As every insurer today knows, the rise of digitalization and the always-on consumer has created a highly educated pool of fickle customers. Customers want information and resources tailored for them and available when they need them, 24/7. They don’t want to read through swathes of text or struggle to find what’s relevant to their needs and situation. Businesses that meet these demands deliver a superior customer experience, which often makes the difference between churn and long-term loyalty.
That’s where Personalized Video comes in. It’s the closest thing you can get to sitting down with your customer 1:1 and talking them through their coverage, how to make a claim, a new offer or anything else you might need to say. It’s personal because people are personal.
It’s time insurance companies started approaching the customer relationship as a relationship, an ongoing journey rather than a transaction. This leads to not just loyalty but cross-sell opportunities as customers come back to the same company they know and love for additional coverage.
How do you do it, and how can data-driven video help? That’s what we’ll dig into in this post.
How To Win Customer Loyalty
In the competitive insurance industry, loyalty isn’t a given. It’s something that takes serious attention as you evaluate each pain point where a customer might churn.
To win loyalty, insurance companies must find ways to:
- Communicate directly with customers as opposed to through agents.
- Establish a superior customer experience across all touchpoints.
- Simplify operational processes such as requests to send missing documents, claim management or renewing a policy.
- Personalize their customer communication to fit the modern age.
- Communicate clearly, not just for you and your customer’s sake, but also for regulatory compliance.
Unfortunately, most insurance companies struggle from a technology perspective to deliver in today’s digital world. With insurance having the highest customer acquisition costs of any industry, personalized marketing’s positive impact on customer retention is all the more crucial.
With the latest tech, even the most desired form of content — video — can be personalized at scale for millions of customers. They can be interactive and actionable. And companies that don’t have video marketing agencies or in-house animators can even leverage AI to generate the creative, cutting time and costs.
The upshot? There’s no reason not to personalize throughout the insurance customer journey.
Less Sales, More Content
Traditionally, individual insurance agents bore the brunt of the sales processes themselves, bringing the latest programs and services to potential buyers in a direct, one-to-one customer engagement method. In the digital age, consumers have the world at their fingertips, meaning they can do all the research necessary to make an educated decision themselves. They don’t need insurance agents as much as they need consumable information! This makes customer engagement a bit of a different beast than it was in the past.
To attract digital consumers in the acquisition stage, insurers must create truly engaging online portals. If you don’t already, give potential customers the ability to easily get online quotes and compare prices. Make it visual and engaging — consider using pop ups to quickly collect the baseline data needed to create a quote. By making the process seem easy, people are more likely to continue on the path to purchase.
Be sure to use the data you collect to personalize the follow-up and nurture communications. Then, you can make videos like this one, automatically send to new prospects with their personalized quote.
In this case, the prospective client receives a video that outlines all of the benefits of getting a plan, including how much a monthly payment might run and how much you can save by paying in full. Plus, it shares discounts you can receive for actions like going paperless.
Remake Your Onboarding Process
Just because the insurance business is steeped in regulatory procedures doesn’t mean that customers need to be subjected to a tedious sign up process. Use interactive, digital media to deliver messages in a more snackable form. Provide top-level information and allow new customers to drill into details as they like.
With Personalized Videos, you can make the process faster and more engaging from the start, a benefit customers of all types can appreciate. (And insurance companies really are dealing with customers of all types in the modern era. At least 52% of millennials are now homeowners, while 4.5 million Gen Zers became renters within the last five years, a jump that’s higher than any other age group. Personalization in insurance helps you reach these crucial groups!)
Here’s an example from USAA. They wanted to create a personalized experience for new customer onboarding. Data-driven video is the perfect way to do this, as it allows you to say a lot to a customer without overwhelming them.
For example, the video explains something called USAA Perks, which helps members save on travel, fitness, home security and more. Then it takes customers through a clickable questionnaire to help personalize their experience even further (like asking them whether they want to learn more about auto, home or other USAA insurance products).
Here, you’re generating consumer trust from the outset. While you’ve already gotten them on board, a seamless process once they’re a paying customer massively contributes to loyalty down the line.
Leverage Customer Service To Drive Loyalty
Working with customers who have a claim is a company’s chance to shine and gain loyalty. At this stage, your customer interacts with you. Make sure you delight your customers across this experience.
Even if your company is hampered by legacy systems, you need to find ways to move those services online. Not only does this help you reduce costs, but it’s also the way many people prefer to work (especially the millennials who prefer to engage online rather than speak to a customer service representative, no matter how lovely she is).
But it’s not enough to create a web application and think that you’re all set. Claims management is complicated and people need guidance to complete the process. If customers get stuck in the middle, they’ll be frustrated and your call center will soon be overwhelmed with requests for assistance. At this stage, you’ve lost NPS points.
Preempt these issues with videos that explain the process. Make them personalized for the user and their claim type, coverage plan and stage. You can even design the videos to connect steps and keep the entire process on track. Include details for local assistance (authorized claim centers, agent information and the like) to help customers when they run into trouble.
Take SelectHealth as an example of how to use Personalized Video to guide customers through change.
SelectHealth created a video to alert customers who will soon be eligible for Medicare of the upcoming change. The video takes the opportunity to explain Medicare at the basic level, how the SelectHealth plan differs from the government plan and additional benefits that customers can expect to receive.
Health insurance is a notoriously stressful beast (particularly in the United States), and making changes to health insurance tends to be even more anxiety-inducing. Most people appreciate anything that can make the process easier, and being a part of the solution is a great way to earn brownie points from customers. All of this can be done through a simple, easy-to-make Personalized Video.
You can also automatically send customers a Personalized Video in the moment as a follow-up to a call with an agent, reiterating what was covered in the call. These videos can be generated in real time so they’re sent on-demand.
Another tip? Turn your explainer docs about PDFs into videos with AI. That’s exactly what we did with the video below.
That’s a 40-second video, condensed down from the full-page PDF below. To make the video, we just gave our Enterprise AI Video tool the PDF, and the text-to-video conversion did its magic. (Honestly, no one’s reading those page-long explainers anyway.)
Don’t have docs like these for customers? What about an FAQ page? You can also turn a webpage into a video with AI. We haven’t forgotten the personalization either. Our Next Generation Video Platform seamlessly adds in the relevant customer data, so you have video production and personalization in one package.
However you do it, by taking the hassle out of customer service, companies will earn loyalty from customers and lower operational costs in the process.
Make Your Offers Stand Apart With Personalized Video
Today, a majority (64%) of equity analysts say technology modernization is one of the most important cost transformation levers for insurers, according to a recent Accenture report.
Engaging with the educated consumer requires insurance companies to cut through the clutter of complicated regulations and sales processes to delight customers.
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Implementing a personalized communications strategy is the perfect way to differentiate and simplify the insurance sales and service processes. By leveraging visual storytelling, personalized communications strategies can significantly improve customer satisfaction and NPS scores.
Let’s see some examples of how Personalized Video for insurance companies improves the customer experience.
The General Insurance created a video template to send to individual customers, filled with their personal information (like policy number and bill amount) to walk them through their first bill.
It also includes an Interactive Video element customers can click on to set up automatic payments, split payments or even in-person payments near them. Whichever option the customer clicks on, the video walks them through how to complete the payment process.
Here’s another example: Zurich created a Personalized Video for customers to guide them to choose the renewal process.
The video helps insured individuals visualize the benefits they receive, which includes peace of mind. Customers can also use an interactive element to share their customer satisfaction level, which helps the insurer better respond to their needs.
Meeting Your Customers Where They’re At
Consumers may not love insurance, but they need it — and someone has to provide it. By personally engaging with potential customers before, during and after the buying process, insurance companies can gain a competitive advantage that wasn’t possible before the age of the educated consumer.
Insurers can build real relationships that elevate their CX without compromising the need to scale services, which you just can’t achieve with the time-consuming phone calls of yesteryear.
To find out more about Idomoo’s enterprise-grade Next Generation Video Platform and how we can help you reach your customers and drive action, contact us below.
