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The customer experience is something that we have spoken on many times before. Why? Well, it is a crucial aspect of your insurance agency’s marketing that deserves a special focus. If you haven’t already checked out our article on the difference between customer service and customer experience, or even our article on big data on the customer experience, then I would encourage you to take a look. Today, we are looking at where the customer experience may be in the near future, because by 2020, 86% of marketers say they will have it mastered, according to a study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Let’s get started.
Customer Experience in the Eyes of a Marketer
According to the study mentioned above, 63% of people who responded said that the top channel for communicating with the customer will be social media by the year 2020. Meanwhile, 53% said it would be done online, 47% said it would be done through mobile apps, and 46% believed it would be the mobile web. Not only that, they also claim that the top three factors (based on technology trends) that will have the largest impact on marketing are mobile devices and networks at 59%, personalization technologies at 45%, and internet based products at 39%.
Immediately, when we look at these trends, it should be obvious that your insurance agency needs to have a mobile app in place. In a world where mobile will have such a strong impact on influencing our customers, your agency should have a focus on servicing your customers through a mobile app. There’s no way you can say that you have an excellent customer experience if you aren’t servicing your customers on their terms, which could mean after hours on nights and weekends when your agency isn’t normally accessible.
Another thing we can take a look at here is personalization based technologies, but we’ll go more in depth on how to capitalize on personalization in a moment.
Customer Experience in the Eyes of the Consumer
It’s always important to survey the industry, or ask marketers what their point of view on the future is. But, even more importantly, we must ask our customers how we can be better, or how they want to be serviced, and so on. We send out surveys to all of our customers as part of our onboarding process, as well as part of our renewal process. We ask multiple questions to see how we can improve as a whole, and we also mention things like our social media networks and our mobile app within the survey as well.
After we collect enough data, we can capitalize accordingly, or start personalizing our marketing content so that we are communicating with our audience on their terms. If you’d like to check out our onboarding process or some of our other email marketing campaigns that we have developed and are constantly working on personalizing, you can check them out online with Our Communications/Marketing Strategy.
In the same study that we mentioned above, they took the time to survey consumers to see what factors led to them having a positive experience and, and they were as follows:
- 47% said that it was fast response
- 46% said that it was having a simple purchasing process
- 34% said that it was the ability to track orders in real time
- 25% said it was clarity and simplicity of product information
- 22% said it was the ability to interact with the company on multiple channels
This tells us that your agency needs to be readily available at all times, you have to be efficient in making insurance products/services explanations easy for them to understand, and we have to communicate with them on their terms in all situations.
More Data on the Customer Experience
So, you may be asking yourself why the customer experience is so important to your agency, but believe me, it’s so much more valuable than you may think. Our good friends from Forrester Research conducted a study about the customer experience, this time asking consumers, “If you were dissatisfied with your experience with a brand that you feel connected with, which of the following would you do?” Their answers were as follows:
- 39% tell their friends and family about a negative experience
- 12% write negative reviews or testimonials about the brand
- 11% post negative comments on their personal Facebook page
- 10% post negative comments in an online customer community
- 10% post negative comments on the company’s Facbook page
- 7% post negative comments on a blog not sponsored by the company
- 6% post negative comments on a blog not sponsored by the company
- 6% post negative comments about the company on their personal Twitter page
- 6% post negative comments about the company on the company’s Twitter page
Whether it’s for your benefit or not, your customers are talking about you. This is why it is so critical to have a positive and rewarding overall customer experience for your clients/customers at your agency, because word of mouth travels quickly. By putting a stronger emphasis on the customer experience within your agency, you will see longer, more rewarding relationships with your audience, which is critical to your agency’s success considering we are in a business of renewals. To all agents and brokers, I hope your agency takes the time to work on how your customers experience your agency, and happy marketing overall!
