Maximise your customer experience with these key steps to implement a Total Experience

By: Wimpie van Der Merwe (CEO, Global Choices)

The customer experience landscape is undergoing a significant transformation in terms of expectations and capabilities, yet many companies are ill-prepared to adapt to this change. 

While it was previously enough for brands to deliver frictionless interactions with customers, they must now adopt a Total Experience approach to stand out from competitors and build lasting customer loyalty. Unfortunately, many insurers have attempted to retrofit this strategy through disjointed and superficial fixes that lead to even more fragmented or siloed customer experiences. Today’s customers demand a seamless, proactive, and predictable Total Experience across all channels and touchpoints throughout their entire journey with your company.

The important aspect of meeting customers emotional needs

To address customers’ emotional needs, an insurer must recognise that insurance products are often associated with stressful and emotional life events. Therefore, empathy, clear communication, and timely response to customers’ queries and claims are critical components of providing excellent customer service. Additionally, insurers must ensure that they educate customers on their policies and help them to understand the importance of being adequately covered. Empowering customers to make informed decisions and simplifying their user experience can also go a long way in addressing their emotional needs.

Recognising and addressing customers’ emotional needs is a critical component of providing excellent customer service. By understanding customers’ feelings and concerns, we can foster positive experiences, build trust and loyalty and promote customer satisfaction. This may involve techniques such as active listening, empathy and problem-solving skills, as well as a willingness to go above and beyond to meet customers’ needs. By making emotional intelligence a priority in customer interactions, you can create lasting relationships and promote business success.

In addition to accomplishing tasks efficiently, customers and employees also seek emotional connections with insurance brands. Neglecting emotional aspects of business is easy with the abundance of technology available. However, customers, employees, and partners are the foundation of any organisation. Insurers must strive to create experiences that align with people’s emotional motivations and functional needs. Understanding how people feel before and during interactions with an insurer leads to valuable insights. 

Serve your customers better by anticipating their needs

To provide superior customer experiences, brands must go beyond simply reacting to customer enquiries. They need to anticipate customer needs and proactively design experiences that guide customers towards their next desired action. A key way to achieve this is through a Total Experience approach that seamlessly integrates digital touchpoints with personalised interactions. Leveraging sophisticated automation and AI can further refine the customer journey, resulting in increased sales and customer loyalty.

Make insurance more personal

To make every customer touchpoint more impactful, aim for hyper-personalisation that recognises unique needs and preferences, even in small moments. And don’t forget to create a personalised employee experience to boost loyalty, connectedness, and customer experience.

Making insurance more personal means tailoring insurance policies and services to meet the unique needs and preferences of individual customers. This can involve using data and technology to understand customers’ behaviours, preferences, and risk factors, as well as providing personalised advice and support to help customers make informed decisions about their insurance coverage. Ultimately, the goal is to create a more seamless and customer-centric insurance experience that better meets the needs of each individual policyholder.

Conduct an honest evaluation of your customer experience operating model

Conduct an honest evaluation of your customer experience operating model. Despite significant investments in your current approach, taking a critical look at your processes, technology, and talent is critical to delivering the future’s ultimate customer experience. 

You should also be sure to scrutinise your technology stack’s capabilities to deliver a Total Experience effectively. To establish a strong technological foundation, prioritise cross-platform integration, collaboration, utilisation and customised creation. 

Implementing the optimal blend of technology tools, processes and personnel enhances the company’s capacity to deliver a Total Experience through all channels. An exemplary instance of Total Experience implementation can be attained by a comprehensive understanding of your customer experience through journey mapping, persona development, objective and insight reviews, site visits, employee interviews, and engagement with sales representatives. 

Lastly, leveraging AI technology can further advance your Total Experience goals, such as using predictive intelligence to enhance personalisation and machine learning to improve overall efficiency.

Align your Total Experience strategy with your broader business goals

To ensure the success of the Total Experience, it’s crucial to align it with broader business goals. Investing in top-notch tools and personnel is not sufficient unless there is consistent support for it from top to bottom throughout the business. It’s necessary for everyone, including each team, every business unit and the IT department, to share the same perspective and value for the Total Experience. When a shared vision and objective existence, the potential new lexicon of terms, tools, and techniques required for achieving success will be more easily adopted. 

An excellent example of implementing Total Experience is where a comprehensive understanding of customer experience is to create a detailed plan for transformation involving all departments, including marketing, operations, e-commerce, IT, and finance.