Digital self-service is now commonplace for consumers in Insurance.
When this experience is flawed, or even when it breaks, it is a huge deal. It should be seamless and easy for them. So, what if we told you that you can enable this and reduce costs all at the same time?
Well, now you can! And it is not as difficult to achieve as you might think. Both employees and customers want their lives to be as simple as possible when it comes to using technology. You can serve both masters by using Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 to boost your Insurance businesses’ self-service capabilities.
But why focus on getting this part right? Well, digital service has several benefits for any Insurer, and it can absolutely assist in reaching your business objectives and outcomes.
It can help you reduce costs and improve the customer experience
Using a myriad of options in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, you can reduce the number of calls sent directly to contact centres, letting virtual agents (chat bots) handle simple requests and giving users easy to understand, actionable answers. You can then take that data and use it to inform how to further interact with the customer later.
Of course, not every call to the contact centre is easy, but even with some of the trickier ones you can significantly reduce the call time by requesting vital information from callers via the virtual agent in real time, meaning less time is spent on getting human agents up to speed with who they are speaking to and more time engaging with the customer and their queries.
What is more, if you are already using a live chat team, you can have the virtual agent hand off the conversation to a member of team if the customer is still struggling. From there, the entire range of communication options is open to them – chat, call or email. It is a great way to unlock efficiencies in your contact centres whilst giving your customer the choice to interact with you in whichever way they feel comfortable.
The knock-on effect here is that it can help to improve the customer experience. Customers have now grown used to being able to contact companies on their our own terms, and it is becoming increasingly clear that people prefer to use virtual agents for simple interactions – 66% of customers say that they prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative.
The cost saving is, as you can no doubt imagine, huge as a result, but it also helps to reinforce your business as one that is ready to meet the customer wherever they are, whenever.
It can have a rapid, measurable impact on your business outcomes
Whilst your customer is self-serving and getting access to your services in any format they wish, a well built and executed customer experience can have almost immediate benefits for your business.
A good customer experience reduces churn. We have stated it before, and we will state it again because it is a powerful figure, but customers are driven to spend more if the customer experience is good. That means higher retention rates too.
Alongside this, data on the customer’s interactions with your services and products can then be used to drive further revenue growth.
The insights generated can inform how you can cross-sell and upsell to customers, which when successful, leads to an uplift in revenue per customer and if done well, leads to an improvement in CSAT scores too.
None of this is possible without the input of your employees, of course. A better customer experience and reduced churn increases efficiency too. Employees are now better able to meet their KPIs.
By taking advantage of the rich data that customers are sending your way by interacting with you, employees’ lives are also made easier because they can spend more time taking care of customers. The result? Increased NPS scores, higher employee retention rates and even good reviews externally for your business on sites such as Glassdoor.
Being at the cutting edge of technology to enable all this filters down through every aspect of your business. So how is it done?
Harness the power of the Microsoft stack to meet your goals
There are many ways this can be achieved. If you are a business that already uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 or even another CRM such as Salesforce, you can implement Power Platform to deliver the kinds of solutions outlined above.
To date, 97% of Fortune 500 companies have joined the Power Platform low-code, no-code revolution, and there are over 3 million active developers using the platform every month.
Use the Power Platform
With Microsoft Power Virtual Agent, you can create chat bots that are easily deployable on any website or inside any application. It utilises a low code, no-code platform which means that users can create the bot, update its functionality with ease, and have it react in real time to customer demands.
By building a knowledge base in the back end of the bot, the AI technology within Power Virtual Agents can display answer to any question you can think of without having to programme lines of logic.
With over 400+ connectors, all the applications within Power Platform are able to connect with just about any third-party system, and if you cannot find the connector you need? You can simply build your own. If the system you need to connect to has an API, Microsoft Power Platform can integrate with it.
That level of integration can also be used with Power Automate. You can use your virtual agents to trigger automated downstream processes, linking it to any other part of your back-office system. You can also deploy Power Automate to automate process that would otherwise be manual. Customer’s policy up for renewal? Trigger an automated notification that lets the customer service team know to contact them. Looking to reduce manual data input for certain tasks? Allow Power Automate to handle it. The opportunities for improving the customer and employee experience are endless.
Enhance it with Dynamics 365
If you have Dynamics 365, you can integrate Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate directly into your CRM. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service you can enable omnichannel engagement, allowing your virtual agents to hand people over to live chat to allow customers to converse directly with a human being.
You can also use the knowledge base within customer service to help colleagues better do their job by searching for the answers to questions and allow Power Virtual Agents access to it so that they can display useful information to customers too.
Taken together with the whole Dynamics 365 system, Power Platform and D365 Customer Service can allow you to obtain the holy grail – the single customer view. Take every single scrap of data you have on your customers, display it to colleagues in any department across the business and use it to super charge your marketing, sales, customer services and more with deep insights, AI, machine learning and much more.
As we said earlier, the customer experience must be seamless in our era of convenience. There is no reason why the employee experience must be any different. Bring them both together by using Power Platform and Dynamics 365 to take your Insurance business to the next level.