As insurance companies are struggling with rising costs, they are looking for ways to reduce their cost base while increasing sales. The pandemic changed customer behaviour with insurance customers expecting the same digital experience they get from other sectors such as retail and banking. However, insurance as an industry is not as digitally mature (see our Digital Leaders Study).

Insurers are also facing recruitment and retention challenges and struggling to implement hybrid working while ensuring productivity, quality, engagement and customer outcomes. With Insurers moving their call centres to a contact centre model, advisors become problem solvers and sales agents requiring different skills and behaviours.

We help Insurers service their customers effectively in three ways:

Active Manager©

Active Manager is a behaviour change programme focused on:

As part of the programme, we provide our clients with access to a digital platform which tracks progress for each manager and includes access to all the tools and techniques required, focusing on establishing habits that can remain in-place years after implementation.

Active Manager is constantly evolving and has been implemented with over 60 clients and thousands of managers over the last 15 years, including numerous financial services clients.

Key benefits

  • Increased productivity (10% to 20%)
  • Improved employee engagement
  • Improved customer engagement
  • An uplift in all process and customer metrics driven from the first line managers

Conversational Digital Assistants

A 'ChatBot on steroids' – a conversational digital assistant that can be deployed across web and social channels as well as to internal business teams. It moves beyond the 'out of the box' capability that Salesforce provides and is tailored for Insurance needs.

This Natural Language Processing AI tool recognises intent in customer messages, learning from previous experiences, to respond to a question. It drives the conversation to either complete in channel, or where preferred, moves the conversation to the channel most appropriate for its conclusion. The conversational digital assistant integrates with Insurers’ existing transactional self-service applications. The knowledge built can be utilised across the company website.

Key benefits

  • +100% increase in self-service selection
  • Circa 50% improvement in completion in the channel.
  • Double digit reductions in call volumes
  • Reduced call handling times – knowledge at the fingertips of the advisors
  • Rapid transfer to a Call Centre Agent in the right circumstances 

Process Optimisation

We implement process optimisation software which effectively tracks a customer service query from the start of the process to the outcome. Providing a comparison with the designed process path, it identifies target variations and enables business processes to be tracked automatically providing a clear illustration of the journeys customers and agents are working through.

By connecting the process software to the base data, it identifies the percentage of transactions/processes which vary from the ‘optimal’ path and identifies the opportunities for corrective action. The corrective action can include process changes, system reviews and improved training, support and development across the operational teams. Immediate feedback is provided on processes that have been changed and access can be provided to the Operational Excellence / Continuous Improvement teams.

Key benefits

  • Identify, test and implement automation typically building to 80% of internal processes

  • Rationalise and simplify systems architecture typically allowing duplicate applications to be removed

  • Improvements in performance are dependent on complexity and maturity of existing processes but cost / time savings in the range of 40% to 50% are achievable

  • Contribute positively to customer measures such as NPS and CSAT with the ability to create test groups and capacity in the front-line teams to deal with outliers which need manual intervention for example in claims or on boarding

Find out more about what benefits we can achieve for our clients in our Hastings Direct client story:

Client Story: Hastings Direct enhances team performance with Active Manager

Operating in a new hybrid working environment, which is more complex, dynamic, and digital, challenges leaders to acquire new capabilities and strengths to guide their teams to adapt and thrive. The ActiveManager™ programme, delivered in collaboration with Hastings Direct, has enabled a sustainable step-change in the capability of leaders to lead, engage and motivate their teams in this evolving environment.

Hastings Direct now has an enhanced leadership capability, delivering a 14% uplift in team performance across several key business metrics including productivity, revenue growth, customer retention, first contact resolution, and customer quality scores. This enabled the operation to absorb increased work volumes and deliver meaningful outcomes for customers, during a period marked by significant growth and volatility in demand.

Read the full story in our link below. 

Would you like more information?

If you want to get more information about this subject please get in touch with our experts who would be pleased to hear from you.

  • Tony Farnfield
    Tony Farnfield
    Partner
    United Kingdom
    Contact me
Industries

We understand your industry, and the road ahead
Read more