Voices of CMB: The Chadwick Martin Bailey Research Blog

Four Keys to a Successful Customer Engagement Strategy for the Insurance Industry

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Creating customer loyalty is a challenge for every company and has never been more important than it is today. 

It’s no surprise that the challenge is even greater for low engagement industries like Life Insurance.   (I’m willing to bet you don’t have a frequent customer card from your insurance carrier hanging from your key chain or special offers filling your inbox.) That makes creating “loyalty” in the traditional sense a challenge, but not one that is insurmountable.  It just means loyalty needs to be defined within the practical realities of the insurance industry.

As MassMutual’s Pete Jacques and CMB’s John Martin discussed in our recent loyalty webinar, at the core of this challenge is the need for insurance companies to focus on increasing customer engagement and attachment within the practical realities of their customer relationship.

1. Make the Concept of “Customer Engagement” Concrete: Customer engagement is not “one size fits all” and needs to be tailored to fit the needs of your customers. It needs to be well defined and linked to business outcomes. Once defined it then needs to be explained internally to key stakeholders in way that demonstrates the link between customer engagement and business outcomes.  By having a concrete plan and set of goals, you can build an engagement strategy and continually test different ways to increase it with measurable results.
   
   
2. Resist the Urge: Resist the urge to blindly adopt what’s working in other industries.  The strategies you routinely see working in other industries simply don’t align with the realities of the insurance setting, but you can learn from what others are doing to customize a program that aligns with your goals. Again, it is critical to get buy-in and share this framework with others in the organization.
   
   
3. Use Fact-based Customer Insights: Using market research as tool to understand the best way increase and maintain strong customer attachment can be accomplished through thoughtful, well executed analysis of insights from the marketplace. This is an opportunity to talk to policy holders and understand their goals and what you can do to help them achieve them.
   
   
4. Use the Right Metrics:  It’s important not to rely on lagging indicators like renewal rates, but use more forward looking measures like the likelihood to shop a policy and recommend your carrier to others.  These forward looking measures help you understand not just the behaviors your customers are taking, but their disposition, which is key to truly understanding loyalty.

 
Learn more from Pete and John by listening to their webinar and hearing how MassMutual is driving profitability by increasing their customer loyalty.