Applying a Customer 360 View to P&C Insurance Companies

P&C insurers have abundant customer data, but data silos limit its value. With proper governance in place, a customer 360 approach unifies data, reduces risk, improves customer experience, enables AI-driven insights, and drives profitable growth. This blog post explains how to create a customer 360 culture to support those objectives.

In brief:

• Customer 360 is about connecting fragmented systems into a usable, trusted view of each customer.
• Regulatory complexity and poor data quality can derail customer 360 efforts without strong governance and clear ownership.
• Building a customer 360 culture requires change management, cross-functional buy-in, and incentives that reinforce adoption.
• Advanced analytics and AI turn unified customer data into actionable insights for fraud prevention, retention, and personalization.
• Customer 360 is a continuous program — not a one-time project — that requires ongoing measurement, refinement, and improvement.

The customer data gap looms large in P&C insurance.

Imagine you’re a customer filing a claim. You get routed through multiple departments and find yourself providing information you know your insurer already has. Then you wonder, “Do they even know me at all?”

Or, returning to your role as an insurance leader, put yourself in your employees’ shoes. They need to be able to spot fraud from a mile away while retaining your customers for as long as possible. Do they have the data to deliver?

In both cases, the problem isn’t a lack of data, but data that’s siloed, hard to access, or both. To have a full picture of every customer, you need to pull your data together and make it available for every department and team member who needs it to:

• Prevent fraud
• Boost retention
• Design better solutions
• Make revenue-boosting decisions

This type of 360-degree view of a customer, or customer 360, is essential to optimizing customer experience in the insurance industry. It requires aggregating data from every customer touchpoint, including policy and claims details, billing and payment history, customer life events, interactions with your digital products, and more.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how to begin building a customer 360, plus how to create a culture that supports it and the changes it will require. But we’ll start where the problem begins: with your data.

Solving the Data Problem for Customer 360

To build a customer 360, you have to overcome a few data challenges, including:

Data Privacy and Regulatory Complexity

Regulations and regulatory bodies like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), and the NAIC Insurance Data Security Model Law dictate how you can collect information from customers. However, application of the laws can vary by state.

“A good rule of thumb is to adopt the most stringent aspects of the applicable laws into one compliance program,” says attorney Joseph J. Lozzarotti, writing for The National Law Review.

For example, not all states have adopted the NAIC Insurance Data Security Model Law. For those states, other laws may provide similar protections, but you should build for the strongest regulations.

Such complexities, and the risk of penalties for not meeting requirements, mean that your customer 360 needs a foundation that prioritizes compliance. It also must clearly document how you use data, whether it’s to make pricing decisions, complete underwriting, or fine-tune customer service.

Fragmented, Siloed Systems

An Accenture study found that 60 percent of insurance executives feel data silos are hurting their customer experience.

That’s not surprising because many companies use multiple platforms. For example, they may have one for commercial lines, one for personal lines, one for claims, yet another for billing, and so on. As a result, a customer who has a business owner’s policy and a personal auto policy may effectively exist as two different people, each with their own records.

Incomplete and Low-Quality Data

Nothing creates systematic hidden risks like missing or bad-quality data. Common culprits include:

• Duplicate records
• Records with empty fields
• Inconsistent formatting

It’s impossible to build an effective customer 360 when facing issues like these. They may even produce inaccurate or misleading analyses.

That said, let’s dive into how to build a 360-degree culture that supports a comprehensive customer view.

How to Create a Customer 360 Culture in 7 Steps

A customer 360 culture instills comprehensive data analytics into the thinking of every person and system in your organization. It creates powerful expectations around collecting clean data, using it, and celebrating the wins that result.

Here’s how to create a customer 360 culture.

1. Build Rules for Data Governance

Good governance solves problems at a variety of risk levels. For example, duplicate records, empty fields, and inconsistent formatting can slow your processes, but other governance gaps can put you at risk of significant fines or legal action.

To address these challenges, your data governance rules must include:

• Who owns each bit of customer data, including who’s responsible for handling it according to compliance standards
• What data can and can’t be used for
• How your organization will honor customers’ data privacy rights

2. Establish a Governance Council

A governance council that includes stakeholders from compliance, information technology (IT), legal, operations, marketing, and sales will ensure that your data governance rules include input from across the organization. The council can also build data movement maps for different kinds of information.

For instance, a data movement map may look like this:

• Entry Point: The customer fills out an online quote form with their name, address, and home or vehicle description.
• Processing: An underwriting engine takes this data and evaluates risk. Processing may also include pulling credit scores and claims histories, such as through the Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange (CLUE).
• Storage: The data is stored in a policy administration system and a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
• Internal Access: Underwriters use the data to review the risk profile, and agents use it to build a quote and adjust coverage.
• External Sharing: When applicable, you may share the data with reinsurance partners or data enrichment providers.
• Retention: Data is stored in a database or data lake in accordance with regulatory requirements. Retention also involves deleting and anonymizing data.

Each insurance company’s map will be different, of course, but visualizing and clearly defining how and why data moves is core to your governance structure.

3. Invest in Change Management

Change management ensures that your agents and other stakeholders use your new system rather than reverting to the status quo. Whether they do so out of habit or because they simply don’t “believe” in the new way of doing things, you can overcome resistance by:

• Providing role-specific training on how to use customer 360
• Identifying internal champions from multiple departments
• Clearly communicating how customer 360 makes their jobs easier and adds value to the organization
• Tying adoption to performance metrics and employee reviews
• Creating feedback loops that team members can use to express praise or concern and using their input to gradually sculpt a more effective system

Honor employees when their feedback sparks improvement. Whether you do this publicly or privately, everyone should know that their input is also part of your customer 360 culture.

4. Use Advanced Analytics Technologies to Process and Clean Data

You don’t have to scrounge through thousands of lines of records, reading, writing, and deleting to make your data usable. Customer data platforms (CDPs) and master data management (MDM) tools can do a lot of the heavy lifting for customer service in insurance industry workflows.

They give you:

• Reliable records without duplicates
• Standardized formats that establish consistency
• Firm, verified customer identities
• A single source of truth that every decision-maker, at every level, can rely on

5. Adopt AI to Dig Through Insurance Customer Data and Gain Insights

Even if each customer profile contains thousands of words and figures, artificial intelligence (AI) can help you pull insights from it and make data-informed decisions.

Consider a few examples:

• A natural language processing (NLP) engine can analyze claims, notes, and call transcripts. It can identify customers at risk of nonrenewal. Just as easily, an NLP engine can pinpoint where service representatives may have dropped the ball.
• Predictive churn models can determine which customers are most likely to cancel their policies weeks in advance. You can then use these insights to reach out to customers and offer concessions or additional services.
• A next-best-action (NBA) engine can analyze customer behavior, decide what should be done to earn or keep their business, and even craft content to do so. For instance, suppose a customer with no claims history gets a quote and logs into your app, but still doesn’t make a purchase. Your NBA engine can identify them as a low-risk client and offer them a 15 percent discount if they use a banner inside your app to bundle their home and auto insurance.

6. Use AI and Human Intelligence to Follow Through on Insights Where They Fit

Once people receive AI recommendations, they can act on them. This will require training your agents and others to interpret AI-generated insights. For instance, they need to know how and when to use an AI’s analysis to offer a discount or escalate a conversation to a manager.

7. Review Results and Continuously Improve

A customer 360 program is a living, breathing entity, not a one-time project. As customer data changes, so should your system. The adjustments you make will often be relatively small, but over time, they keep your customer 360 effective.

For example, you should identify key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with retention rates and claims satisfaction. When you fail to meet KPI goals, examine how using data could help, then adjust your customer 360 accordingly to gather or analyze information that improves KPI scores.

Use a Customer 360 View to Boost Profits

A customer 360-degree view gives your team members the info they need to make customer and revenue-first decisions while minimizing risk. It dismantles data silos and gives you a central hub of customer data. But it can do more than boost gross sales by helping you identify the most profitable customer accounts.

“A 360-degree customer view boosts retention rates and helps you understand customer profitability across varying products and services so you can intelligently segment your customers according to meaningful data and trends,” says Benjamin Bourgeois, head of product and customer marketing for software maker Profisee.

However, building an effective customer 360 system requires knowing which tools to use and how they work, while fostering a customer 360 culture involves training and a systematic governance structure.

Our P&C insurance experts know how to structure and deliver effective customer 360 systems. Learn more.