Having a trusted insurance services or insurance agent is a little bit
difficult to attain for some people. You are faced with a lot of forms and
procedures that obviously can take your time more than you have. Not forgetting
the risk of fraud from a bad agent. This poses risk to the insurance customer,
as well as to the insurance company it self.
Imagine what if all of that role can be done by an apps? A mobile apps. You
certainly want to have a simpler way to get your insurance needs taken care of.
Some insurer already start to develop claim servicing apps because they thought
that claiming is the most important thing to serve to the customer. Well, that
is just ain’t enough if you want to fully satisfied your customer.
Here is the thing, from a customer point of view, they need ‘somebody’ or
‘something’ to help them:
- Apply for insurance with ease
- Recommend what insurance suitable for their needs and lifestyle
- Help them ease the process of premium payment
- Help them ease the process of endorsements
- Help them ease the process of claiming
- Help them ease the process of policy renewal and/or policy termination
- Help them get another value added offering that relate to their insurance policy
Lets start to imagine the process we need to implement to be able to cater
all of the above needs of an insurance customer.
a). Insurance Application Stage: Please throw out all the complicated process,
a bunch of different written application forms for different products, and too
many unnecessary questions at the beginning of the application. Here is what
you should make the customer do in the apps: MAKE A SINGLE CUSTOMER PROFILE
that can be used later to purchase all kind of your insurance products.
b). Insurance Purchasing Stage: Insurance company should make their apps
act as a consultant to the customer. Provide various suitable products according
to the customer profile provided in the apps, and let the customer choose what
they need. Give them the privilige to choose recommended products, extention
cover and do other administrative things such as self endorsements, self risk
survey, etc. Insurance company can verify and validate at the back end process.
Current technology such as geo tagging, digital forensic, etc should be able to
help insurance company to prevent customer initiated fraud.
c). Insurance Claims stage: Simplify the claim reporting and submission
process. Provide automated services such as recommended claim provider (car
workshop, hospitals, etc) based on customer location, emergency button, automated
claim survey scheduler & reminder, self claim progress monitoring,
paperless claim reimburstment, insurance limit monitoring & reminder, and
the claim rejection description. For more advance claim process, you can ask
the customer to select claim proposal from a list of perils claimable under the
policy. By this way, the customer can have an interim view about the liability
of their claim, whether their claim are claimable or not to the policy they
have. This can help the insurance company manage customer expectation of their
claim, and minimize claim disputes.
d). Insurance servicing: other things that can be added such as linked bank
account with policy premium due date. This is to make sure that the customer
premium are credited on time and avoid them from late payment that can leads to
claim rejection. The other use is to conviniently transfer the approved claim payment
directly to the customer bank account or the designated beneficiary bank
account. For recurring insurance policy, insurance company should provide
renewal reminder facility on their apps and let the customer give updates on
their insurance object details for any changes available. Changes of terms and
conditon should be done at the back end. Other useful feature can also include
integration with credit card account, premium installment facility, and cash
back for no claim bonus. How about integration of annual premium charge and
annual maintenance fee of the insured object? This can be also an interesting
feature for the customer. By then they will have their asset both insured and
well maintained. All the insurance company need is to have the right
maintenance vendor partner for their customer, and let the customer choose the
maintenance vendor via the insurance apps.
e). Another value added: for assets such as motor vehicle, or property
insurer can make their apps as a third party certificator by providing claim
history of the insured objects. For example: if a customer wants to sell their
vehicle, and they have a clean loss record, they can show the ‘Non Claim
Certificate’ of their vehicle via the apps to convince potential buyer that their
vehicle are in a good shape and have no accident records. This will increase
the selling value of their vehicle to the potential buyer, because it has been
certified by a trusted third party (which is the insurance company). They could
also integrate routin vehicle maintenance record in the apps with the vehicle
maintenance vendors. That way, the customer will get reminders and
notifications for maintenance schedule. Will be more interesting if you can
also integrate vehicle maintenance bookings to the nearest vehicle workshop or
towing services.
For property asset, will be interesting if you could provide integrated
CCTV or IPTV monitoring into your apps. Many customer now have CCTV or IPTV
installed on their house. If you can connect their CCTV/IPTV to your apps, and
have an incident notification facility (such as fire incident, burglary
incident, etc) that will be a helpful feature to your apps. You can also add
the automated emergency caller if the apps recorded such an incident (ex: fire
incident will trigger automated call to Fire fighter call center, and burglary
incident will trigger automated call to the police call center. Giving them
precise location of your property based on Geo tagging data so that help will
come immediately).
There are so many possibilities with the help of developed and emerging
technologies. Insurance company should think of more creative ways to better
service and satisfy their customer, and if possible beyond their expection.
Lets hope that this is all soon going to happen and benefited for all parties,
whether the customer or the insurance companies.