The insurance cyborg: The intersection of AI and the humans using it

By Jackie Morales

Insurance carriers face a changing landscape from continued regulatory complication, economic uncertainty and the ever-changing needs of retirees and their advisors. But balancing human and digital processes across the insurance industry will be the key to enhancing services and delivering on customer expectations.

Although many insurers picked up their digitization efforts during COVID-19, others have been developing strategic measures to digitize their services for decades. More recently, this has included the adoption of automated processes and artificial intelligence, to streamline customer experience, making it more efficient and increasing personalization and engagement.

However, while convenient for many, digitizing everything should not be insurers’ priority. Instead, many insurers should continue to deepen the impact of digitization practices by first considering the following.

Am I tracking the right signals from financial advisors and their clients?

Often debated, digitizing the entire CX platform isn’t likely to be the most effective roadmap for insurance carriers. In fact, a good first step might be to consider which client and financial advisor services could remain analog.

We arm financial professionals with data and tools that can help them understand and address their clients’ priorities. You cannot assume what those priorities might be, but if you build in functionality for periodically testing ideas and asking for feedback, clients will tell you what works. Gathering existing data sets and feedback will help to identify risks, product misconceptions, process bottlenecks and more.

Finding out what your competition is or isn’t doing is very important as well. We have learned a great deal from insurtechs and traditional carriers about what can be done digitally, but also what shouldn’t be fully digitally enabled. Moving quickly is important too, but there are many processes that should not be altered for the sake of speed alone.

We must also keep pace with “table stakes” automation. If all your competitors are allowing automation in an area you are not, it sends a signal to advisors and customers that you may be behind the times.

Ultimately, financial advisors should be confident in the support they receive from their insurance partners. The decisions they’re making on behalf of their clients are critical, so building in an extra layer of training from distributors and insurers can make a difference in helping them position client portfolios and make other retirement decisions.

For customers, the digital process that guides their individual purchase journey should be timed in a manner which balances the ease of doing business with sufficient respect for the importance of the financial decisions they are making.

How do I make the most of my existing data pools?

An enhanced data pool educates stakeholders on key customer needs and can be an important competitive advantage as they build out their organizational capabilities for end-to-end digitization. It is an opportunity for insurers to empower data analytics with human expertise.

Human involvement provides empathy to customer takeaways that a digitized system may not. Don’t let your data make the decisions. Data is meant to give you the information you need to make informed decisions, but don’t let it draw conclusions for you.

When does it make sense to gather feedback and make improvements?

There are many tools that allow insurers to gather customer insights and feedback. It’s the application of these customer insights that should be considered frequently. How often is your organization making improvements based on feedback?

Within 24 hours of finalizing a transaction, insurers should use their existing digital services to touch base with customers. Repeating this again at the six-month mark (depending on the transaction) and on an ongoing basis can provide new insights as customers access and interact with an insurer’s CX throughout the life of the contract.

Consider developing a customer satisfaction program, including an assessment of your NET Promoter Score, to better understand customer insights at a deeper level.

Review the journey – if you find advisors or customers are dropping out of your process in a particular part of their journey, they are speaking to you without saying a word. Is there an opportunity to review and improve that step of the process?

Balancing human interactions and understanding feedback from financial advisors and customers is vital to establishing an effective digitization roadmap for insurers.

Insurers should build in standard review and feedback loops that equip them with key product and CX takeaways. This allows insurers to build relevant solutions for both their product line-ups as well as digital processes, and drive awareness, loyalty, and ongoing customer satisfaction and advocacy.

Jackie Morales is chief operating officer at Security Benefit. She may be contacted at [email protected].