Insurance, travel, retail industries challenges

Consumers share word of mouth face to face, over social media, and through a host of other communication channels. But do these channels affect what people talk about and, if so, how? Laboratory experiments, as well as analysis of almost 20,000 everyday conversations, demonstrate that communicating via oral versus written communication affects the products and brands consumers discuss. Compared to oral communication, written communication leads people to mention more interesting products and brands. Further, this effect is driven by communication asynchrony and self-enhancement concerns. Written communication gives people more time to construct and refine what to say, and self-enhancement motives lead people to use this opportunity to mention more interesting things. These findings shed light on how communication channels shape interpersonal communication and the psychological drivers of word of mouth more broadly.

Historically, most insurance carriers distributed their products through local insurance agents or brokers. However, times have changed as new distribution channels emerged. Web-based technologies now allow customers to quickly and directly deal with insurance companies and get around-the-clock peer feedback. Insurers now have better predictive tools, advanced pricing algorithms and straight-through underwriting data that allow them to offer quotes instantly while minimizing risk and cost. Finally, providing a differentiated customer experience has become more challenging when consumers can deal either with brokers or with insurance companies that offer their products directly to consumers and influencers. These changes have important implications for the provider-broker partnership.

In my research I noticed that more and more competitive markets challenge Insurance companies and brokers. Insurers share similar channel issues as other sectors including banking, travel and industrial goods. Leaders in these markets have thrived in a multi-channel environment by using strong, intermediary relationships to deliver an omni-channel brand experience — a compelling value proposition consistently delivered through every online and offline channel. There is couple ways of get customer happy:

1) Customers do hate of chat bots, they actually feeling, that they talking with computer and having not adequate conversation. Of course after some time, real agent answers query and start talking. Those issues facing most of big companies. When customer wants to buy something, there always will be agent that will help customer to do everything he desires. Though when it comes to claims, or handling some issues, it takes time to get answer. Customers start complaining about poor service, they starting to look over competitors. So in that matter you have to choose correct contact management system.

2) Call handling is another thing of the problem. Of course if company have around 100 agents that answers a phone and dealing with customers enquiries, than standard SLA would be around couple of minutes. So in some cases customer might feel waiting to long on the line. So in that matter we always advice to offer a call back functions to customers. That would save their time of waiting. Nowadays it is all about customer experience with the service you can provide.

3) Young customers – most of their time they spend in social networks. To get such clients you have to communicate through Facebook or twitter. So in this case all questions could be answered as well as quickly, as web chat. Not all companies can provide such services. If they can, they using separate pages to handle all messages from potential customers their getting. Another thing, if you using original web page, you can’t get response rate, analysis of successful deals, type of enquires and other important data.

So if you see that your business is in comfort zone, and you are using 2-5 different programs, to communicate with customers, then you have to mail me vidas@188.166.39.168 I would be glad to show around and try to help you out. It is always hard to move out of comfort zone, but when you do – you gain more knowledge and experience.