The insurance industry is way past its time when timely response and a balanced price-quality relationship were enough to define customer experience. The advent of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Advanced Analytics have disrupted the insurance industry and have reshaped the way it operates. Insurtech firms these days are using their AI and ML capabilities to drive high-quality customer experiences, increased loyalty, generate new revenue while simultaneously reducing the costs. The vision of the insurance firms today and for the future is where customers and customer experience comes first. The combination of AI and ML models built on top of the Customer Data Platform leads to improved customer experience through hyper-personalization. Let’s have a look at how relevant customer experience is and how effectively a customer data platform geared with artificial intelligence and machine learning models can create a customer-centric culture.
Customer Data Platform & Customer Experience – The Winning Combo
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” -Bill Gates
Need of the hour – Customer Experience
Empowered customers have access to more information, choices, and channels and are redefining the “ideal customer experience”. They are not only able to recognize a poor customer experience from a unique one but are also quick to spread the word to their friends and followers on social media. As a result, customer experience itself has become a vital function for all businesses regardless of their scale and size.
So what specifically should the companies be exploring and implementing to meet the needs of “want it now” consumers?
Deliver Personalized Experience at Scale
Digital disruptors deliver a personalized experience. Examples include-
- Airbnb – Personalized hospitality
- Amazon – Personalized buying experience
- Uber – Personalized transportation
- Netflix – Personalized movie experience
The expectation of customers varies from industry to industry, but expecting a highly personalized experience is now the norm. Customers value experience more than product or even price. Analysis of data on a never before seen scale is opening the floodgates to great customer experiences.
Challenges in delivering a personalized customer experience
A large volume of data – an increasing number of devices and platforms and the continuing decrease in the cost of data storage – has intensified the challenge of data management and removal of old data.
Siloed data – The number of applications used by a single organization is staggering and the stand-alone data in these applications exist separately, without sharing and cross-referencing. Even though the organizations are data-rich, the siloed data restricts organizations from getting the real picture. Integrating these systems effectively is a pain point that needs immediate resolution in the case of every organization.
Complexity in real-time – Data is not stagnant. It keeps updating in real-time. It is important for businesses to keep updating these real-time data in order to build better insights and enhance decision-making capabilities.
Compliances and security – Data compliance and security is a huge challenge for most enterprises. Data accumulated from multiple sources need not always be authentic and some of them cannot be trusted to be secure and compliant with organizational standards. It is critical for all organizations to adopt data security best practices in order to deal with the data explosion happening now.
Lack of technical expertise – Skilled big data professionals is another challenge.
Resolving all the above-said challenges is just the first step. All this data means nothing if we cannot unify, analyze and act on it. It must be readily accessible throughout the organization over time so that actionable insights could be taken over it.
CRM, CMS, Mar-Tech, and E-commerce tools had always been collecting and storing customer data. But none of these are intended to create a single unified view across physical and digital worlds. Marketers who already use multiple tools to collect customer data are in dire need of a single, persistent, unified view of a customer to drive personalization. Such a system that is designed to unify customer data and make it accessible and actionable across real-time to optimize the customer experience is known as CDP (Customer Data Platform)
Customer Data Platform
According to the Customer Data Platform Institute, “a Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”. A CDP is a prebuilt system that creates a comprehensive view of each customer by capturing data from multiple systems, linking the information related to the same customer and storing the information to track behavior over time. In order to create a unified customer experience, unified customer data is a must.
How a CDP help improve customer experience
A CDP helps in a deeper understanding of the customer journey, both within the organization as well as outside it. By leveraging the location details, a deeper insight into various touchpoints and engagement intends could also be derived. If integrated with IoT, it can inform about the final stages for a deeper connection with the customer on product usage. In effect, a CDP will help you connect the different touchpoints across all channels and optimize an engaging customer journey at each stage of the process.
Furthermore, since today’s customers tune out mass marketing initiatives due to ad fatigue, personalized messaging will remind them that they are being treated as an individual rather than just a statistic in the database. In short, a personalized message from a CDP is likely to get far more reach and appeal, resulting in a conversation.
With a CDP, it is easy to piggyback on current data management and customer relationship management software. It can easily integrate with other martech tools making it easy to plug into the existing systems. The marketers will be able to effectively reap the labor in higher revenue and improved customer retention by using a CDP. It brings together the strengths of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and advanced data analytics to embrace personalization. A few of the advantages that CDP can offer businesses are:
Effective Customer Segmentation
A CDP will have in place more organized and accurate real-time customer data for better segmentation which leads to an effective and sophisticated targeting strategy for the customers. Having relevant data in one place from many sources paves way for a successful engagement strategy as well. Modeling these data to attain a deeper understanding of the customer aids the marketers to create differentiated campaigns and strategies.
Predicting the ‘Next Best Action Recommendation’ with AI and ML Capabilities
Many of the CDPs are multilayered and have artificial intelligence and machine learning models built on top of it to provide deeper and better customer insights that can open new doors of opportunities for your business. A CDP can be used to track customer behavior in all channels and provide intelligent recommendations based on those customer journey triggers. In order to get a deeper understanding of the customer and their journey patterns, AI and ML can be leveraged to generate smart datasets, evaluate them and reveal relationships between them.
Predict the intent of the customers
The CDP can help predict the future actions of the customers which will improve the customer sales opportunities. With effective machine learning models built on top of the CDP, it is even possible to identify the intent of the customer and influence their decisions through appropriate content or calls to actions in real-time. This proactive response towards the online behavior of customers by targeting them with the right products and offers, at the right time will take personalization to a whole new level.
In today’s hyper-connected world, where there is an explosion of data from more connected devices than ever, one thing is certain – companies need a technological solution to help them make use of their data diligently. Any organization that aspires to engage with their customers in a consistent and personalized way needs a CDP.
