Customer Intelligence – Leveraging Social Media to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction for Property and Casualty (P/C) insurers has been on the slide over the past few years for many reasons, but most notably due to increased premiums driven by natural catastrophes.  Carriers can work to offset these premium increases by improving upon the intangible values policyholders receive, such as customer satisfaction.  Improving customer satisfaction can be supported by improving upon Customer Intelligence.  Customer Intelligence is the process of collecting relevant and timely information about customers and prospects, consolidating the data from all the different sources into a cohesive structure and providing the sales, service and marketing with tools that can leverage this intelligence.

Insurers must begin to look at ways to respond to customer needs outside the old fashioned methods of phone and email, and embrace the social media outlets.  Most carriers look at social media as a marketing tool but used well, it is much more of a relationship, loyalty and service tool.  Many carriers already have a Facebook page and Twitter account to disseminate information and respond to complaints posted directly to them, but the most damaging words are those posted where the carrier does not respond because they do not even know they exist.  Integrating with social monitoring tools can help carriers avoid these situations, creating a competitive advantage.

Carriers need to be able to serve their customers in the channels they wish to be served in, and helping customer service representatives to address issues early, before they become a costly live call or a crisis, can decrease CSR expenses.

The first step to monitoring social media is actively listening, using tools that provide real time alerts on relevant mentions, questions and discussion topics that should be responded to, then route them to the appropriate responder.

Imagine how impressed a customer will be, when they are contacted in response to a tweet that was posted after a bad claims experience.  Carriers can capitalize on opportunities to turn negative feedback into positive, if they take advantage of the chance to make things right with the customer.

In addition to providing this service level response involving their own interests, carriers can extend this service to assist their top tier agencies as well, and educate them on the proper way to interact online.  While policyholders may jump carriers, they are generally loyal to their agency, and if carriers can help protect their agencies, they may find more, and better, risks on their books from those agencies. Conversely, it can also provide an opportunity for carriers to rethink some of the agencies they work with, if they consistently find negative feedback about them related to their support of their policyholders.

With carriers and agents working together, marketing executives can provide management with overall reports on social media sentiment, issues and the activity metrics for agents and their customer service organization.

This is the initial step of a broader goal to create a robust Customer Intelligence framework that allows P/C insurers to listen, connect, analyze, respond and market to customers in a much more proactive and targeted way, leveraging the new communication channels Social Media provides.

The next step becomes tracking this information within the carrier’s CRM and linking with customers’ Twitter names or Facebook accounts, to help CSR agents get a complete picture of the customer.  CRM projects are expected to be near the top of the list for many carriers in 2013 that look to get out ahead on this front and gain a better of understanding of their current customers, and the customers they are going after.