Three ways to stand out in a crowded insurance market

With new guidance in the FCA’s Consumer Duty directive, the financial services industry is being asked to get to know their customer better and meet their diverse needs. In a recent report produced by Braze & CACI, providing insight for financial services brands, it was found that 42% of EMEA consumers only use one financial services brand – so how can you retain their loyalty, trust and keep them engaged? 

1. Technology Innovation

The general insurance market has always been challenged with engagement, as the frequency of communication with its policy holders is low and concentrated at the point of policy inception, claim or renewal.  

However, building trust is still crucial in this market. 

Every insurer is now looking for new ways to harness technology for growth and competitive advantage. The use of AI and innovative tools is becoming more prevalent in the underwriting, claims and CRM process.  

Harnessing your customer data through modern decisioning tools, and leveraging third-party demographic data to build a more holistic understanding of who your customer is, enables you to interject hyper personalised communications throughout the life of the policy, via the most appropriate channels, and actively give policy holders transparency over potential changes in premium. 

2. Building Trust  

Whilst insurance may be seen as a “necessary purchase”, the payments aren’t usually greeted with good sentiment or the feeling of value for money. 

However, the data and insights that much of this new technology generates creates the opportunity to engage policy holders more during the life of their policy.  

For example, in car insurance, the use of telematics data could be used to talk to customers regularly about how they can improve their driving whilst reducing the cost at their next renewal. It’s well understood that people feel a sense of dread when a renewal comes around, fearing a policy price increase without a clear reason. As an insurer, why not reduce this surprise and help your customers maintain or reduce their premium? 

If the data used to run the underwriting model changes, meaning that the car insurance policy may go up at renewal, it is better to let the customer know this early and explain why this has happened. This would increase trust and loyalty, reducing the likelihood that they might go to an aggregator when the renewal is due.  

Even better, utilise predictive analytics to warn customers early of changes, enabling them to make changes in behaviour to help keep premiums down. 

3. Understand your competition 

The insurance market is made up of large general insurers through to niche specialists. Whilst brand reputation has a role to play, the heavy use of aggregators to seek out favourable deals is commonplace.  

The opportunity is there for the more established brands to innovate and use their capability to invest in and truly leverage marketing technology and data to create a more trustworthy experience. For niche players, they can utilise their positioning to clearly communicate the benefits of their USP to customers. 

With restrictions on the use of incentives for new consumers, all insurers need to consider other important elements of their offering and communicate this throughout the experience. 

Throughout this blog series for the financial service industry, we break down the opportunities for marketers to build trust, loyalty and a superior customer experience with data and technology. Continue reading at the links below: 

Blog 1 – How the banking and financial services sector can lean into a changing market

Blog 2 – Creating human banking experiences through data-led marketing

Report – Banking on the Customer Journey: 2022 Financial Services Insights