The way companies do business and view customer relationships today has drastically changed. Transactions that used to take place in person or during a web site visit are now happening across an extended omni-channel universe. In the insurance industry, this means that customers might be shopping and applying for policies online, purchasing through a call center, and updating their policy on their mobile device. Knowing who your customers are and providing seamless experiences is more critical than ever — not just to capture new buyers, but to help foster positive relationships that spark lifelong customers.

Smart companies understand that insights derived from analytics is only half of the equation that helps you to go beyond basic customer service

They also reduce the time it takes to resolve a customer issue or complete a transaction. The industry leaders complement these insights with a decision engine to determine the next best action to take with customers. A decision engine acts as a central brain that sifts all the possible actions, and ultimately orchestrates which one is most likely to be successful to fulfill the customer’s need in the moment.

Putting it into play

Here’s an example: Let’s say a regional insurance group has a call center that services over five million calls a year. Until recently, the agents on the phone had no way of knowing how long a customer had been with the insurance company, let alone the next best action for what to offer them. The company then implemented a sales, customer service, and marketing system that replaces its legacy environment, consolidating data from nine policy administration systems, simplifying the messy internal processes, and creating a single view of its customers.

Now, as agents speak with customers, they have on-screen pop-ups providing information about the customer’s history with relevant actions and offers for the agent to speak on. The results? Customers received their answers faster (calls were reduced by an average of 30 seconds), and there was a significant increase in the company’s Net Promoter score. The company implemented this system and achieved its internal goals within six months.

How to get started

So where do insurance companies go next? Most insurance companies have analytics and modeling capabilities in place, but decisioning technology takes this thinking one step further. Without this technology in place, updates to customer information and interactions will be outdated since they are added manually. Decisioning allows for fully digital and automated updates to customer records in real-time. If an agent is talking with a customer, they can access and use information that has been updated even minutes earlier.

Want to learn more? Check out our latest white paper in collaboration with Pegasystems, The Future of Customer Engagement.