The biggest challenge in insurance today is rapid digital transformation - how to accelerate combining online, digital communication with the human face of your financial advisor. Besides contact via chat or phone, video calling has recently become the go-to communication to stay connected during the pandemic. And also for interacting with customers video calls help solve the digital-versus-personal challenge. But for what types of insurance services can you use video calling?
Are you interested in CX video calling, but wondering what use cases it has to offer? In this blog, we present 5 ways to get started with Insurance via video.
Use cases of video calling for insurance:
1. Advice
2. Claims
3. Desk account management
4. Field account management
5. Sales
Case study: How Achmea uses video for claims & account management
The digital challenge: how to provide a digital but personal service
Consumer demands were changing rapidly in the Insurance industry - also before Covid-19. Insurtech was the buzz word. But now more than ever consumers are expecting ‘optichannel’ digital interactions. As long as consumers can not visit local, ‘offline’ branches, it is a must to be present digitally.
What it comes down to if you’d like to come out of this crisis as a strong insurer, is: digitize now, or risk business continuity. You want to meet the digital demands of your customers and show your ability to innovate. On the other hand, human resources still make up your biggest asset, in the form of your financial advisors. And your product requires you to stay personal: dealing with people and their property or personal losses can involve deeply emotional interactions.
In order to keep providing maximum value as an insurer, you need to remain accessible and human when interacting with customers at crucial moments. So you’re facing a double challenge these days:
- You need to digitize as fast as possible, and find an efficient way to interact with clients that you can scale for the long-term;
- In order to remain relevant to customers in these extremely insecure times you also still have to establish human relationships built on trust.
Video calls: the new channel for interacting with customers
How do you interact with your insurance customers in a personal way that builds trust, but which at the same time contributes to business continuity? Video calling is the solution.
In 2017 already, research showed that over 60% of insurance professionals planned to use video for at least one of their services. These insurance companies had 2 main business goals for offering video calls: they aimed to humanize their customer interaction for more complex or emotional topics, and to streamline their processes by connecting customers with the right insurance expert faster.
The 2 main benefits of video calling that the 2017 study found, are still relevant to today's urgent requirements - if not more relevant:
- Faster service with more efficient insurance processes
- Higher customer satisfaction rates and NPS: with the help of video calls, our Insurance customers have attained NPS scores ranging from +63 to +78.
Moreover, video calls can easily be integrated in the customer journey touchpoints where they add most value to your clients.
How to get started with video calling: 5 use cases for Insurance
Whether you offer advice in personal or commercial lines insurance - when your customers are facing big changes in their lives and financial situations, they prefer to have a human conversation about how these changes will impact their insurance needs.
Video calls provide both a digital and human channel to be 24/7 accessible to your customers.
How do you start using video and leveraging its benefits? At what touchpoints in the customer journey can you add it as a new channel, or use it to replace a more traditional channel like chat, phone or face-to-face?
We’ve listed 5 clear use cases of CX video calling for your insurance services:
More complex financial topics are best explained when there’s live interaction between the advisor and the customer. You can use video calling for advice on financially complex products, like life insurance or retirement plans.
Video allows advisors to explain insurance products more clearly than via the phone. And advice via video is just as clear or even clearer than face-to-face at a branch desk or in one of your offices, for example.
Insurance advisors can illustrate their words visually during video calls, thanks to the screen sharing option. This makes it easier for customers to understand the explanation of financial products. That, in turn, creates more trust from a customer’s perspective and makes meetings more effective from your side, since fewer contact moments are needed in total.
A second advantage of premium video calling technology are the tools and automations that come with it: thanks to an automatic booking module on your website, for example, customers who are short on time or mobility can book a video meeting with one of your insurance advisors themselves. You offer them an extra, easily accessible option to contact you - omnichannel. On top of that, it saves you time that would otherwise be needed to schedule a meeting via phone or email.
In short, video calls allow your advisors to interact with customers in a personal way, while the fact that advisors can operate remotely reduces the total time investment for one meeting.
2. Claims
A great use case for video calls is the processing and management of insurance claims. When your customers become the victim of personal injuries or suffer losses related to property and casualty insurance, that’s your chance to provide the best possible service - to establish trust.
Several insurers worldwide have started using video calls to offer immediate service to customers and instantly assess damage right after an incident took place. In case of injury or loss, personal contact and fast service can really make a difference - and a human touch and speed are exactly what video offers when it comes to managing claims.
Video is a win-win for claims management. It speeds up the insurance process, enabling agents to analyze more claims in one working day and hence lowering costs for the insurer. At the same time it delivers a better service for the claimant, thanks to a faster and more personal experience. And as a result of allowing you to interact with claimants directly and personally, video could help your business become even more efficient by eliminating the need for an intermediary to manage the claims process on behalf of customers.
You might also like
Learn more about using video calls for handling insurance claims >
3. Desk account management: replace phone-only touchpoints with video
You probably have some type of customer interaction that takes place via phone only at the moment. A third way to start integrating video into your services, is to replace phone-only communication with video calls.
A good example of how to start with video instead of phone contact is desk account management. Video offers some extra benefits compared to phone contact:
- Enable desk account managers to build more personal relationships with clients, and become trusted partners;
- Create more sales opportunities with live video, both cross and upsell: live communication still converts better - especially now that sales processes revolve more and more around the needs of the customer.
An extra tip to help leverage video calls in insurance: offer customers a tool to schedule video meetings with your advisors or account managers online. This will save you a lot of inefficient email communication. Plus, you can skip the phone as a channel altogether.
4. Field account management
Besides desk account management, which is already being handled remotely, there’s field account management for higher-value customers. Pre-corona, most insurers used to manage bigger or more valuable accounts face-to-face, via in-person meetings.
However, field account management is a great use case for video calling. You can start using video calls to interact with customers that rank right below your top-value customers.
If (depending on the government measures in social distancing) you reserve in-person meetings for your most valuable clients, you can communicate with other important clients via live video meetings. That way, you provide just as personal a connection, but you save your account managers lots of travel time. Which in turn will also boost your company's business continuity.
An example of how to add video to the channels you use for customer interaction: video calls in addition to face-to-face contact, phone and online
5. Sales
If you’d like to clearly see the added value of interacting with (potential) customers via a digital and personal channel: start selling via video.
You can use video calling for up-sell and cross-sell in any of the use cases we outlined above, from claims and advice to account management. That’s because video increases the sales of all insurance products across business activities. We briefly mentioned how it could raise sales opportunities in desk account management already. But video boosts conversions in general: it creates sales opportunities, converts more and helps close deals.
People will always want to buy from real people, and personal communication still achieves the highest conversion rates. In the Financial Industry, for example, video banking has led to a 33% increase in sales conversions at Dutch bank ING. Big insurers have also come to this insight: according to Accenture, 31% of Personal Lines sales would be digitally executed entirely in Property and Casualty Insurance.
How do you see the future of Insurance?
With the need for digital transformation now accelerating at full speed, video calling is a highly relevant channel. It might be the ultimate solution for customer interaction in the Insurance industry, by bringing together new consumer demands for digital-yet-human communication with insurers’ needs to innovate.
There are many use cases where video calls bring a benefit to the Insurance industry. Video can be used as a new channel for live insurance advice, claims management, account management of both smaller and high-value customers, and for sales. Video calls not only increase conversions and create cost-efficient insurance processes, but also make for happier customers, thanks to a faster and more personal service.
Do you see other benefits of CX video calling to the Insurance industry? Know of more ways to use video calls? Let us know!
