The power of personalisation in Insurance

Why Insurers should get more personal with digital

IBM expects that by 2020, 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without a human agent. For many insurers, this prediction will sound pretty much on the money. After all, you’ve invested heavily in digital lead gen, you’re rolling out self-service - and increasingly, it’s your website rather than your call centre that’s the go-to hub for customers.

What’s not to love? And who needs personal when you’ve got digital?

Trouble is, customers don’t see it quite that way. They’re drawn to the ‘human touch’ - and they tend to get turned off if it’s been engineered out of the buying process.

Take email, for instance (still up there as one of the best and most cost-effective ways of building customer relationships). Experian discovered that messages with personalised subject lines get a 27% higher click-through rate and double the transaction rate of other promotional mailings. Simple - but effective.

More widely, McKinsey found that 70% of customer conversions hinge on how those customers feel they are being treated. And especially for younger consumers, this means being presented with information and product offerings that feel like they have been tailored just for them. For instance, 48% of Millennials expect customised offers as standard.

Recently, we highlighted personalisation as one to watch in our 2018 trends roundup. Here’s how we think insurers should approach it:

• Digital isn’t at loggerheads with staying personal. In fact, the opposite is true. In 2018, a fit-for-purpose customer platform should make you more relevant and better able to meet customers’ needs than ever before - not less.
• Personalisation should be hardwired into user experience. A lightning fast website is obviously a good thing. So is lots of useful content. But it may count for little if your prospective new policyholder is still left searching for precisely the right info at the right time. Personalisation can help bridge this gap.
• Avoid the feeling of being processed. You wouldn’t be able to operate without automation. From a customer’s perspective though, automated service encounters can feel frustrating and inefficient. Personalisation addresses this.

The personal touch is increasingly a bread and butter need for your customers. It drives conversions, builds relationships and gives policyholders a reason to stick with you that reaches far deeper than the policy price tag.

Essential elements of personalisation: The Sitecore Approach

The insurers who get it right manage to to do two things:

• Correctly identify the specific need states of individual customers;
• Place information and offers in front of customers based on those specific need states.

So what do you need in place to achieve this?  Here’s a rundown:

1. Move away from 'Group Thinking'

Insurance products are traditionally designed based on group characteristics and risk factors. But the problem with this is that it will never or rarely match the needs of the individual. Effective personalisation starts by recognising that you need to contextualise human behaviour and translate this into individual experiences.

2. Read the context

It’s about understanding customers’ needs and intentions based on perceivable behaviour. Under the bonnet of the Sitecore Experience Platform is the ability to do this effectively. This includes identifying the source of the visitor; where they’ve come from and what they’ve viewed previously.

At the same time, you enrich your intel by analysing on-site behaviour. This includes the content they spend time consuming, pages they visit and terms they enter into your search bar.

3. Define the rules

How do you decide who sees what? One of Sitecore’s strengths is that it makes this easy. Out of the box comes the ability to define the conditions under which content is placed in front of the customer.

These rules might be very simple (tweaking the info based on broad geographical factors, for instance). But take the example of a commercial insurer offering a vast range of products to businesses. From fleet insurance to cyber risk protection, your ability to define your rules means that only the content and offers directly relevant to your site visitor’s individual needs are brought centre stage.

It means that a potentially confusing range of options and packages starts to make a lot more sense to your customers.