Tying CRM, Core Systems and Digital Together in Insurance

We share how using a CRM, core systems and a digital strategy together can improve the customer experience in insurance.

Enhancing engagement with agents and insureds is one of the biggest focus areas for insurance carriers in this ever-changing industry. Today, consumers demand personalized, customer-friendly experiences.

Research proves insurance companies with higher customer engagement have higher retention levels and lower price sensitivity. If you wish to remain competitive, you can no longer hope customers will adapt to their outdated processes.

Here are the aspects of the value chain where providers could improve touchpoints and interactions:

• Creating new quotes
• Renewing insurance policies
• Cross-selling opportunities
• Showing agents what their book of business looks like
• Measuring agent performance
• Engaging with agents that are more likely to sell.

Let’s look at how using digital strategy, core systems and CRM technologies together can help insurance carriers improve customer engagement.

Digital

Most insurance companies have already embarked on a digital transformation journey, but the need to deliver valuable customer experiences is causing carriers to expand on this journey. 52 percent of companies report that improving customer experience and engagement continues to be the top goal fueling digital transformation.

We’ve seen, for some time, that insurance customers can get everything they want in a few clicks or taps. Today’s agents and insureds are digital natives who expect fast, on-demand and personalized service. This prompts new thinking about how to engage with both agents and policyholders. As a result, carriers have started creating self-service tools and customer portals, mapping out customer journeys and expanding their digital options and offerings at unprecedented rates.

In addition to providing on-demand services and accessibility, carriers feel the pressure to improve cycle times and slow claims processes customers traditionally associate with the insurance industry. If you’ve struggled with the complexity of your legacy systems and time-consuming processes, this is an opportunity to incorporate the latest digital-focused technologies into key areas of the insurance value chain to provide a better experience to customers and agents.

As insurance carriers race to adopt digital solutions and strive to simplify how agents and brokers engage with them, they also want to tie exceptional customer experiences into their core processes.

Core Systems

To be truly customer-centric, insurance carriers need to take another look at their core systems and explore how to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Most carriers understand their current systems manage their customers inadequately.

Right now, most systems don’t provide a 360 view of a customer’s entire data set through every phase of their journey with their carrier. Moving forward, if you want to keep customer satisfaction a top priority, you will need core systems that easily configure with external systems and data.

Carriers also know the importance of easily doing business with an agent. As a result, they’ve examined the agent journey and discerned that doing business with them is not simple. This revelation made insurers realize they need better customer and agent relationship management. This includes improved design for digital touchpoints with agents and core systems functions.

Here are some insurance core-systems functions where insurers can improve touchpoints and interactions:

• Cross-selling opportunities
• Engaging with agents that are more likely to sell.

There are many journeys and use cases carriers know they want to implement, but they can’t accomplish them with their current set of technologies. Insurers see the value in CRM systems that can do things like customer record management and forecasting sales pipeline management.

CRM

Most carriers cite improving sales, better managing relationships forecasting and sales pipeline management, and improving the agent’s and insured’s experiences as primary reasons for investing in CRM. Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 are giants when it comes to CRM software.

Salesforce is helping carriers transform the customer experience, manage networks and support producers. Carriers who use Salesforce as their CRM solution receive the ability to unify meaningful insights, deliver omnichannel experiences and support producers. Salesforce provides a 360-degree view of each customer to give insurance representatives the information they need to deliver hyper-personalization and seamless customer service across every channel.

Our Microsoft Dynamics 365 insurance solution is specifically designed to help grow revenue and improve agent’s and insured’s satisfaction. Carriers who use Microsoft Dynamics 365 receive a unified workplace with features such as centralized data, management of sales pipelines, email integration and comprehensive dashboards that can help insurers work more efficiently. Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides a unified view of customer and agent data that allows insurers to devote their attention to client services and make data-driven decisions.

Bringing it All Together

The solutions and technologies available are important, but many insurers wonder how you can adjust and integrate with them without losing the functional labor core system. Carriers are starting to integrate and realize they don’t have a good framework for their digital designs.

For example, carriers may have a website that portrays their brand the way they want, but their portal doesn’t match and is difficult to use. Carriers also might not even have a portal, or the portal they have focuses on exposing basic transactions instead of reflecting an agent’s or insured’s journey.

As a result, they don’t have a good way of exposing core system functionality without going against their design, and they don’t know how to create a design for heavier core functions. Carriers know they need a good design framework, but that’s difficult to put together. Some core systems include portals, and there are also portals insurers can buy ad hoc. But, those portals are traditionally rigid since developers build those like an application and not a designed website.

To achieve benefits through a CRM, you should model all your insurance processes to understand where and how you capture, house and manage information. In addition to modeling their own processes, they need to model the processes of the agents and insureds.

If you integrate your CRM closely with your core system, you also need to integrate your CRM with whatever you are going to use from a digital standpoint. If you want to custom design your experience to differentiate the customer experience, then each element must combine through a good integration backbone like an event-driven architecture. This enables applications to act on events as they occur.

Core systems don’t solve the problem from a portal standpoint, but they integrate more easily using more event-driven concepts to expose core data and functions. Then from a design standpoint, your systems can mature by taking better advantage of the integration and technology components.

Conclusion

Due to technological advancements, customer expectations and behaviors within the insurance industry are changing. Today’s insureds and agents have higher expectations for seamless digital experiences. To stay completive and relevant, insurers are investing in technology to improve customer retention and enhance customer engagement.

If you want to improve customer engagement, you must bring together three key elements: a digital ecosystem, a CRM that’s configured for insurance and an integration backbone that can pull your core system processes, CRM functionality and design system together. As both customers and agents demand more from insurers, the path forward will depend on successfully adopting these elements to achieve a more satisfied and loyal customer base.