Capgemini’s ‘The World Life Insurance Report 2023’ says insurance companies must transform the insurance value chain and customer lifecycle to unlock growth. This can be done by boosting policyholder and beneficiary engagement, while developing innovative products and services that help people age well across their life journey, it says.
It will be a shift from today’s product-centric approach to an operating model focused on customer-centricity, with comprehensive, higher-value solutions designed to help consumers age well, the report says, adding, the move will require a value chain evolution that includes simplifying and personalizing onboarding processes, converting claims into opportunities to retain beneficiaries and generate revenue and modernizing the technology layer. “Thus, insurance companies that get it right will shift away from commoditized offerings limited to specific risks, long purchase and claims cycles that undercut consumer trust, and sporadic engagement with older insureds and none with beneficiaries,” says the report.
CAPABILITIES GAP
The report says it has identified what 50+ affluent and mass-affluent policyholders seek and highlighted the capabilities gap insurers must bridge to deliver what these customers want.
Elaborating, it says: “Nearly 70% of this segment expects transparency in policy terms and conditions, while 57% want regular and personalized engagement. Yet only 28% of insurers focus on customer centricity through hyper-personalization.”
The study has spelt out steps that insurance companies can take to foster engagement, secure trust and retain their assets under management:
- Develop comprehensive aging-well solutions by creating personalized and bundled aging-well propositions
- Streamline the purchase experience by digitally augmenting intermediaries to enhance their productivity and offering self-service portals with personalized experiences for aging policyholders and their beneficiaries
- Accelerate risk assessment by leveraging data to streamline medical and financial assessments, quickly identifying relevant offerings for customers, and expediting policy issuance timelines
- Engage more widely and frequently by using value-added services and ecosystems to increase touchpoints with policyholders and promoting earlier engagement with beneficiaries to connect beyond a one-time payout
- Elevate the claims experience by providing flexible payouts, such as partial or multiple instalments, based on the changing needs of aging customers; fostering empathy among claims professionals and equipping them with skills and insights to make sound recommendations.
The study also brings out that there is widespread recognition across the industry of the need for more advanced technology and robust data analytics. But, according to the study, insurers’ tech and data maturity continues to lag, hindering their attempts to leverage cloud computing, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (including generative AI and machine learning) and other technologies needed to streamline operations, enrich experiences, integrate in emerging ecosystems, and make faster and more data-driven decisions. More robust tech and data capabilities benefit all stakeholders, including customers, intermediaries, and insurers. By advancing their use of cloud, APIs, robotic process automation, and digital platforms, insurers can break down silos to create single views of their customers, boost ecosystem connectivity to deliver more value, and centralize and standardize data to draw unique insights that will enable hyper-personalized experiences and ongoing performance improvements, it adds.
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