Applying a Customer 360-Degree View to P&C Insurance Companies

A Customer 360-view allows forward-thinking, customer-focused insurers to differentiate themselves, retain customers and capitalize on opportunities.

Part of a blog series.

In all industries, customers respond best to companies that provide personalized content and products that suit their known interests.

This is made possible by building a Customer 360-Degree View that includes the capability to analyze direct interactions between your company and customer, gather data on the customer’s browsing and purchase histories, analyze mobile application activity, and link data on social media interactions with individual customer profiles.

This comprehensive cross-platform approach not only empowers your company to develop more customized relationships with current customers but also helps you develop predictive analytics that inform product development and data-driven marketing campaigns.

Is Your Customer My Customer? The Challenge of Harmonizing Customer Data

One of the biggest challenges that large property & casualty (P&C) insurance enterprises face is the harmonization of customer data across business units and subsidiary firms. Large companies frequently acquire smaller companies and face the challenge of aggregating data and accurately merging customer records across different systems.

For example, a customer may have a car insurance policy with the parent corporation and a property insurance policy with the subsidiary firm. In a perfect world, customer data is harmonized to create unified customer records that provide a 360-degree view of individual customers based on all data that has been collected across the expanded enterprise.

However, data harmonization doesn’t happen automatically. In fact, it is common for recently acquired companies to be resistant to sharing information, particularly in the early period following an acquisition. Company cultures may differ, information may be managed differently, technology platforms vary, and there may be pre-existing employee incentives that deter information exchange.

When such conditions are present, your company can be adversely affected in several ways:

• Customer Service Shortfalls: Your company may fall short on creating a positive business relationship with the customer. When your company doesn’t appear to know its customers, it invariably misses the mark on personalized customer communications, which negatively impacts service delivery. In a competitive, data-driven market, some customers will be lost to competitors since service-related problems are a key cause of brand-switching.
• Missed Opportunities for Cross-selling and Up-selling: With the customers who remain, the lack of complete data on their behavior and preferences will cause your company to miss opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling. For example, let’s say that a company specializing in general liability insurance wants to develop a commercial insurance product and so it acquires a small company that exclusively writes automobile insurance. The parent company must eliminate any barriers to gathering customer data across their expanded enterprise in order to cross-sell to current customers, up-sell to new customers, and extrapolate trends to expand market share. Customer 360-views provide insight on what current customers are asking for and what the market demands.
• Inability to Detect and Prevent Fraud: Information silos create missed opportunities to detect policy duplication and prevent fraud. An insurance company with a Customer 360-View capability can scan across its customer base to flag potential fraud cases. For example, after an acquisition, the parent company may discover that a customer has filed multiple insurance claims for loss or theft of the same property. Fraud affects an insurance company’s bottom line and impacts the entire customer base by prompting across-the-board rate increases and damaging the customer experience. Therefore, effective fraud prevention helps to reduce costs, improves customer retention, and stabilizes a positive brand reputation.

Develop a Customer 360 Culture

Harmonizing customer data across your insurance enterprise requires breaking down existing communication barriers.

Until resolved, these barriers will serve to obscure the company’s insight about customers and inhibit the ability to build stronger customer relationships. If such conditions persist, they can create an adverse effect on service delivery, which leads to negative impacts on brand reputation.

Companies that embrace the need for 360-Degree Customer Views are gravitating toward cloud-based platforms that offer advanced analytics and the ability to scale data storage.

The best technologies provide the most current and powerful analytics that enhance personalization and identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. In addition to technology solutions, these companies must ensure that all departments, business units, and subsidiaries are on board with how data should be developed, tracked and used across the enterprise.

Defeat Property & Casualty Insurance Challenges with a Modern Analytics Approach – Ebook, Insurance

Final Thoughts

Building a powerful Customer 360-view enables forward-thinking, customer-focused insurance companies to differentiate themselves from competitors, retain customers, and capitalize on opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.

You can bundle insurance packages and offer new products based on enhanced knowledge of market demands in specific demographic groups. You can even produce more powerful predictive analytics about how customer and general market preferences may evolve.

Developing a multi-platform Customer 360-view can help your insurance company build lasting customer relationships and a positive reputation that will retain a loyal customer base and attract new customers.