Customer Data Platform for Insurance Industry

The recent wave of pandemic has moved the attention of masses towards the insurance sector. The seriousness of people has shown a boom in this sector and it is expected that by 2022, this industry will grow to $3.6 trillion. And, with the digital revolution, there is a significant change in the way consumers want to look at insurance companies. Infact, the insurance companies are at a benefit as they now have multiple avenues to showcase their offerings.

Since consumers nowadays are always on the go with mobile and other smart devices, it is a great platform for insurance companies to notify consumers about the various insurance options. As the number of interactions over digital channels increase, it becomes absolutely necessary for insurance companies to understand what exactly their customers need.

Analyzing customer behavior over multiple digital channels is the key to success for insurance companies. They need to deliver customer-centric experiences by moulding their approach to keep the customer coming back to them as they acquire new customer for the insurance sector.

A Customer Data Platform(CDP) is a solution that collects, unifies, segments and activates customer data from different sources to a single platform. CDPs are used to analyze the customer data across multiple touchpoints, both online and offline, to enable brands to offer personalization to their customers. With the help of Customer Data Platforms, marketers can offer experiences on the basis of behavioral as well as contextual information in real-life.

Understanding CDP Capabilities

At the basic level, one can understand the capabilities of CDP as mentioned below:

• Data ingestion- CDPs pull first-party customer data from various sources such as transactional systems, web behavior, call center, demographics or POS.
• Identity management- CDPs resolve the identities of customers across multiple channels. Most CDPs use deterministic matching and profile stitching with identifiers
• provided by the inbound data. The CDPs create and maintain a persistent customer identifier.
• Segmentation- CDPs allow marketers to build and maintain a universal, omnichannel audience segmentation with the collective data in it.
• Data provision/activation- CDPs facilitate the activation of the insights and unified customer profile generated in the CDP. This is done by providing connectors and APIs to other marketing technologies.

CDP in the Insurance Industry

The insurance sector is fueled by transactional data coming majorly from offline transactions. While there are companies that do utilize online platform, the instances of data siloes and outdated IT architecture causes a friction/hindrance to create a seamless omnichannel experience in the insurance sector.

A CDP specializes in gathering information from first party and third party data resources, which was beyond the capabilities of traditional CRMs and DMPs. It allows marketers to have a 360 degree view of each customer, which creates a room for better CX.

Let us learn how CDP is aiding insurance companies in providing tailored customer experience and engaging new visitors to convert them into customers:

1. Identifying User Intent:By analyzing the data collected from the browsing history of the users, marketers in the insurance industry can provide tailor-made experiences to the individual visitors. For example, a customer lands on the website of an insurance company while searching for a term insurance plan, and exits the portal on reaching the pricing menu. Here, a marketer, after analyzing this customer behavior, can send customized push notification on the browser to bring that visitor back.
2. Maintaining Customer Relationship: When an existing customer returns to the website, he can be welcomed with a personalized “welcome back” message and he can then take his journey from the point where he last left. By doing so, the customer feels valued and on getting contextual experience, he forms a favorable image of the insurance company.
3. Quote level personalization: Business of the insurance industry revolves around getting the best quote for the desired insurance plan. There are high chances that customers exit the insurance portals after getting the quote. When this data is captured in a CDP, customers can be offered personalized quotes on the basis of their requirement and affordability.
4. Lead nurturing: When the captured customer data shows that the customer did not purchase the desired insurance plan after showing interest in the same, CDP customer care executive can get in touch with the customer to understand the gaps and by resolving them offering personalized plans as discussed.
5. Reaching the non-reachable customers/prospects: There are always some visitors who submit their details once but never respond to telecommunication services or messages. CDPs capture the various channels where the user activity takes place and enable marketers to send customized message/push notification with an attempt to get in touch with this customer over the net.
6. Reaching customers through Ad targeting:When customers do not engage with the native channels, marketers can design paid campaigns to reach the customers. These users can be targeted through Google Ads or Facebook ads on their last product intent.
7. Converting prospective customers: There are many factors which lead to incomplete transactions from the customer. It can range from incomplete payment to failure to submit the desired documents. Since CDPs are designed to capture each movement of the customer, they facilitate ‘reminders’ to the customers for document and payment submission. In the absence of a CDP, the chances of losing customers at this crucial stage increase.
8. Customer Up-Sell:CDPs allows insurance marketers to have a complete view of customers’ purchase history, thereby suggesting customers to upgrade their purchase to the next best plan. For example, for customer who purchased an insurance plan of 15 years, a notification for upgrading the plan to 20 years at no extra cost can be a positive move.
9. Customer Cross-Sell:Insurance is not just limited to a term plan or motor insurance. While insurance companies have customers under life insurance plan for a long time, they can suggest them to invest in health insurance or home insurance by keeping a track of their lifestyle and the behavior in all these years of association. CDPs capture all this data and keeps a track, enabling marketing to cross sell insurance services.

Conclusion

Scalable platform such as CDPs are opening up avenues of higher growth for the insurance by taking care of the customers and the prospects at every stage of their buying journey. By understanding the ‘want’ of the customers, CDPs are taking the digital experience of insurance industry to a level of exponential growth. Customer Data Platforms fill gaps with systems designed from the start for modern customer data management requirements. CDPs, thus, offer a uniquely powerful solution for companies that want to unify data from all sources without losing any of the details and to share that data with any system that needs it.