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.
