Insurance Customers Want Solutions, Not Products
As an insurance professional responsible for developing, managing or selling insurance products, have you ever dreamt of being able to offer a perfectly tailored and personalised insurance solution to your customer? A solution so unique that none of your competitors can match it?
This vision is becoming a reality thanks to the new ways in which master data management (MDM) technology is allowing customer and product information to be gathered from across the enterprise to be enriched and assembled in new ways that create new value propositions for your customers.
MDM enables you to create new, personalised products and services from your existing offerings – both proprietary and from your business partners; and MDM can help you to create insightful enterprise-wide views of customers that help to identify which customer might benefit most from these new products and services.
Key to repurposing and invigorating your product and customer information in this way, is the ability to have confidence in this information. The most trusted, accurate, complete and up-to-date information is needed. Your data must be transparent.
Customer insight fuels personalisation
An information rich, insightful and unified view of the customer is paramount. Responding to your customer’s requirements starts by understanding the customers themselves with information about their contractual relationships, personal relationships, preferences, demographics, finances and more. The challenge is that this information is often fragmented. It is found in different departments and used in different ways. This makes offer personalisation difficult.
Product information management must enable collaboration
The same challenge exists for product information management. Different departments create and enrich product information for their own needs and in accordance with their own - not corporate - KPIs and data quality metrics. The result is siloed product data that lacks trust and therefore prevents efficient data sharing and, eventually, the needed business agility to create innovative personalised solutions.
Initiating the right information sharing to enable personalisation requires a re-visiting of your data management processes: who owns the information and what are their KPIs? How can it be shared and enriched? Who is going to use it? To which compliance requirements and data quality standards must it adhere? Settling these issues is foundational for delivering excellent customer experiences and ultimately for innovation in the insurance industry.
Insurance innovation focusing on enhancing customer experience can include:
- Customized pricing
- Options to bundle different products and services
- Collaboration with business partners to add value
Master data management: a core component in insurance personalisation
When developing personalised insurance offerings, there’s no way around a data quality check and probably a revamp of your data processes. Data quality issues that stem from duplicates, outdated information or incomplete records are a root cause of many failed new business opportunities because the insurer is unable to see relations and contexts of customers. Poor data quality can also hinder delivery of the best possible customer service when, for example, first-line personnel does not have visibility of a customer’s total engagement during phone calls.
However, resolving data quality issues is not a one-time clean-up but requires the implementation of data governance policies according to business rules and goals.
Data governance is essential to improve both existing and new data types, in particular master data.
Implementing governance policies to control your master data can ensure the data foundation that is needed to build relevant, personalised offerings and support a consistent customer experience across channels and touchpoints.
What you need is a governance tool that connects existing, but disparate, sources into a shared source. This way, you can create a unified customer and product view with visibility of all associated entities without re-engineering the existing IT architecture. MDM – Master Data Management – is such a tool.
Moving from a silo-based data structure to a connected view of customer information – possibly enabled by an MDM solution – allows you to base innovative initiatives on trusted and transparent data.
How to create insurance solutions – instead of products
Trusted and sharable data – customer as well as product data – are crucial prerequisites to develop personalised insurance solutions that focus on customers’ experiences and their desired outcomes.
People have different lifestyles and individual aspirations which are not well accommodated with the traditional one-size-fits-all products.
But when you combine customer information to get a 360° view of your customers, and combine existing products, into compounded solutions, you can target customers much more precisely.
Lifestyle, health data, relations and digital maturity form part of a customer 360° view.
