Now, this transformation is rewriting the rules for customer experience (CX) in the insurance industry. In the highly competitive industry, delivering best-in-class customer experiences can be a critical differentiator. Combining operational data (O-data) with experience data (X-data) provides the insights that enhance the customer experience offerings and give insurers a competitive edge.

CX Imperative: Why the Insurance Industry Lags Behind

Customers typically have few 鈥� if any 鈥� interactions with their insurance company. In fact, without a claim or policy change, there is often no interaction at all. This means when an interaction does occur, it takes on a greater level of importance. Furthering this challenge, consumers are becoming more discerning and less forgiving. One in three customers will walk away from a brand they love after just a single bad experience,聽.

How can insurers get a broader picture of the customer journey? The first stop is O-data, which reveals the聽what. Policy renewal rates are decreasing, attrition rates are increasing, new customer acquisitions are decreasing. This data tells us the insurance company has a problem, but we don鈥檛 know聽why聽the problem exists.

This is where X-data comes into play, revealing customer pain points 鈥� a difficult claims process, a poor digital experience, a slow reimbursement process 鈥� that are causing the problem. Together, this data can help insurers uncover the causes of customer churn and identify actions to best address pain points, such as automating the claims process, reducing call wait times, or optimising digital channels for claims submission.

Combining O-data and X-data makes it easier for insurers to unlock powerful business outcomes and:

• Improve the claims process, reducing attrition and increasing renewal and revenue
• Deliver a superior digital experience, increasing revenue and acquisitions
• Strengthen insurer-broker relationships, increasing policy renewals, revenue, and acquisitions

Bringing X- and O-Data Together for True Insight

three components critical to customer experience in the insurance industry: effectiveness, ease, and emotion. These components are critical to building a strong customer relationship, shoring up existing market share, and capitalising on new business opportunities. And they are best assessed through a combination of X- and O-data.

Consider what happens when a customer files an insurance claim. This process can be emotional: Property may have been lost or damaged and a customer鈥檚 day-to-day life is directly impacted. O-data tells us about聽how聽the claims process is handled while X-data tells us what the customer聽feels聽about the claims process.

The X- and O-data from these interactions must be part of a customer鈥檚 profile. No matter with whom a customer is speaking, this agent or representative is empowered with the background knowledge they need to be as responsive as possible to a customer鈥檚 concern. When insurers have these insights at their fingertips, agents and other front-line employees can provide a better experience, improving engagement and strengthening customer loyalty. These exceptional experiences turn loyal customers into brand advocates, giving insurers a critical competitive edge.

Turning Insights into Business Success

Here鈥檚 how three companies put the power of X and O to work for them.

Allianz: Predictive Power of Democratised Insights
is one of the world鈥檚 largest insurance providers, but despite being a market leader, the company recognized it was operating in a market with excess supply and declining rates. Rather than staying the course and risk falling profits and market share loss, Allianz proactively put customer experience at the heart of its strategy to earn lifelong loyalty from clients who see them as an integral, forward-thinking business partner. Working with Experience Management solutions from 麻豆原创 (Qualtrics), they collected experience data from customers in 22 countries and 16 languages. The company now has a wealth of insights, filtering and prioritising based on location and function. These insights have led to new products, such as protecting customers from risks like cyber crime; new approaches, such as elevating claims processing from back-office to client-facing function; and new reputation management strategies, such as above-and-beyond consultations.

MetLife: Boosting Brand Engagement
MetLife, Inc. is a leading global provider of insurance, annuities, and employee benefit programs. The company is digging deeper into its data for actionable insights that drive brand engagement. For example, in a recent MetLife-sponsored Earth Week contest, participants needed to answer a series of questions to be eligible for a gift card. From the reporting, MetLife was able to determine three winners and the process sparked significant brand engagement.

SwissRe: End-to-End Customer Experience Ownership
merged all its customer experience, voice of customer, and market data from more than 11,000 clients, 25 markets, and 11 languages onto a single, secure platform. The company now has a Web-based, highly secure insights platform that gives users 24/7 access to data. The intuitive interface makes it easy for all stakeholders to become experts on customer experience. This centralised, in-house approach led to a 90 percent decrease in research costs, a five-times increase in speed and productivity, and a seven-point Net Promoter Score increase.

Next Steps: Enhancing CX with Data-Driven Insights

Experience matters. We live in a world where insurers are disproportionately rewarded when they deliver a great experience and punished when they do not. Experience Management solutions from 麻豆原创 unlock the power of business operations data (O-data) with experience data (X-data) to transform customer experience and drive business success.

As part of the 麻豆原创 C/4HANA suite, 麻豆原创 now makes it easier for insurers to combine X- and O-data and gain actionable insights at every step of the customer journey.聽.

This article first appeared on the Global News Centre.聽

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In its simplest form, XM is the process of monitoring every interaction people experience with a company in order to spot opportunities for improvement. By understanding what people are feeling and why, companies can focus their efforts and resources on the changes that will have the biggest impact on their customers or employees.

The first step to effective XM is understanding how people feel when they interact with your business. This information is called Experience, or X-data. When this is combined with traditional, operational or 鈥極-data鈥�, such as sales numbers, processing times or staff turnover, it enables companies to understand what is happening and what they need to do to fix or improve operations.

Experience Management is already big business: the market is now estimated at more than USD$44bn annually. In Australia, XM has been adopted by the likes of Volkswagen, Chobani, Allianz, Finder, Fuji Xerox, and Sigma Healthcare. In fact,聽聽2019 Customer Experience Management Survey revealed that 90% of the world鈥檚 biggest companies now have a chief experience officer (CXO) or chief customer officer (CCO), up from 65% in 2017.

Insight into action

It鈥檚 not hard to understand why XM is growing so fast. It鈥檚 a real driver of business results. Since implementing an XM program,聽聽has seen its Net Promoter Score increase by +49 points, while average order sizes have increased by 8%. But beyond the bottom line, Experience Management is also a clear driver of innovation.

At 麻豆原创, we believe in the聽. This is an approach that is founded on empathy for the stakeholders involved. Working through the phases of an innovation roadmap (Explore, Discover, Design, Deliver, Run & Scale) you quickly realise how intertwined Experience and Innovation are.

In fact, in many ways successful XM and innovation programs are very similar. Often a fundamental driver of innovation is the need to improve experience.聽 One common example of poor XM I regularly witness is employees double handling information 鈥� due to siloed teams and inefficient processes 鈥� which leads to errors, frustration, and wasted effort. Often, this can be solved with innovative approaches and technology, like process automation, edge computing, or new mobile applications.

Getting to the root of a problem

In this example, by using XM to understand the biggest frustrations your employees are facing 鈥� and what they want to fix the issues 鈥� businesses can get a crystal-clear understanding of the problem, which is the first step on any innovation journey. Key to this approach is gaining empathy for the users by understanding their experience.

What鈥檚 more, by engaging and empowering the employees on the front-line, who typically have the best understanding of current systems and how they could be improved, XM also enables organisations to capture feedback and ideas which might not otherwise see the light of day.

Take for example a business complaining of a lack of repeat sales. Through XM, the business can identify that the problem is not the product, the sales process, or even the pricing. Instead, it might reveal the biggest problem is the after sales and service process.

A better understanding of the problem (and the users) helps inform potential solutions. In this instance, rather than dropping the sales price or introducing self-service scenarios, Experience Management enables the business to understand that technology like chat bots, connected products, or digital twins may result in a better outcome. Grounding innovation in deep insights means better problem solving and results.

Empathy and innovation

Using techniques from Experience Management allows businesses to truly empathise with customers. The reality is that too many businesses believe that they understand the problems faced by their customers or employees already. But if organisations do not ask users about the issues they鈥檙e facing, and why they鈥檙e problematic, it鈥檚 impossible for them to get the real picture.

When it comes to solving problems, generating ideas from many different points of view greatly increases your chances of successful innovation. Experience Management is a powerful way of gathering a diversity of opinions and involving stakeholders in the innovation journey. Of course, finding a problem and generating potential solutions is not the end of innovation. But as companies like聽聽prove, user-testing new products at scale with Experience Management means you can get real time feedback on new products and a cycle of continuous innovation improvement.

These days, more than ever, staying one step ahead of the competition is the key to success. Businesses need to ask themselves: are your employees, customers, and partners having their expectations met? Understanding their expectations will be the first step in an effective innovation journey and will ensure you are competing well into the future.

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In an increasingly digital world, Queensland鈥檚 Treasury department felt it either had to renovate or replace its technology, taking a compliance-first mindset.

The path it has taken has allowed the department to provide more digital services to the state鈥檚 taxpayers. It鈥檚 also elevated staff from the more mundane, manual process tasks and afforded them the opportunity to do more interesting work.

鈥淭he world, our ecosystem, as well as taxpayers鈥�, staff and government鈥檚 expectations are changing, and our transformation project allows us to meet those expectations,鈥� says Queensland Treasury deputy commissioner Simon McKee.

The transformation comes under four strategic pillars. The first and most important is culture and leadership. 鈥淲ithout a change in culture and mindset, nothing can be achieved,鈥� McKee says, adding that has involved exposing the management team to disruptive thinking.

Research backs up how important culture is in achieving a successful transformation journey. A Gartner survey from 2018 indicates 41 per cent of chief operating officers believe the biggest blocker to change and transformation is culture.

The second pillar involves process redesign. Queensland Treasury has partnered with the Queensland University of Technology to learn more about what taxpayers, industry and staff need from Treasury, to allow it to redesign processes to better meet their needs.

Says McKee: 鈥淲hat they want is to access our systems securely at a time of their choice, on a device of their choice. They also want to know why we’re collecting their data, how we鈥檙e storing it and how this benefits them.鈥�

The third, most ambitious pillar is the digitisation of Treasury鈥檚 systems, involving 46 initiatives across three years, of different sizes, complexity and risk. The end goal is the migration of its systems to a secure data centre in which only government tenants are allowed.

McKee says data is critical for this pillar. 鈥淚t’s at the heart of everything we do. We want to be able to use that data for our transactional and external systems. It gives us a very stable core. We have a really strong data warehouse and we鈥檝e cleaned and de-identified our data, which is a challenge for many organisations. Our data hub now orchestrates the data and we have an analytic cloud, which allows almost Google-type searches of all our data holdings across our transactional systems. But it’s very simple to use.鈥�

So far, Treasury has delivered 31 of its 46 initiatives on time and on budget. 鈥淲e have another seven in flight, with the remaining ones to be delivered by 30 June next year,鈥� he adds.

The fourth pillar is workforce strategy. Treasury has sought advice about how to shape its workforce towards 2023 when the transformation project is slated to be finalised, after which time the department will hand over to an innovation team.

鈥淭he idea is to be able to leverage all this beautiful technology we’re delivering,鈥� McKee explains. 鈥淚t’s about shifting our current skillset and ensuring job security. In the past we routinely received queries about whether machines will replace people鈥檚 jobs. Now people want to know how machines will help people do their job.鈥�

The exciting new technologies Treasury is implementing includes machine learning, which can predict with more than 70 per cent accuracy when a land tax payer may default on their debt. This was previously a challenge for Treasury, given 20 per cent of the state鈥檚 land tax payers don鈥檛 pay their debt on time, whereas just 2 per cent of other taxpayers don鈥檛 pay their tax on time.

Thanks to the ability its new technologies deliver to identify people who are likely to default on their land tax bill, Treasury can now proactively remind taxpayers to pay their land tax bill through digital tools such as SMS messages or email. It can also invite them to consider a repayment plan or give them other options so they don’t default.

鈥淭his benefits taxpayers as it reduces the risk of them defaulting and then paying a fine. It also benefits the government as it gets more revenue earlier to fund essential services,鈥� McKee says.

The next step to improving Treasury services and the citizen experience was understanding the reasons why some taxpayers were defaulting. This required a platform where taxpayers could give continuous feedback about their interactions with the Treasury. By combining the citizen experience data (X-data) with existing operational data (O-data), the Treasury can create a holistic picture of service delivery and generate actionable insights into how to improve.

This allowed the Treasury to bridge experience gaps by understanding what led to negative sentiments and why citizens were unable to pay their obligation on time. As a result, the Treasury changed its approach and began proactively offering financial assistance and support to those in need, before they had defaulted.

Treasury is expecting a substantial return of $200 million from this project, the cost for which is $80 million. It also supports the state government’s goal to deliver responsive governance, which benefits taxpayers.

Says McKee: 鈥淚t鈥檚 all about building an intelligent Treasury department and we鈥檙e on track to achieve that.鈥�

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The experience economy is prompting businesses to reconsider how they engage with not just consumers but also their greatest asset, their employees, to ensure they develop a true connection with their place of work.

Volkswagen is one business that is at the forefront of this shift. Jason Bradshaw, Volkswagen鈥檚 chief customer marketing officer, says taking this approach to optimising an employee’s experiences of work has real business benefits.

鈥淔inding and retaining the right talent is everything because it helps drive business valuations. So having highly engaged employees adds real value,鈥� he says.

Bradshaw says a highly engaged employee is one who is prepared to advocate for your business. 鈥淭he idea is that they are sufficiently engaged in your long-term success, so that effort is freely given because success for them is success for the company.鈥�

The secret to achieving this, he says, is making it as easy as possible for staff to do the job for which they have been hired. 鈥淢ake sure they鈥檙e not bogged down in bureaucracy so they can focus on their role and delivering for customers. No one wants to go home and say, 鈥業 achieved nothing today because I couldn’t get the computer to work鈥�,鈥� he says.

Looking at experience data (X-data) can help show how employees are feeling about where they work and help to find engagement solutions for shared success.

鈥淚f you can’t invest in both the customer and employee experience, then invest in the employee experience because that will lead to better results for customers in the long run,鈥� Bradshaw says.

At 麻豆原创 Australia聽& New Zealand, HR head Debbie Rigger, says her team has been tracking X-data and working to optimise these types of employee experiences. Putting people at the centre of the business plan like this is a move that has seen 麻豆原创 place seventh on the 2019 Best Places to Work list as ranked by global workplace consultants Great Place to Work.

鈥淚n recent years, People聽& Culture leaders have been actively dedicating time and resources to improving the employee experience and developing the right culture to engage, motivate, and inspire their workforce,鈥� Rigger says.

鈥淴-data reveals the employee experience. It鈥檚 the human data, or the beliefs, emotions, and intentions that tell you why employees are leaving the organisation or why candidates are rejecting offers.

鈥淐apturing employees鈥� experience data, and where the experience gaps exist, provides a baseline for HR to begin making improvements that will deliver real business results.

鈥淭he best People聽& Culture leaders today must care as much 鈥� or more 鈥� about employees as they do customers. It means redesigning experiences with the end user in mind across every HR touchpoint.鈥�

Andrew Morris, director of recruitment firm Robert Half, says attracting a cohort of talent that combine soft skills, brand expertise and analytical insight to help enhance the customer experience journey across the enterprise assists in retaining business and growing revenue.

Morris says to drive customer experience, staff also need analytical skills to track and analyse customer encounters to identify errors, inconsistencies and areas of improvement. 鈥淭his in-depth knowledge is critical to developing new products, marketing plans and engagement strategies.鈥�

But optimising employee experiences to create customer-focused and engaged workers like this ultimately relies on the right approach from everyone in the business and setting the tone from the top.

Importantly, says VW’s Bradshaw, employers must demonstrate values that attract people, who in turn transmit those values back to customers. This helps to build the right culture and employee experiences to spur the business on to success.

鈥淐ustomer experience is everybody’s job, especially the leadership team, because they are the ones who give staff permission to embrace creativity, innovation and environments that breed success,鈥� he says.

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