Self-Service Solutions Enable Customers to Manage Their Insurance

August 16, 2023 | Blogs

One of the main ways to establish a customer-centric business model is paying close attention to simplifying processes and providing a flexible and intuitive customer experience. With the rise of customer centricity in recent years, it has become vital for businesses to keep up with these demands.

According to a Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers attempt to solve their queries first before reaching out to a live agent; this is where self-service solutions come in, which can transform the customer experience in any industry. For a complicated product like insurance, the potential benefits of self-service solutions are hard to ignore because they can help provide a more personalized customer experience that is more accessible, flexible, and efficient. It also allows insurers and brokers to potentially increase their retention rate and improve cross-selling opportunities.

There are many ways that customer self-service solutions can benefit your insurance business as well as your customers. Below, we discuss the different types of customer self-service solutions and how they reflect positively on organizations.

Customer Self-Service Solutions in the Insurance Industry

Below we cover several different types of self-service solutions that insurers and brokers can provide their customers.

Online portals: These include web-based platforms that customers can use to access services and tools through their web browser. A portal can also include FAQs that offer necessary knowledge about insurance products.
Mobile applications: Customer self-service apps provide convenience and efficiency as they allow your customers to access tools and services on-the-go.
Interactive voice response (IVR) systems: IVR systems are automated phone systems that use pre-recorded messages or text-to-speech technology to provide services or information for callers without relying on a live agent.
Chatbots: Chatbots facilitate customer service and provide information to customers without the need for a live agent and accessed via mobile, web, or social media.

Features of Self-Service Solutions for Insurance Customers

Let’s look at some of the features that must be included in a self-service solution to provide practicality and convenience for insurance customers:

Access to information and documents: Customers can view documents related to their insurance policies quickly and easily. Insurers and brokers can also provide a knowledge base and FAQs.
Tracking claims: Customers can efficiently file and track insurance, anytime, anywhere without the need to talk to a person.
Requesting policy changes: Customers can seamlessly request changes to their existing policies and receive information about their updated premiums, saving time and effort.
Renewals and cancellations: Automated renewals enable billing to occur automatically, ensuring that policies stay active, and customers are always protected. Online cancellations eliminate unnecessary processes for brokers, insurers and customers.
Requesting quotes for additional coverage/new policies: Customers who request quotes for additional insurance coverage or new policies through a self-service portal have a quicker and easier process.
Updating personal information, payment method: Customers can update their insurance information, including their payment method, in a few clicks. This ensures the customer’s data is always current, while reducing the risk of missed payments or failure to contact customers.

Advantages of Self-Service Solutions in the Insurance Industry

We’ve seen the diverse ways self-service solutions can benefit customers, including 24/7 access to tools and services, convenience, accessibility, personalized services, and faster response and processing times. Self-service solutions can also radically improve your insurance business operations in many ways, including:

Decreasing human error and security risk
By automating tasks, like data entry and handling payment information, self-service solutions can significantly reduce the occurrence of problems arising from misheard or misunderstood communications or stolen personal information.
Gaining business insights through data
Self-service solutions can provide your business with valuable data on user behaviour and preferences that you can analyze to make data-driven decisions that help you meet customer needs and develop and market new products or services.
Reducing operational costs
Providing your customers with services, during and outside of working hours, helps you reduce the need for additional resources; it also enables you to reoptimize your existing resources for handling more complicated issues that may not be possible to resolve through the self-service solution. Self-service options also increase efficiency and productivity and can help you provide a better work-life balance for your staff.
Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty
Customers want quick and reliable services they can access anywhere, anytime; and with an efficient and functional self-service solution, you can significantly increase customer satisfaction, which reflects positively on customer retention, cross-sales, and referrals. Deploying customer self-service solutions can also set you apart from the competition, which will give you an edge in a highly competitive market and ultimately lead to an increase in sales.

Implementing Self-Service Solutions for Your Insurance Business

Before implementing self-service solutions as part of your business operations, there are a few important steps to take to ensure the solutions meet your business needs.

Discover customers’ needs and preferences to understand more about their expectations of the solution.
Explore different tools and technologies available and compare them against the features you need and your budget.
Choose a self-service solution that has a user-friendly, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface.
Determine how the new solution will fit within your day-to-day business operations and which employees and processes will be directly affected by the deployment of the solution and how you will mitigate those changes and redistribute resources.

Challenges and Considerations of Self-Service Solutions

With any digital solution, it’s important to focus on implementing the necessary data privacy and cybersecurity precautions to ensure the safety of your customers’ data and reduce the risk of cyberattacks or data breaches.

Furthermore, to provide consistently functional services to your customers, you should allocate sufficient resources towards handling any arising technical issues and glitches with speed and efficiency.

Additionally, customer feedback can be extremely helpful to improve your self-service solution, including adding new features to meet your customer needs, so it’s vital to keep up with appropriate customer feedback channels.

Getting Started with Customer Self-Service Solutions

Are you interested in integrating a customer self-service solution into your brokerage? At Trufla, we offer truMobile, our advanced plug-and-play customer self-service tool that helps you to provide a seamless online experience for your customers while also benefiting from features like BMS integration, automated email marketing, and data dashboards.

Learn more about truMobile here or contact us to request a demo and get answers to any questions you have.