CRM in Insurance – SMA Whitepaper
Article Synopsis :
As customers avail themselves of products and services in a more digital way, insurers are evolving their CRM strategies to meet new expectations.
In “CRM in Insurance: New Opportunities in the Digital Age”, Avanade combines their direct experience in digital strategy with data from their survey of 73 North American insurers (both property/casualty and life/annuity) around how insurers are improving relationship management capabilities with customers and agents.
CRM implementations, per the report, are on the upswing as about a third of North American insurers have major initiatives in progress or planned. Key drivers include improving the customer/agent/producer experience, improving profitability and managing expenses. Other reasons for investing in CRM include understanding pipeline, personalising marketing, and improving cross-sell and up-sell capabilities.
The top-five current capabilities for CRM for Policyholders are:
- Contact information
- Coverage information
- Product information
- Recent transactions
- Account balances
The top-five CRM capabilities to be enhanced in the next 12 months are:
- New sales stage (prospect, needs analysis, etc.)
- Mobile access
- 360 degree view of customer
- Account balances
- Contact information
Insurers identify the following as ‘important’ features/capabilities in an enterprise CRM platform:
- Real time analytics
- Transactional data integration
- Mobile app and enablement
- Cloud
- Collaboration (chat, real time video, screen sharing)
- Social media capabilities
- Customer web-page log data
Insurers seeking to improve the customer experience via CRM should consider the following:
- Understand where and how relationship information is captured, housed, and managed today, looking at all five “Ps” – prospects, policyholders, producers, partners, and providers
- Recognize the vital role of solutions that create, orchestrate, manage, and deliver communications, especially Customer Communications Management solutions. These systems will increasingly interact with and rely on CRM
- Assess the core. Without modern policy, billing, and claims systems it will be difficult to achieve enterprise wide CRM, considering that these are the systems of record that manage the bulk of the transactions
- Map customer journeys, and develop a plan for how to operationalise insights from the understanding of journey patterns
- Integrate customer analytics to improve customer touch point experiences with the right message for any interface, any device, anytime
- Establish a plan, endorsed and driven from the C-suite, to implement a modern CRM solution
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Digital Insurer's Comments
When CRM burst on the scene in the late 1990s many insurers, especially tier-one companies, embarked on major multi-year, enterprise-wide initiatives. Results were mixed; lessons learned.We agree with the authors that it’s a bit of a paradox CRM is seeing a resurgence. It’s fair to say, based on past business and technical challenges, CRM had fallen out of favour. But with new interest in becoming truly customer-centric comes renewed interest in CRM as the main means for achieving same.
The data and complexity issues plaguing CRM implementations twenty years ago still exist and, if anything, have grown stickier and more complex. But managing customers is one thing and managing digital customers entirely another. (D)CRM investments, given rapidly changing customer behaviors, deserve top priority.
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