According to McKinsey, customer satisfaction with your company has more to do with the end-to-end experience than individual touchpoints. This is important to understand, because we tend to evaluate business performance based on distinct metrics such as call handle times, quote starts or quote conversions.
While each of those aspects of the customer experience is important, they provide only a snapshot of the customer’s journey and not the big picture. If McKinsey is right, it’s the picture as a whole that will influence a customer and generate their loyalty.
A leading insurer, which has always placed the customer experience at the forefront of its strategy, proved this to be true as it transformed the entire customer journey with top-tier digital capabilities.
Creating a Loyalty-Generating, End-to-End Experience
The year was 2014, and a leading insurer that manufactured a much-sought-after auto product was meeting demands for homeowners coverage by sending leads to other carriers. Right away, this is where we begin to see that the sum of the end-to-end experience is worth more than its parts.
Customers didn’t like being sent to another insurer, and, to be quite truthful, the leading insurer didn’t like sending them away. Providing a consistent customer journey across multiple insurers was difficult, and, once the customer was transferred away, the leading insurer lost the connection that encouraged satisfaction and renewals.
See also: P&C Insurers: Come Out of the Dark Ages
Committed to providing every customer with the same high-quality end-to-end experience, the insurer had a thought. What if it could add homeowners coverage from a few select carriers—those that met its stringent customer experience standards—to its own auto policies, improve the efficiency of the quote-to-issue lifecycle AND still own the customer? It sounded like an impossible feat, but, as a leader in insurance innovation, the company knew it could achieve just about anything with the right help.
It struck up a healthy relationship with a well-established insurtech innovator offering a leading digital distribution platform. In addition to gaining digital competence for its in-house agents, the company was able to offer product choice and bundle home coverage from other carriers with its own to improve the customer journey. Here is how the new customer experience looks:
- A customer calls the company’s internal agency for quotes on homeowners and is interested in auto insurance.
- Agents take a few pieces of information from the customer, such as name and address, enter it into the platform and let the magic begin.
- Automated capabilities draw verified data from third-party sources to complete the application. The agent receives instant pricing for various homeowner product options and an instant quote on the auto.
- The agent selects the appropriate coverage with a few clicks of the mouse and just as simply quickly binds and issues the policies.
