With hard lockdowns causing a significant decline in new business, health impacts resulting in a rise in claims, and increased financial pressure leading many to cancel their policies, it’s safe to say the life insurance industry has been under incredible pressure over the last year.
When I think about how insurers handled the coronavirus pandemic, my sense is that they dealt with the situation in one of two ways.
Some players responded to the global health crisis by adopting a cautious approach; hoping they could weather the disruption and continue with their normal strategy once the storm was over three weeks later – as we thought back then.
But as the reality of the pandemic started to set in, these insurers realised the enormity of what they were facing and had to develop solutions to keep the lights on, retain existing business and ensure their strategy remained relevant in the new world.
While most insurers were already developing digital solutions before the pandemic, the typical approach to digitalisation entailed taking existing products and processes and putting these on Web sites rather than on paper. So where customers once completed a printed 20-page form in person, now they filled out that same form on the Web instead. It might work, but it doesn’t add convenience and seldom meets the client’s real needs.
Other insurance providers saw the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to be strategic; taking time to do research around what the future of the industry could look like, and most importantly, viewing the world from the client’s perspective. By relooking at their products or processes and improving these via some sort of digital approach – not because they want to, however, but because they understand that digital provides clients with the best experience..
Today, it’s less about the product and more about the customer.
Across a broad range of industries, the demand for digital self-service experiences accelerated during the pandemic. This digitalisation drive means that people can do more themselves and their expectations increase as a result. Today, it’s less about the product and more about the customer.
While no one knows what the world will look like in two or five years’ time, what we do know is that digital offers the agility that brands need to shift their efforts as the market shifts.
Consider an app like Checkers Sixty60, for example. This popular e-commerce offering, which allows consumers to order groceries and have them delivered in as little as 60 minutes, may have been launched before COVID-19 shut the world down, but the platform really gained momentum as a result of hard lockdown.
With this, we saw a brick-and-mortar retail giant transform into a major e-commerce player because customer needs changed and it realised it needed to provide a better client experience.
Within the life insurance space, offering a better experience means looking at improving the whole client experience – from realising the need for insurance to making an insurance claim.
While the pandemic hasn’t changed what products protect against all that much, it has driven demand for more intuitive customer experiences, simpler products (that people can buy without a face-to-face meeting with a broker), as well as flexible products that allow clients to adapt their policies, or pause and later resume coverage as their needs change.
The strict lockdown may only have lasted a few months but the effects have bolstered trends that will have an impact on our industry for many years to come.
Today, more consumers want the option to do certain things themselves and interact with businesses in simpler and more efficient ways – most notably, on their own terms.
In response, brands need to get creative and come up with innovative ways to address these changing customer expectations.
Society looks very different now and if the last year has taught us anything, it’s that being willing to experiment, adapt and change your approach is essential in this ever-changing, ever-evolving digital world.
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