Making a Statement to Clients

Take a moment and look at your insurance company from your customer’s perspective. They selected your product from a sea of competitors, perhaps having questioned brokers and waded through copious amounts of advertising. You likely managed to break through based on the merits of your product and your company’s brand image. But what have you been showing your customer lately?

The problem

Now that you have your customer, you need to ask yourself about how they see your company. Do they get the same feeling that they had when they signed on with you? Not likely. The problem? The documents you send customers do not reflect your company’s image. Corporate marketing departments generally do a good job of communicating the company’s desired image to prospective customers, but have trouble maintaining the image to current customers.

A quick conversation with an agent is the best opportunity for a customer to get business done, and for you to manage your relationship with your client. However, speaking to an agent happens once a year on average, and is generally initiated by the customer and follows their specific agenda, such as a claim or policy change.

Most communication initiated from insurance companies is done via documents. Your company image asserts that you understand your clients; you are responsive to their needs, and you are looking out for their financial future. But your documents do not reflect this.

Increasingly, the responsibility for understanding customer behavior, profitability, and support for marketing strategy lies with the Decision Support or Data Mining team you have recently assembled. However, the fruits of their talent are only useful when they are translated into marketing strategy and ultimately are reflected in unique communication with each client.

Take another look at the insurance premium documents or investment statements you send out. Look past the facts and see what it says about your customer and ultimately your company. You are not likely to see much more than their name. It is a low-cost document that is generally seen as a required expense.

A new perspective

The only thing that is mandatory about your documents is that they must carry certain information about recent transactions, etc., and they must have a stamp.

But when you stop to think about it, the potential is significant. You are paying for the stamp anyway, so there is little incremental cost. Customers read official documents, so your message is almost guaranteed to rise above the pile of irrelevant mass-marketing inserts and direct mail. Your message and the customer’s statement information are presented together so the context of your marketing messages is extremely high. And, as your documents are the most frequent point of contact with your customer, they become a timely customer relationship management tool.

Further, if your company has initiated a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program, you will soon realize that information gathered about your customer must have some form of outlet to be useful. Benefits of such programs include increased profitability and loyalty resulting from a more focused marketing strategy and lower servicing costs, better personalization through relevant information and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

The biggest obstacle to adopting this new communication strategy is merely coming to the realization that the customer’s statement is a communications vehicle, not just a regulated compliance document.

Beyond the change in perspective, implementation of a new statement can typically be done in three to six months and can incorporate various levels of personalization and data-driven content, much of which is already available to the company.

What will your customers think?

Without question this is a win-win strategy. First, your customer opens their statement and finds it easy to read and to interpret. They are already satisfied because their expectations were quite low.

Now if you add useful, relevant information, you can really raise the bar on your competitors. If messages are added — offers and information specific to that customer — they will be both pleased and impressed. Maybe you really do understand them and their need for insurance products. Even this does not have to be rocket science. Information can be relevant to a recent claim, type of insurance, or their stage of life.

So what about that homely, ‘just the facts’ document that you send out to keep the compliance auditors off your back? Not such an ugly duckling any more. The databases have the raw data; your statements are already going out to your customers. You just need to bridge some of the gaps. If you do not, you can bet your competitor will.

The Wired World welcomes your feedback. Contact us, via E-mail at <vikki@canadianunderwriter.ca”>b>vikki@canadianunderwriter.ca