December, 20208 IN MYV EWTOP EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES TO INCREASE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENTBY SHASHANK SINGH, DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OFFICER, PRUDENTIAL FINANCIALLike it or not, Insurance traditionally had never been an attractive forum to talk about customer engagement and value journeys. The traditional metrics of customer satisfaction had always been retention rate and if the retention rate of an enterprise exceeds the competitive benchmark, it generally used to lay the yard stick.Question is ­ Is it good enough?Is it good enough to map the customer engagement only through retention rate in this digital marketing world? Consumers are seeing the thinning engagement horizon of financial services and they want similar experience whether transacting a retail banking account or buying an insurance product or shopping on e-commerce platforms. Consumers are getting more and more demanding, e-transaction focused, want everything through "few clicks" and let the engagement engine service them.Below are few effective strategies to navigate through the digital insurance customer engagement cycle. 1. Understanding before engagingIt's pertinent that customer engagement can't start without understanding the needs of your customer. Hope you would agree that understanding is the key to the customer loyalty. In typical insurance world, traditional segmentation is inadequate to understand the customer in detail, which would include demographics dimensions like age, income profile, employment and location.To better understand the customer in today's digital world, enterprise should:· Map the customer journey through their lifecycle· Establish the connection or event when customer abandons the services· Create customer-centric services organization to map and deliver the contextual services based on "specific demand" of the consumers· Create value-tree of his / her family, referrals, friends or any associated members so that the enterprise can understand the experience in more totality, to assess the "overall demand"To complete the customer understanding, be prepared the measure the effectiveness before and after the sale.2. Create true consumer personasAs stated above, generic customer segmentation will yield to generic results and outcomes, wherein the result-set can be generalized to wider group of customers, rather than specific customer needs. Henceforth, creating value journey or customer personas will be generalized. Example, customer persona for male adult with age between 25-40 years will be same irrespective if social profile, personalisation or preference is different between these adult male members.Good personas are representation of good customers. A good persona accurately reflects your target customer's age, location, goals, social behaviour, emotions, which will result in shaping the better or contextualised products.To create true and effective buyer personas:· Don't assume that you know your target audience. The target audience needs to be mined, understood, patterned and then shaped according to the target segmentation which the enterprise would prefer· Update personas frequently and see the results· Review the results based on the updated contents, as sometimes the content may vary the persona definitions· Create the full journey map i.e. from the interest to the sale closure. Sometimes half-baked personas like buying a product may not show accurate results3. Apply Intelligence in Customer EngagementOptimized or contextualised customer engagement is no more a thought but a reality in the digital engagement world. With use of various tools, which can engage with the customer on real-time basis and able to communicate with the customer more effectively.
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