Digital Engagement Channels: The Best Way to Grow Your Insurance Business

Growing your insurance business requires solid leadership, a coherent strategy and the willingness and ability to try new things. Although the real complexity lies in the specific details of your business, there are fundamentally three things you need for your business to grow:

1. Products customers want
2. Effective distribution
3. Reason for customers to stay

Fixing distribution = leverage

In this article, we are focusing on effective distribution channels. Getting distribution right creates massive leverage for everything else you do. Increasing customer reach and reducing distribution costs change the game for insurance businesses. “Fixing” the way you distribute and engage is definitely worth it.

We say “fixing” because distribution is currently “broken” in so many ways. Traditional ways of distributing insurance products (brokers and call centres, for example) are expensive, and are generally becoming much less effective. They also don’t always put the customer’s best interests first. Customers have become used to self-service in many other areas of their lives (Uber, Netflix, OrderIn), and they want insurance to work the same way. They value convenience and immediacy, and they (mostly) hate being cold-called.

3 great digital distribution channels for insurance

Across many insurance use cases, digital channels have become one of the best solutions to the distribution problem. They enable you to speak directly to customer needs, while offering a much better customer experience.

Here are 3 of the best channels to consider:

WhatsApp chatbot

WhatsApp is one of the most effective digital channels to launch. It’s a widespread platform that offers multiple ways to innovatively engage your customers. As a channel, it has very little friction and has millions of active users. Customers don’t need to download another app and are familiar with WhatsApp’s simple, natural user interface.

A WhatsApp chatbot can (read: should) be fully automated, and needs only lightweight customer support in the back office.

Last year, Guardrisk and CarSure launched a WhatsApp bot in just two weeks, using Root.

In-store tablet app

In-store tablet apps are a great way to engage customers while they’re already in your store, eliminating the expense of finding and contacting them. If you sell electronic devices in-store, for example, device cover is an ideal complementary product to sell using a tablet app at checkout. Risks are top of mind for your customer at that point, giving added relevance to the insurance product.

Your existing website or app

Embedding insurance into your primary digital engagement platform, whether it’s a website or a mobile app, is a great value-add for customers. It’s typically the go-to destination for self-service - a place where customers are in the mindset to engage with your brand.

If your brand is known for insurance products, customers will be delighted to have the ability to self-service on your website. If your brand is not (yet) known for selling insurance, you can drive awareness and sales by embedding this in your website or app.

Digital channels have a direct upside for you and your customers

The key benefits of digital channels for distributing insurance can be summarised in 3 points:

1. Engage when it’s most relevant. Targeting at the right time makes the insurance product more valuable, rather than a “grudge purchase."
2. Self-service, low-friction. Low friction and immediacy make for a better customer experience.
3. Better product education. Contrary to popular belief, customers often understand the product they’re buying better when engaged digitally. Modern user interfaces provide endless ways to educate customers, helping them make more informed purchases.

Great customer experiences foster trust and build brand loyalty, boosting lifetime value through improved retention, brand advocacy and upselling. Significantly lower customer acquisition costs through digital channels further boost unit economics and the value of your business.

Digital channels require the right technical foundation

Launching digital channels is known to be hard and painfully slow, but it does not have to be that way. While insurance companies are bogged down by legacy systems which are not designed for seamless integration, modern technology that is built to be extensible makes launching new digital channels a breeze.

This is why we built Root. We felt that innovators are severely limited by the lack of a standard modern insurance platform on which they can easily collaborate and develop. Because Root is cloud-native with easy-to-use APIs, adding digital channels do not require any changes to other systems.

If you’re keen to find out what Root can mean for your insurance business, schedule a chat with us right away.