Clear and consistent communication with customers is one of the most important functions of a company regardless of industry.
In the insurance industry, a policy document or an update regarding your claim is the only “product” that ever effectively gets delivered to a customer. Insurance providers are effectively selling trust that they’ll have our back when something goes wrong. Confusing or disjointed communication is one of the quickest ways to lose that trust that took so long to build.
It’s no surprise that insurers are among the biggest users of customer communication management (CCM) technologies. Two of the leading providers in this category, Smart Communications and Quadient, recently joined the MuleSoft Partner Technology Program.
We wanted to take a closer look at the industry trends that were driving this demand for a decoupled, flexible approach to integrating their platforms, leveraging our customer feedback, and analyzing research from leading analysts Aspire CCS, CapGemini, and PWC.
Customer experience (CX) spans design, content, and channels
The value of delivering a superior customer experience is well established, particularly for premium brands and for products where customers can easily switch providers. According to PWC, almost one third of consumers are willing to walk away after a poor customer experience, even for brands that they love.
To respond to these pressures, our insurance customers are using our platform to address CX needs through:
- Content: MuleSoft’s broad real-time integration capabilities allows CX teams to deliver relevant, up-to-date content to each customer by plugging directly into operational core systems and third-party data sources.
- Channels: since consumers expect to be able to interact with Insurers through the channel of their choice, making sure the experience and data is consistent irrespective of channel has become critical. This is where our focus on reuse really begins to have an impact, enabling a bidirectional, omnichannel approach to CX with much faster delivery times.
CX requires complete customer data across the whole journey
While the recent PWC Customer Experience report highlights the importance of efficient service in customers’ evaluation of their experience, data from Aspire also shows the experience during onboarding is almost as important.
During this initial phase, customers are used to interacting more with the brand, and a compelling onboarding experience can lead to effective cross-sell and upsell opportunities. To do this effectively, companies need to be able to bring data together quickly from third-party party sources and their own marketing systems, among other places.
This explains why CCM platforms can no longer be just tightly coupled with an Insurers Core Policy Admin system, but need to be integrated across all steps of their customer lifecycle, and how companies are turning onboarding from a cost to profit center. According to Aspire, almost 40% of companies plan to add more rich interactivity to their onboarding experience.
Translate that need into an IT view (as Capgemini did), and it means that IT teams are scrambling to integrate CCM platforms across all pillars of their CRM (marketing, lead management, service, ticketing, core policy, and claims platforms) to ensure customers receive a consistent experience at all stages of their journey.
MuleSoft’s new partnerships with Quadient and Smart Communications will significantly reduce that effort by creating outside-of-the-box connectors and other assets to help insurers implement modern CX programs faster and at lower cost.
A new organizational and technology approach for CX
The response from our customers to these trends are also quite consistent with analyst research:
- Organizational shift to centralized CX teams
- Rapid Adoption of cloud-based solutions for customer communications and experience management
The impact on how the IT team then needs to approach CX software integration is then seen in a few different ways. Since the teams are now separated, we see a shift from point-to-point integration to building APIs that allow the central CX team to build their own integrations without needing to know the underlying core system details.
The adoption of more cloud-based services that may be outside the traditional span of control of IT has increased the need for API Management capabilities to complement the traditional data integration focus.
Be sure to check out these partner solutions on MuleSoft’s Anypoint Exchange platform to see how they can accelerate your CX projects:
- Watch a full presentation from the CEO of Aspire CCS at Smart Communication’s conference.
- Find more information on our partner Quadiant’s solutions.
- Learn more about MuleSoft’s solutions for insurance.
