Imagine the ability to connect with and offer current and future insurance customers exactly what they need to achieve their life and business goals with the least risk possible in real-time. Imagine having insight into new and profitable risk pools and customer segments as they are forming. Imagine the ability to configure and deliver highly personalized solutions and value-added services to them on the fly. The rapidly maturing Digital Ecosystems surrounding customers offer that opportunity. However, the roadmap to get there doesn’t start with technology. It starts with the customer.
Digital Ecosystems: Customer Immersion
Customers live, work, play, and connect through digital solutions. Solutions that are aware of what they are planning, doing, and who and what they are connecting or engaging with. Solutions that are part of interoperable ecosystems that provide value and meaning throughout their personal, professional, and business journeys. Through their interactions with these and the data they produce customers are generating individual as well as collective footprints of their goals, values, actions, and outcomes. As an insurance industry, we have the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the rich, informative data streams flowing around the customer and within those ecosystems. Doing so gives us the ability to understand and support our customers, their families, communities, and businesses in ways we never could. Those who excel at this will be the next industry leaders.
Right Time, Right Place, Right Value
Customers interact with those solutions and ecosystems in real-time. Those interactions enable solution providers to deliver just the right solution or value at just the right time. This opens the door in a way never before possible to deliver highly personalized value-added solutions at the right place and the right time. Companies that become an integral part of these ecosystem enabled platforms and solutions open the door to an exponential way to engage and create value for customers.
Connections & Insight: All that Data
The real treasure from a customer engagement standpoint though lies beyond the individual solutions. It lies within the digital connections to the customer’s physical world and the data from when, where, and what they engage with. Information that gives us context, location, mental and behavioral insight about the customer, their plans, actions, and outcomes.
That information when analyzed at the individual and global level gives us unprecedented insight to help the customer achieve their life and business goals in ways never before possible.
Innovation, Prediction, Prevention, Mitigation, and Recovery
The connection points, data, and insights coming from the ecosystems, platforms, and solutions surrounding the customer are a springboard for more than exponential customer connections. They are also a springboard for exponential innovation. Innovation in how, when, and what we engage customers with. Innovation in how and when we predict and assess risk. Innovation in solutions that help prevent, mitigate, and recover from risk. And, more profoundly, underwriting solutions that proactively assess, package, and offer those solutions at the time of need and then price the risk based on the value added solutions package the customer chooses.
Roadmap: Pragmatic Strategies to Get from here to there
No one will get there all at once no one will get there all alone. The good news? Every industry including insurance is moving to a Cloud and SaaS-based footing. Micro Services are being launched along with suites of dynamic APIs that make it easier to interconnect and interoperate solutions and data sets. Platforms are being launched that make it easier and easier for supporting solutions to be bound into more personalized solutions for the customer.
The roadmap for insurers starts not with the technologies, but instead with understanding the customer. Who are they? What they are doing and struggling with? What are they negatively impacted by as they work to achieve life, recreational, and business goals? Who and what are they engaged with as they undertake those macro and micro journeys?
The next part of the roadmap is assessing the existing and emerging ecosystems, platforms, and solutions surrounding the customer? Which of those most effectively engage and support the customer in their journeys? What level of data and interoperability is available or planned. Which of those individually or collectively provide insight and connections that allow us and the customer to better predict, prevent, mitigate, and recover from risk. What innovations in customer engagement, insurance solutions, and value-added services will they enable us to create?
Once we understand those we can then start to answer the question of how do we get there. How will those capabilities change the industry value chain? What do we need to change about our existing business and technical strategies? What requirements will this place on our core systems and operational architecture? What do we need to change in our culture? Which current or potential new partners can help us accelerate our ability to harness the exponential opportunities for innovation these create?
Love to hear your thoughts and share your case studies.
