Daren Rudd, Vice President Consulting – Head of Business and Technology Consulting, Insurance at CGI
In simple terms, seamless insurance promises a complete, digital experience for insurance providers and insurance customers alike. The insurance market, alongside other industries, is increasing its use of low-cost digital channels to reach new markets and better connect with external users. In recent years, the industry’s move towards digital transformation has reduced the cost of customer service and generated fresh opportunities to get closer to customers, as well as strengthen brand loyalty.
However, on the whole, many insurers are only just at the beginning of this journey and creating a seamless digital experience for consumers, providers, and insurance professionals has proven challenging to navigate. At CGI, we are considering the role technology can play in reshaping the use of insurance for both consumers and businesses; to alter the dismissive and inaccurate perceptions of insurance that threatens to hold the industry back.
Considering human-centred design beyond just sales
The first step towards seamless insurance is an end-to-end and frictionless buying experience for customers. When designing a seamless insurance product and process, equal effort should be given to understanding both the sales and claims processes that the customer will be given.
A human-centred design approach will be critical to understanding how a customer will interact with the original sales channel or insurer, especially in the event of a claim. Insurers will need to work with their claim service providers to join up the customer experience and share data across the value chain to deliver the same seamless customer experience. The role of information-sharing between service providers is crucial here, to improve overall market efficiency and consumer outcomes.
Insurance providers must also consider the whole customer journey and not lose sight of the importance of the claims experience to their brand and customer experience, in the rush to embed insurance at the point of sale. Likely, their brand will not be as prominent during a seamless purchase journey, so the main interaction the customer has with the insurer’s brand is during the claims process. If this process is not frictionless and digital but relies on a poor traditional manual process or is handed off to multiple third parties who don’t share data between themselves, the customer will not perceive the brand well. This will stifle positive perceptions and not drive the industry forward.
Another consideration for insurers is to ensure customers understand the cover they are being sold while still providing a great seamless customer experience. If the right data is shared between sales channel and insurer this will help to ensure that the customer is buying the right insurance for the product (e.g. camera) or service (flight) that they are purchasing. A strong design-centred approach and excellent user experience (UX) design will be as important as data sharing, in delivering truly seamless insurance. To make this most effective it will need to leverage the customer and sales channel data to customise that information, rather than just provide a generic set of simplified cover and terms.
Giving customers control of their data
Product duplication will be an increasingly difficult problem facing the industry as seamless insurance sales models increase. This is not a challenge that individual insurers will be able to solve independently. Similarly to how the industry has collaborated to share claims and license details (such as the MIB’s CUE & MIAFTR data services), a way to proactively address miss selling will be to share products and cover data to check what is needed or allow the customer to review. Instead of looking at a large central repository as we have done in the past or accessing insurer data stores (as with Open Banking), a more practical approach is to use a distributed data sharing model where the insured is the ultimate owner.
There have been attempts by InsurTechs to independently develop customer cover and policy wallets, but in practice we can only make this type of data sharing work by bringing industry parties together in the best interest of the customer.
As Web 3.0 capability develops, such as Tim Berners-Lee’s SOLID initiative, we will be able to utilise distributed data sharing and control technology to give customers control of their data and whom they share it with. We are already working on this type of capability in the health sector, and I believe this will naturally expand into insurance.
If we don’t do this as an industry, then the FCA or government will eventually be forced to step in to address this as an issue, as the growth of embedded insurance will inevitably increase to a trillion-dollar sales channel.
