to their customers, many have multiple siloed systems with incomplete and fractured information. This makes it impossible to create a single, accurate customer portfolio.
What’s more, each time a team member in the various departments update client information, there is no way for that information to be updated across all the siloed systems. This means there can never be a unified customer experience across the organization and customers will quickly become frustrated when asked to repeat basic information.
Another challenge is that when data exists in multiple, disparate systems it is extremely easy for policy updates to go un-actioned and for mistakes to creep into the various systems. These could end up posing real risks to the agency and results in E&O, client attrition, and churn. Quite simply, if agencies don’t have their data organized correctly, cleanly, and in an easy-to-access format, agencies are leaving money on the table.
Having a 360-degree view of the customer allows insurance agents to better understand who their customers are and find solutions to address what their customers want. This can only happen if there is one version of the truth when it comes to the customer’s information.
A single version of the truth is the customer data that the entire organization agrees is the sum of all the real and trusted information. It must be accessible to everyone who needs it and when it is updated, the changes must be captured across every system within the organization.
To achieve this, agencies need the power of a Data Integration Hub (DIH).
Data trapped in a siloed application is of little value unless it can be accessed by the right people, at the right time, across the agency. A DIH enables an organization to break application and data silos.
The value that Synatic's Nimble, Simple, and Powerful DIH provides is quickly realized. Synatic’s DIH offers a single system that can consolidate, verify, integrate, and orchestrate disparate data across an agency’s existing technology stack.
By verifying, integrating, and orchestrating data, agents can obtain an accurate 360-degree view of their client's profiles, allowing them to quickly and easily get to grips with everything they need to know about them. This allows agents to establish a great rapport with clients and lays the groundwork for future cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
For agency leaders, unified systems mean they can rest assured their agents are spending their time on revenue generating activities rather than bouncing between different systems in an attempt to access information. Synatic also cleanses data, removing the need for agents to double-check the information for errors and duplicates before the agent can use this data for future rate-quote-bind processes and onward funtions. This helps build a better working environment for agents and reduces costly and disruptive staff churn.
While it’s clear that customers are engaging through more channels across the customer journey, the role of the insurance agent remains key. And, with some smart tech decisions and a powerful DIH, agencies that unify their systems to create a single view of their customers can gain a competitive advantage. To learn more about how you can unify your operational systems to provide an exceptional customer experience, contact Synatic today.
