Customer Experience Means More Than Having a Digital Experience

Customer experience seems to be a common theme in the insurance industry. We’ve seen it written about pretty extensively, including here, here, here, and here.

We’ve noticed that when many talk about the customer experience, their thoughts usually revolve around providing customers with a digital experience. It’s understandable since many carriers currently lack the breadth of digital experience that policyholders see from other industries, such as streaming entertainment, social media, food delivery, and even banking. Insurance, as an industry, has been slower to change. That’s a reality. So when many experts correlate digital experience with customer experience, they have that history in mind.

They aren’t wrong, but they also aren’t right.

Providing a great customer experience consists of more than developing a great digital experience.

A digital experience plays a big part, but it can’t be the only thing. As insurers, you service a variety of people with different needs and wants. While many policyholders want a digital experience, some don’t need one because they don’t do anything online. As a document output solution provider, we see the actual numbers on this and, fact is, paperless adoption (or digital experience) is still evolving slowly. There are a good number of policyholders who still want to receive physical documentation in the mail. In fact, we’ve talked to some online-based startup carriers who launch thinking they’ll operate 100% paperless and then later realize that many policyholders still want paper policy communications.

Having a good customer experience means understanding and providing for, and anticipating where possible, your policyholders’ needs and wants, whatever they may be.

Some want paper documents, while others want a dashboard or emails.

Some policyholders want to contact you via online chat, while others want to email you or call you.

In order to provide a good customer experience, you must offer your policyholders options on how they can communicate with you. It doesn’t mean trying to push your entire base of policyholders online. Remember - you don’t define your customer experience. Your policyholders do.