How Insurers Can Use Video to Improve Customer Engagement

How Insurers Can Use Video to Improve Customer Engagement

How Insurers Can Use Video to Improve Customer Engagement

Heightened competition, increased consumer expectations and declining customer loyalty are hurdles that many insurers are facing today. More than ever, companies are turning to personalized customer experiences to differentiate themselves and compete in challenging markets. Organizations engaging in personalized communications are seeing great results across the entire customer lifecycle, especially regarding increased engagement. Customer engagement is powerful and impacts every touchpoint for insurers, from reducing policyholder churn to keeping up with evolving expectations of agents and customers. It is so powerful; it is crucial in determining the overall policyholders experience and the depth of relationship they have with your brand. Here are some steps insurers must take to succeed when adopting a customer-centric approach that will increase customer engagement.

Know your Audience

The first step in customer engagement is knowing your customer. To understand your customer, requires having a full picture of who they are and more importantly, what their needs are. This means you must go beyond traditional demographics of age, location, and employment. To understand today’s digital customer, you need to determine what your customer is looking for from you, and more importantly what causes your customers to leave your services. From this you will find customer-centric goals to start mapping how you can best communicate in real-time to effectively provide valued information to meet their ‘specific demands’.

Personalize your message

Every customer wants their voice to be heard. As digital communications continue to grow in popularity, the entire insurance industry is reexamining how they connect personally with customers. However, the transition from face-to-face contact to online digital communications doesn’t mean you need to lose the personalized or ‘human’ touch.
88% of insurance customers demand more personalization from providers
When you make your interactions look and feel personal, customers will feel you understand their needs. This ‘connection’ customers feel with you is what will increase their loyalty and keep them coming back to a trusted relationship.
84% of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.
Taking the time to offer personalized interactions and messaging are proven to be an influential way to build a customer culture of trust and security.

Build resources that answer customers’ needs

Whether it’s paperless billing, AutoPay or auto renewals, every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle is an opportunity to proactively engage with customers. More importantly, every opportunity allows you to add value to your customer. Insurers can’t afford to wait until customers are clogging up call centers trying to connect with someone or switching insurance providers to start engagement efforts. You must preemptively provide customers with answers to the questions they are asking at the right time in a manner that saves them time. Whether it’s understanding their policy options or getting in touch with an agent, insurers need to take every opportunity to educate customers and make getting the answers as easy as possible for them.

Embrace technology to engage customers digitally

In our device focused world, traditional methods of communication no longer gain the traction needed to improve engagement and increase conversions. Insurers need to start looking at interactive marketing that can connect with customers on digital, mobile, and social platforms. Reaching customers on a format they already use daily, helps make learning about and dealing with insurance a little easier. The easier you can make it for customers, the more satisfied they will be. Nobody wants to do enormous amounts of research and comparison shopping to find the right insurance. Once they do pick an insurer, there is no way they want to dedicate their already overloaded schedules to educate themselves by reading a 30–50-page enrollment policy book. Those labor-intensive and time-consuming policy booklets are dense, but they do provide much needed information insurers need to get to customers. The very fact that they are dense with information puts the onus on the customer to commit themselves to thoroughly reading the booklet to understand their products, services and options. Personalized videos do the heavy lifting for insurance companies by providing customers with information that is lighter and entertaining. Take a few key points, personalize them to add relevance to each user and the result is an easily digestible summary that can easily explain supplemental insurance options in 30-90 seconds. Now plug that information into the right point in the customer journey and your adding value, reducing your costs and lowering churn. People appreciate the faster technology the numbers show to increased engagement and conversion rates.
With IndiVideo we often seen an increase of 40% or more in conversion as compared to text-based communications.

Key takeaways

Text based communications will always play a role in your customer strategy, but personalized videos will have a greater impact and help you move customers along their journey with you. Personalized interactive videos are essential for businesses to thrive.