Pandemic. Economic uncertainty. Potential recession. Although everyone across the world has been going through many of these same challenges, insurance companies have had to change their business to plan for some of these events. Customers often turn to their insurer more than ever during tumultuous times.
With a few simple adjustments, you can exceed your customers’ expectations so they can have an excellent experience during some of their most challenging times.
1. Increase Employee Engagement and Buy-In
Humans are hardwired to find a connection with others. Customers that can find that by doing business with you will be more likely to stick around long-term. All it takes is having employees that are willing to put in extra effort into developing these relationships.
Start encouraging your employees to be more involved and engaged with your customers. There are multiple ways that you can set a new standard for how your customer interactions will go.
For example, your employees can do something as simple as sending cards or emails for your customers’ birthdays or other significant events.
You can also train your customer-facing employees on how to be more involved and personable in conversations with customers.
Download Guide: Transforming Your Claims Processing for the Digital World
One great thing about this is that there is no single solution for what works. Your employees can get creative on different solutions that work for your unique business. All that matters is that you’re doing something to improve your relationship with your customers.
But one thing to consider when it comes to asking your employees to do more is that there has to be some amount of give and take. You can’t just pile more and more on their plates and expect them to excel in every area without simplifying their job in another area.
You can make this happen by researching tools that can simplify their jobs in other ways. Like implementing a solution that automates repetitive tasks. This way some of their responsibilities can be alleviated so they can better focus on their customers. When you clear up some of their time, they’ll be much more motivated and committed to focusing on the customer relationship.
2. Enhance Communication Methods
According to MITSloan, only 14% of customers are happy with business communication. That’s a really low success rate.
Think about your current business communication strategies and ask yourself the following questions.
- How do you communicate with your customers?
- What methods do you use?
- Do you feel that they are effective?
- Are you satisfied with them?
Your communication strategies show your customers how available you are to address their questions and concerns.
Keep in mind that you should have multiple communication channels for your customers and make sure they’re easily accessible. Some people really dislike talking on the phone, so having some sort of instant messaging service might be best for them. Email is great for those who have some concern but might not need an answer right away.
Having all these different modes of communication available to your customers will be key to improving the customer experience, especially when something bad has happened—which is usually the reason why they need to get in contact with their insurance provider.
3. Improve Processes Affecting Customers
One last strategy to improve your customer experience is to upgrade your customer-facing processes. This is one of the most important things you can do because it’s actually changing the services you offer for the better.
Any process that experiences slow downs in some capacity is a perfect candidate for upgrades. Claims processing is a perfect example of a process with plenty of room for improvement.
An impressive claims process is ultimately the reason your customers are doing business with you. When they’ve gone through some sort of unfortunate event, the only thing they want is to have it resolved quickly.
You may have seen in your own business how slowly claims processing can move along. It’s often not anyone’s fault, it’s just a difficult process to make efficient with all the document collection, document routing, approvals, signatures, and data extraction.
The key to improving claims processing is by using automation. Instead of taking the time to wait on every single step of the claims process, you can use automation to move every step along.
Not only will an automated claims process improve the customer experience, but it offers several other benefits to your business and your customers. Three of those benefits are:
- Creating error-free documents
- Getting claims payments to customers faster
- Overall reducing overhead
Instead of letting your customers know that they’ll need to submit their driver’s license, images, a police report, or any other kind of documentation, you can use an automation system that requests these specific documents from them. They’ll have all the required documents that they need to submit right in front of them. Additionally, your system should be able to send your customers reminders until they’ve submitted every required form.
Document routing and receiving approvals from your team can be automated too with the right tech. So instead of waiting on the adjuster to send all the documents to whoever will actually get the payment rolling, they can just click approve with one button. Then it will automatically route to the next right person and notify them if a task requires their attention. Automation can stop you from being dependent on one person remembering to send the claim to the party that will perform the next action.
Document Management as the Key for Improved Customer Experiences
The insurance industry is a competitive one. Offering a better experience for your customers can help you stand out from the crowd.
Document management can be the key to making it all possible. It can empower you to focus on the most important part of your business—your customers. Using Revver for document management can streamline your tedious processes, keep you more organized, and centralize all of your customers’ documents. If you’re ready for the solution to your document-centric challenges, let’s talk.
