By James Hall, Commercial Director, Doxim
One of the most important business lessons from the past 18 or so months has been the importance of customer experience. This is especially true for insurers, who have dramatically had to alter how they service their clients, as well as their communication around those services.
In the wake of COVID-19, thousands of businesses faced unprecedented levels of disruption. Those businesses turned to their insurance companies to help make the shortfall from that time. Many of them are still waiting for their payouts. Insurance companies, ordered by Britain’s highest court to pay thousands of small businesses millions of pounds in claims for COVID-19 disruption, are facing a battle with reinsurers over who should foot the bill.
Coupled with a slew of insurtech companies coming for their lunch, this situation only makes it more important that insurers use communication to retain and grow customer bases. Historically, that’s not something insurers have been good at. Within the last few years, more than 90% of insurers worldwide did not communicate with their customers even once a year, and many customers did not receive a single communication all year. Of those interactions, many were limited to claims and related advice. Digital communication is, obviously, the best way around this, allowing organisations to talk to customers on the channels they want to be reached on.
But simply adopting digital communication isn’t enough. Organisations also need to ensure they’re doing everything they can to provide their customers with the best possible experience. This is known as customer experience management (CXM). While customer experience is the sum of all their interactions and exposure with and to that brand, CXM is what the organisation does to manage and optimize customer experience; it is a combination of all the strategies, processes, systems, and technologies that a business employs for this purpose.
While the task of enhancing CX can seem daunting, organisations can make it a great deal easier by making 12 simple adjustments to their customer communications. These steps can, in turn, be broken down into four categories of progression.
Audit
The first few steps when it comes to enhancing CXM involve assessing the current status of your customer communications. Doing so means auditing all the communications your customers currently receive. Initially, at least, it’s probably best to start with one or two customer journeys such as onboarding or renewals.
1. Step one in the audit process is to fully visualise the customer journey you’ve chosen. One way of doing this is to print out every piece of communication for this journey and stick them up on a large, blank wall. Ideally, they should be put up in the order the customer receives them in. If you notice that they’re dealing with differences in design and tone, and calls to action, you know for certain that you need to take action.
2. Even if your communications are aligned from a design perspective, you should identify the best performing piece of communication. Importantly, this shouldn’t be the piece of communication that you like the most, but the one that gets the best results. As a team, you can then discuss what elements made it so successful and how to integrate them.
3. The third step in the auditing process is to take your team through each step in the customer journey from the customer’s perspective. Here, you can note where your communication is lacking and can be improved.
Design
With the audit step having given you an idea of how much work you have to do, you can begin to address the communication issues you’ve identified. Design is the best place to start on this front.
4. Using cues from the best performing communication which you identified, you can design your communication standard. This standard should also incorporate best practice on layout, accessibility and readability.
5. You also need to ensure that your designs clearly display the most important information and include a clear call to action. As well as it being immediately clear what the communication is about, it should be obvious to the customer what they’re expected to do.
6. With those elements in place, you should do as much testing as possible. Assess whether your communications adhere to your design guidelines, and if they meet accessibility requirements and are compliant with industry regulations, such as GDPR. You can also use A/B testing to further refine the message and your call to action.
Align
The outcome of the first six steps you’ve taken should give you a design template on which to base your future communications. With this template in place, you can begin to align all your communications so that your public body has a consistent brand voice.
7. The first step in the alignment process is to build out a plan for consistent creative design and tone of content in your communications. This will help you create a customer experience that lines up across all your target communications.
8. Another important aspect of alignment is timing. By reviewing the frequency of customer communications across the customer journey, you can hit the communication sweet spot, rather than too frequently or not frequently enough.
9.The next step can be the hardest, especially in public service organisations where people can easily get stuck in their ways. It is nonetheless critical to align the objectives of everyone involved in communication. Organisation-wide buy-in is crucial to creating a consistent customer experience.
Enhance
Now that you have communication that does what it’s meant to, is set up and designed to achieve the intended results, and is aligned across the organisation, you can look at ways to keep enhancing it.
10. The first thing you need to know about enhancing your customer communications is that the design needs to be refreshed regularly. People stop paying attention to things that are familiar to them. Additionally, standards, regulator requirements, and best practises evolve. It’s therefore imperative that your organisation also adapt.
11. Another important part of enhancing your communication is to listen to how your customers react to it. This can take the shape of direct feedback as well as analysis of their interactions with each piece of communication. The more data you have, the better equipped you’ll be to refine your communication and optimise performance.
12. If you’ve done all of the above successfully and seen positive results, you can apply these steps to other customer journeys.
For the good of public service
Insurers are under pressure from all angles to meet increasingly high customer expectations. Their best hope of doing so on a consistent basis is to use enhanced communication to manage their experiences.
