Omnichannel customer service solutions for L&A insurers

Life and annuity (L&A) insurers currently have a unique opportunity to transform the way they work to benefit their customers. The older legacy L&A customer was at ease contacting their insurer over the telephone or by mail. As the rest of financial services companies joined the digital revolution, L&A companies stuck to their original approach. Why? Because they thought these customers were always going to prefer filling out forms to hearing a voice on the phone.

But the pandemic has changed all of that. First, it's driven older demographics online, where they're now comfortable handling everyday activities, such as grocery shopping and banking. Second, it's diversified the types of people seeking to buy L&A insurance. Younger, digital-savvy demographics concerned with their health and futures are looking for protection. L&A insurers now face an urgent need to bring their customer service up to speed and meet the needs of this new digital-first market.

Roadblocks to change

But there are multiple challenges to implementing digital solutions and helping customers adopt them:

• Most customer contact is still via call centers and physical mail, so driving customers toward self-service channels takes a great deal of effort
• Most contact centers are on-premises and often plagued by complex technology landscapes that aren't integrated with other systems. This means that L&A insurers aren't getting the most out of their workforce or their technology infrastructure
• L&A insurers need help to pivot their operations to cater to the new types of customers interested in their products. Without an experienced partner by their side, they could miss out on a lucrative market share of this emerging customer base
• Customer experience rests in no small part on employee experience based on how employees are currently operating. There's plenty of room for improvement in the current digital skills they possess to work with new systems. Add to that the rolling effect of the pandemic on workforce availability for call centers, and you can see that insurers face serious workforce management challenges

In order to serve their customers better, L&A insurers need to digitize their customer service channels and connect systems to make the masses of data they collect more useful. And they need to modernize their operations to provide quick, seamless, omnichannel services to customers. At Genpact, we provide these solutions.

We partner with L&A insurers to advise them on omnichannel transformation. With our world-leading experience agency, Rightpoint, we take clients through the customer service process end to end, starting with an as-is assessment of customer service operations and advice based on each company's digital maturity and how integrated its current systems are. Then we help implement new technologies, systems, and processes – including the targeted use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We can help clients operate these systems too, training staff and offering to route initial customer contact through our established, experienced L&A contact center.

Our award-winning team has served over 80 clients across 40 countries in 47 languages. Using ecosystems of content and data, we have helped clients deliver seamless omnichannel experiences for customers and employees, leading to higher Net Promoter Scores and a massive 35% reduction in contact center expenses. The systems and processes we help to implement have effects that resonate for long after the initial transformation too because we can analyze and interpret the data we collect and funnel through digital technologies to deliver actionable insights.

L&A insurance is changing, but the window for insurers to transform and meet their customers' needs is small. To deliver the digital solutions their customers desire, the onus is on L&A insurers to tap into cloud and connected ecosystems as the growth engine for their business and quickly move to meet their customers where they are – online.