Insurance through the Looking Glass

Introduction

An ongoing agenda item over the past 25 years in the insurance business has been to create a single view of the customer. The rationale for doing this has always been well understood – effective relationship management, the enablement of cross-selling and up-selling, better customer service and retention, operational efficiency when working across multiple departments, products and channels, and so on.

But while the value is clear, creating a more customer centric business environment has historically been hard to achieve against the backdrop of fragmented systems, processes and data. Progress has therefore been patchy, and most organisations have learned to live with a disjointed approach to one degree or another.

Trends in technology and communications, however, particularly in relation to the web, social media, and mobile networks and devices, have been conspiring to add a degree of urgency to the situation. Digital interaction with the brands we buy from is now part of all of our daily lives as consumers. This is changing both our behaviour and our expectations. When it comes to the customer experience, the watchwords today are flexibility, responsiveness, personalisation and convenience.

In the remainder of this paper, we will examine how technology and market trends, together with changes in the regulatory landscape, are elevating the status of customer centricity from ‘aspirational ideal’ to ‘business critical imperative’. We’ll go on to look at how the latest ideas and capabilities in information management can help to turn the challenges into opportunities. It’s about unlocking both the strategic and operational value of your organisation’s data to enhance customer engagement, and ultimately to drive higher revenues while reducing costs and overheads.

Dale Vile

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Dale is a co-founder of Freeform Dynamics, and today runs the company. As part of this, he oversees the organisation’s industry coverage and research agenda, which tracks technology trends and developments, along with IT-related buying behaviour among mainstream enterprises, SMBs and public sector organisations.