Author: Mazahir Valikarimwala, Industry Senior Director – APJ, SAP
The APJ market is a fascinating one. Emerging economies rub shoulders with matured markets, and customer acquisition, cross-selling and up-selling all combine to create a plethora of opportunities. It’s a constantly evolving landscape, and to operate effectively, we need to ask ourselves key questions about trends and drivers:
What do we want to offer the customer? How can we be sure we’re offering them the right product? What else can we offer beyond the product?
Some straight forward answers are quick to emerge. Customers want transparent, simple products. The less small print the better. And in terms of going beyond the product, we are looking at ways of being more encompassing. For example being seen as a health provider rather than a life insurer, using health and fitness as a way to help people reduce their claims – the result is a more holistic product for the customer.
The next big change is the idea of managing the customer’s experience specifically from the point at which they make a claim. In terms of customer loyalty, this is a crucial stage. So our answer is to try to be more personal to customers by giving the agent the details they need to understand and help the customer properly.
We can use social media to find out about these live events – for example knowing if they’ve had a baby or moved house – and so anticipate how their needs might change. Again, these results in being more personalised and engaged with the customer.
Of course it’s not just about the claim; it’s about complete customer-life-cycle management. Right from the first prospect to fulfilment, we need to be able to offer educated and tech-savvy customers a great service whilst also keeping these overheads down. Perhaps it’s no great surprise, then, that the emphasis is now being put on online experience. Forty- and fifty-year-olds might not be so technically savvy, and prefer to go to a branch and have a face-to-face interaction, but even these needs to be as efficient as possible.
The result of all this is that customer satisfaction is now a high priority KPI, measured both by third parties and by social media. There’s an inevitable amount of trial and error, but surveys and predictive analysis are underway, which will help a great deal.
All insurers are focused on this, and at SAP we’re focused on delivering them the right products and tools to do the job as seamlessly as possible, harnessing a fascinating combination of social media and big data – plus of course taking on the challenge of digitizing everything and bringing it online. We have customer who has launched initiative of introducing simple products first, online only and will be going live soon. But there’s more to come after this first phase. It’s an exciting time – a revolution in this industry. Understanding the customer is everything. Now more than ever, insurers need to concentrate on offering an online experience and full lifestyle management – and we’re developing ways to do exactly that.
To learn more about we can help you with your business challenges please have a look at SAP's Solution Explorer for the Insurance Industry: https://rapid.sap.com/se/#vm?indids=i_insurnce&lobids=all
What do you think about customer-centricity and the APJ region?
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