Creating the total experience playbook for your business

By Wimpie van der Merwe (CEO, Global Choices)

Creating a total experience (TX) playbook can streamline the complex insurance purchasing process, empowering insurance brokers with digital tools to personalise services and meet changing customer needs. Insurers leveraging digital technology can allocate their resources efficiently, allowing for a focus on value-added tasks. Prioritising customer experience when creating innovative insurance products is key to satisfying customers seeking protection against financial risks, while accommodating evolving needs.

The TX strategy is essential for insurers to attract and retain policyholders in the changing economy as younger generations enter the market. To stay ahead, insurers need to create superior experiences for both existing and new clients with different expectations and values. 

A comprehensive TX strategy that integrates MX (multi-experience), CX (customer experience), EX (employee experience), and UX (user experience) will help achieve this goal. By optimising multiple objectives and creating shared experiences across devices, platforms, and touchpoints, insurers can prioritise customer service, user satisfaction, and employee engagement. This holistic approach builds trust and fosters better relationships throughout the policyholder lifecycle while ensuring consistency across all channels. Additionally, it provides a comprehensive view of interactions and delivers an exceptional experience every time.

Creating an effective total experience framework

To create a comprehensive total experience framework, insurers need to focus on the crucial elements of customer needs, compelling offers, and delivering results. To ensure that each experience decision and action is informed, start with a 360-degree view of the customer and employee, with a commitment to fostering the best possible experiences. Investing in a Total Experience approach will yield long-term benefits, including satisfied, loyal customers and engaged, happy employees who stay with the company for years. 

Identifying where to begin the process can be challenging. To address this challenge, implement the five “E’s” of the total experience framework:

• Evaluate: Understand your customers’ perceptions of your brand, evaluate your current capabilities, and deliver on your brand promise.
• Envision: Develop experience designs that drive growth and reduce costs, and establish a blueprint, business case, and transformation roadmap.
• Empathise: Use customer feedback to identify pain points, prioritise improvements, and track progress towards resolution.
• Enable: Empower employees with the correct tools, training, and support to provide exceptional service and drive performance.
• Evolve: Continually refine and improve your total experience strategy based on customer and employee feedback, data, and industry trends.

Do a total assessment of your business

To gain a comprehensive understanding of your business, it is important to conduct a total assessment. Even companies that strive for a total experience can’t succeed without a thorough comprehension of the total state. You must examine every component of the overarching experience and consider the underlying business, technology, and operational capabilities. The following aspects must be considered:

• To assess the state of your business, think through the following:
  • Your current CX vision for each business unit
  • All customer touchpoints, interactions, and experiences
  • The overall sales and service value streams
  • Major business initiatives and how they support your total experience vision
• To evaluate the technology state of your business, consider these factors:
  • Enabling technology capabilities for each core function
  • Your customer data assets, insights, and predictive/proactive capabilities
  • Your digital conversational maturity, including automation, artificial intelligence, and overall conversational experience
  • Your unified CX platform which enables hyper-personalised experiences
• To assess your operational state, focus on the following areas:
  • Employee experience, especially those who interact with customers directly
  • Put incentives in place to promote exceptional brand experiences
  • Eliminate operational and system silos
  • Evaluate your operating model to drive efficiency

Create a total experience maturity model

To create a total experience maturity model for your organisation, focus on the following five primary components:

• Alignment
• Understanding
• Design
• Co-ordination
• Measurement

A basic maturity model typically has four levels:

• Limited: Limited CX channel offerings, siloed data, inconsistent experiences, essential KPIs, no enquiry channels
• Ad hoc: Preliminary pain points identified, strategy not integrated across all channels, KPIs neglect operations side, call centre not proactive, limited insights
• Reliable: More dynamic journey maps, formalised research processes, robust data insights incorporated into design, CX and EX not yet differentiated
• Embedded: Total experience is embedded across the organisation, true omnichannel environment, integrated systems, data and processes, sophisticated analytics, simple and streamlined data on a central dashboard

Understand customer needs at a deeper level

To deliver a total experience, it is crucial to understand customer needs at a deeper level. Categorising human needs into three types – functional, emotional, and social – can aid in achieving this understanding. Functional needs focus on what the customer is trying to accomplish, while emotional needs refer to how they want to feel when interacting with your company. Social needs relate to how they want to be perceived based on their association with a particular brand. Meeting emotional and social needs can help drive value and create a sense of purpose for both employees and customers. Understanding these needs can aid in building customer personas and segments.

Creating well-defined customer segments and personas

Creating well-defined customer segments and personas is essential in designing a personalised total experience. Segmentation enables you to identify the most valuable target customers for your business, while personas provide granular insights into their behaviours, preferences, and motivations. 

By combining both, you can create a highly detailed picture of your customers, which can then inform your data management strategies and lead to continuous improvements in the total experience. AI technology can enhance the accuracy and efficiency of this process through automated data analysis and pattern recognition, allowing you to identify trends and customer clusters in real-time. This way, you can adapt your product offering and marketing messaging to address specific needs and desires, resulting in higher engagement and brand loyalty.

Creating a total experience operating model

A total experience strategy requires companies to assess and potentially change their operating model to better align with the customer experience vision. This involves reviewing and optimising various elements including capabilities, structures, processes, data assets, and investments to support the delivery of a seamless total experience. By leveraging AI technology in this process, organisations can gain deeper insights into customer preferences and behaviours, identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, and optimise their operations in real-time to continuously enhance the total experience. This approach allows organisations to stay ahead of constantly evolving customer needs and preferences, ensuring that they remain competitive and relevant in an increasingly digital landscape.