Customer journey mapping in the Insurance industry is on the verge of significant transformation –  Digital technologies are transforming multiple aspects of the financial insurance sector. Customer behavior is gradually changing, whether gathering information during the pre-purchase stage, comparing alternatives, or even the final purchase of insurance.

Customers expect a simplified and streamlined omnichannel customer experience throughout their journey, whether shopping online, planning a holiday, or getting insurance. 

With the increase in the digital influence of apps, insurance companies focus on acquiring the maximum market share. The customer journey mapping technique that allows companies to interact and engage customers through multiple channels has gained popularity recently.

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a concept that provides a powerful insight into how customers interact with the brand when buying a product and dealing with it.

Why map customer journeys in insurance?

Before the digital transformation, insurance companies primarily relied on agents to acquire and interact with customers. With the addition of digital tools, companies gained the advantage of interacting with customers without the help of agents.

Customer journey mapping is a digital visual representation that will make the job easy for companies to understand the customer’s experience, how they interact in different stages of their journey, touchpoints, and, importantly, what they are expecting from you and where you need to improve.

Improve customer experience

Customer experience strategy is crucial for businesses to grow and compete. Companies try to improve in accordance with the changing customer behavior trends.

Customer journey mapping helps insurance companies to understand an ideal customer journey—segment customers based on their demographic, geographical, and behavioral interests with metrics to analyze how different segments experience the journey and where they need to focus on delivering the customer expectations. Improving customer experience can enhance customer loyalty and strengthen the product’s value proposition.  

Monitor journeys

Monitoring customer journeys in real-time helps understand customer touchpoints and clarifies your customer engagement strategy. These can identify areas for immediate improvement and influence customer decisions.

Boost customer engagement by identifying high-value touchpoints where customers engage the most and re-engage customers with reminders to come back and explore.

Understand your customers

Conceptualizing your customer data from all touchpoints based on demographics, browsing behaviors, psychographics, and their point of interaction is vital for businesses.

Understanding how they engage with the brand and identifying where customers lost along their journey enable insurance companies to improve business processes.

Optimize customer journey mapping in insurance to improve customer loyalty

Customer experience is one of the most crucial factors determining loyalty. Successful companies build their business around the customer. 

A few years back, insurance customers viewed insurance as a commodity product. But now, the insurance market has become saturated with more insurance products, creating a more sophisticated buyer. Hence, the insurance industry, more than ever before, needs to shift their focuses on improving customer experience with a customer-centric model.

#1 Clearly define your ideal customer

Have a clear idea about your target customers,  their needs, and preferences. Create and analyze the profiles of your customers based on age, gender, income level, location, interests, behavior, etc. 

Doing this will help you better understand your customers and figure out how different customers interact with your product in various ways. 

#2 Assess and analyze your existing customer journey

Customers may or may not be aware of the insurance products, but definitely, they are looking for better products available in the market. With digitalization, most customers are now enquiring on search engines and may consider your brand image based on play store app ratings and reviews.

Assess your visitor’s series of interactions and behavior with the website/app, and understand your customer by journey mapping out their touchpoints. 

Identify customer journey opportunities to increase first-time engagement with the application by capturing and meeting customer needs. 

Customers may drop out if your brand is not reaching expectations like personalization and understanding pain points. Converting a potential customer into a paying customer involves understanding their journey, series of interactions, and pain points. 

Each journey may be different, but still, there are common patterns in customer journeys. Mapping can help shape your customer journey predictions. Understand and customize your customer journey to meet the customer needs.

#3 Measure Customer experience at every touchpoint 

Customer journey experience creates a touchpoint that will help form an impression of the business, whether good or bad. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction. 

Personalize your target customer’s interactions to build more profound and meaningful relationships. Upsell/cross-sell and recommend products based on the customer journey that equips insurers to make the right strategic decision at the right time during future transactions.

Identify key areas where customers need guidance(For example, Product tutorials) when using the product, such as product information and claims.

#4 Take action and close the feedback loop

To build better future customer journeys, analyze the customer experiences with the product that will help in generating insights needed to diagnose friction areas.

Leveraging real-time customer feedback collected from the voice of customer tools and closing the feedback loop helps customers complete their journeys. This helps mitigate friction, remove obstacles, and reward customers for their successful journey.

#5 Retain customers

At this stage, customer journey mapping focuses on how customers perceive your product and their experience with the product. This process identifies opportunities to engage and retain customers with personalized email, push notifications & in-app messages.

#6 Make changes

Analyzing the journeys allows you to identify the issues, fix them for future visits, and provide design insights to solve the friction points.

Once you understand the elements that hurt customer journeys and those which make them successful, you can create workflows and automated actions to trigger when a customer expresses a negative experience.

Rules-based or automated programs can help customers navigate good customer experience, and companies can use them to mitigate bad interactions.

Wrapping up

Maintaining potential customer interaction points and consistency of experience across all channels are nearly impossible unless you are managing the journey and not simply the individual touchpoints. Creating an omnichannel approach to interacting with customers and mapping their journeys improves customer experience.

The insurance industry must reimagine how it delivers the end-to-end customer experience by understanding customers’ transition through their journey.

How can Upshot.ai help?

Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve product adoption and conversions.

With Upshot.ai, banks and FinTech firms can enhance their digital experiences with pre-built gamification features while providing personalized insights, actionable recommendations, and contextual nudges designed to deepen their relationship with their users.

Book a demo of the most comprehensive user engagement and gamification platform to achieve your digital product goals. Join our communities for more insights, guides, and best practices that keep you updated with proven strategies and tips to supercharge your campaigns.

Follow @upshot_ai