With millennials reaching an age where they have significant buying power and market influence, we’ve seen a dramatic change in society. This change is driven by the extremely fast evolution of connected technology such as the Internet, mobile devices, the Cloud, artificial intelligence, and big data. Millennials are the drivers of customer expectation because they grew up with the Internet and were socialized to expect immediate gratification. To be competitive and attract millennial customers, insurers are rethinking their business models and showing a willingness to digitize their systems. This process of digitization however, can be expensive, and new insurer models include the expectation of a seamless customer experience.

The customer experience is both tangible and intangible in the carrier-technology vendor relationship. The tangible begins with initial engagement (electronic or physical), selling cycle, implementation, and support. After deciding to spend considerable budgets on new technology, insurers vet vendors on product functionality, financial stability, industry knowledge and experience, and thought leadership. Survey results published by Celent shows that 69% of companies expect vendors to be competent thought leaders. The intangible includes vendor perception and reputation. Perception in how the company is viewed by its audience. Does it practice corporate social responsibility? Is it eco-friendly? Does it treat its employees well?

The initial engagement is both electronic and physical. Electronic engagement includes an online brand presence such as website content, published articles, thought leadership, blogs, etc. Physical engagement includes meeting sales executives, thought leaders, and subject matter experts.  This initial engagement can be initiated via conferences, through client or industry analyst referrals, and leads generated from marketing campaigns, press and activities. Customers will lose interest if your website is difficult to navigate or if your articles and emails do not address their touchpoints of interest and show industry leadership. You will not be considered if your sales executives are unable to effectively articulate their value proposition, showing deep understanding of industry and customer needs, and the ability of their solutions to effectively address those needs.  Millennials expect you to communicate openly, often, and to utilize mobile and messaging technologies.

Selling cycles include RFI and RFP responses, initial meetings, workshops, product demonstrations, sales follow-up, and proposals and contract negotiations. Being prompt and prepared is very important as it helps to set the tone of your interaction.

Your audience will expect a concise but effective demonstration of your products and services, and the ability of your organization to support them. Showcasing your product quality, showing subject expertise, and having confidence in your ability to deliver what the customer wants, enhances customer engagement and is usually a huge factor in the decision-making process.  Millennials want your presentations and demonstrations to be short and to the point, more on substance than the “sales pitch”, and look forward to learning from you during the process.  Being able to demonstrate capability, and the ability to deliver and support customers during and post solution implementation.

Implementation includes deploying a cohesive project team, gathering detailed business and technical requirements in a way that shows you are committed to the team’s success through understanding the nuances of their business.  Millennials expect the teams to blend as one cohesive unit—Customer/Vendor/Systems Integrator—with roles and responsibilities clearly defined, and regular communications plans in place.  Time should be devoted to overall system design to improve efficiencies and provide more flexibility for users, rather than a new implementation of old business models that are hampering the business. Configuring your product to meet customer needs is an iterative process where functionality is delivered to the business on an incremental basis for user testing and acceptance. Being honest about what you can and cannot do within specific timeframes builds trust. Providing credible timelines that can be met taking into account internal and external dependencies that will impact the project such as data being available from a policy management system before full testing of integrations can occur. Testing the product throughout the implementation is necessary so that misunderstandings or errors in configurations can be detected easily, and inefficiencies can be found and resolved prior to going live with the product.

Support requires your team to be accessible during and after an implementation. This leads to greater customer satisfaction and in the long term, leads to more referenceable customers and can generate new business referrals. Again, millennials want responses to issues to be instant, with teams deployed rapidly for quick resolution.

Effective communication throughout the project lifecycle is possibly the most effective element of the customer experience.  Understanding millennials is key—they are not as demanding as some people would have it—they just want communication to be open, honest and instant, and when agreements are reached, actions to be executed as planned.

The intangibles that are a part of the customer experience are sometimes more important than the tangibles. Millennials are beginning to hold decision-making posts and they are very particular about the reputation, social responsibility, and eco-friendliness of the vendors they purchase from. If your organization is perceived as not caring about the environment or their communities (local and international), or if they have a reputation of treating their employees poorly, it could have a significant financial impact on the vendor.

At the end of the day, people like doing business with people they think are “just like them” or if they are not, can at least show they can understand and can communicate with them effectively.   Customer/Vendor relationships are typically for 10 years or more and over time, like any relationship, will have ups and downs, but it all gets back to the desire to partner for the long term and communication.

The post Customer Experience: A Millennial Approach appeared first on Computer Solutions & Software International LLC.

Take, for example, that airlines are getting rid of those screens on the back of the seats because most people have some type of mobile device—iPhone or tablet—that lets them watch a movie they downloaded to their device before they got on the plane. This has removed a revenue source from the airline that passengers were funding, which I imagine will show up in some other fee. But in using mobility, airlines have done some amazing things to reinvent their digital presence. With a smart phone and a downloaded application from the airline, you can book a flight, change a flight, check on flight status, download a boarding pass, and make sure you are getting the right amount of miles plugged into your frequent-flyer account. Pretty amazing when you consider that the underlying infrastructure of the airlines is a hodge-podge of technologies that have been in use for 40 or more years.

That underlying infrastructure is the bane of the existence of mobile technologies. You see, mobile apps are only able to do things that those “old” systems and applications let them do. The airlines are fortunate that they recognized the functionality of the Smartphone and started working on how it will be used years before most companies. I recall Fidelity Investments being the first to market easy-to-use access to a customer account. Even though the use of the mobile technology was miniscule, a fraction of 1%, they could read the tea leaves and understand that over a period of time, their old model of client interaction was going to be obsolete.

When companies decide to become “mobility ready” they do more than just let a client or an employee access the website with a device other than a desktop or laptop computer. A common mistake is the lack of a plan as to how and why mobile devices should be a part of your technology strategy. Obviously, management needs to agree on a basic business case to define the mobile strategy. And, after defining the strategy, answering the what, the next step, and how becomes paramount. Too often the client’s IT department will take on the task of building and implementing the mobile strategy. For many IT projects, the “build my own” plan is fraught with problems.

Mobile Technology: The Right Way

CSSI has deployed “anytime, anywhere, any device” mobile technology to a large number of its clients who use mobile technology as a key strategy to transact business, as well as to deliver information directly to the client. CSSI’s digital experience lies in its knowledge of technology infrastructure: systems that house data that must be accessed by a partner or a customer. CSSI’s insurance expertise is extremely valuable: integrating into a myriad of systems and applications is a basic fact when addressing insurance organizations. That expertise reduces project time and delivers the mobile project at a lower cost than other technology firms.

Where to Deploy for Best Results?

Obviously, an insurance organization has many areas that can use mobile technology. But, many inquire as to where the digital business should be used and the most important areas to deploy mobile technology. The short answer is to understand Moment of Truth opportunities for customer (or agent) engagement.

• Claims has the most obvious moments of truth in an insurance company. Customers with a question are willing to wait for an answer about billing, or a coverage question. But when calling about a claim, especially to report a claim, it must be all hands on deck to get the matter resolved, moving in process, answering customer questions, or providing information or status on a claim. Mobile technology speeds up the initial first-notice process and if a smart phone has a camera (and which ones don’t in this day and age?) photos of the accident, voice recordings of the scene for example, deliver important information to the insurance company and save huge amounts of time in the early claim process.
• Underwriting is another moment of truth area of an insurance company for an insured and for an agent. A customer can be in a closing transaction for a mortgage and needs some coverage information or needs to transmit a photo to an underwriter. Again, smart phone technology is there to move the process along.

Ultimately, mobile technology is a key differentiator for an organization to remain competitive in today’s marketplace and allows an organization to build a strategic advantage using technology to digitally transform and ehnace the customers experience. Companies must develop an end-to-end response to rethink their business and operational models.

The post Mobility is the Foundation of Customer Experience appeared first on Computer Solutions & Software International LLC.

Digital transformation is the modernization of your business, processes, activities, and competencies that give you a competitive edge and transforms your business ecosystem.  Digital technologies has impacted all aspects of our lives from automated personal assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, to smart refrigerators, Bank of America’s Live tellers on video at ATMs, and autonomous cars. Digitization is a major disruptor for many industries, the most notable being retail with online shopping, and the hospitality industry with Air BnB, discount websites like Orbitz, lastminute.com etc. where potential guests can book airline tickets, vacations and hotels for a fraction of what they paid in the past. Last year, when Google launched its insurance product, Google Compare, it sent a ripple of fear through the insurance industry, resulting in more insurers paying attention to upgrading their technology.

For businesses to survive in this continuously evolving digital environment, they must understand that their transformation must be enterprise-wide. It should encompass front and back end processes as well as company culture. In the article, “The Making of a Digital Insurer,” McKinsey & Company listed six areas insurers need to consider to succeed in this digital era:

• Digital analytics and decision making: data from internal and external sources gathered in real time for actionable insights
• Strategy: digital strategies adapt to rapid industry change while supporting overall business aspirations.
• Customer-centricity: Digital tools improve the customer experience at every step in the decision journey, and beyond
• Digitize business processes: Processes are reimagined from a zero base, reducing costs and errors and boosting customer satisfaction
• Organize for digital: The corporate culture approach to talent and organizational model all support digital excellence
• Technology: Two-speed IT allows for rapid digital development and ensures transactional systems are safely maintained

For example, in the insurance industry, many insurers are focusing their digital transformation strategies on their front-end processes to improve customer experience across all interaction channels. In this digital age, the adage “The Customer is King” has become a reality.

Access to tremendous amounts of information through the Internet has resulted in smart, well-informed consumers/shoppers who have become powerful by sharing information on social media. This is a major disruptor for all industries, as customer reviews can make or break a product. For insurance carriers, the ability to onboard producers quickly (in a matter of hours), giving producers access to their book of business and demographic information using a self-service portal is a must. Processing producer compensation correctly and in a timely manner is a must. Managing the producer lifecycle seamlessly is a must.

To survive in this new business environment, businesses must digitize their processes: that’s the only way to ensure that the brightest and best producers will work for them. Again, I will use the insurance industry as an example. For insurance distributors, digitizing revenue reconciliation, gamification, compensation, etc. is also a must. To win new business, producers are using digital technologies to gather information, find competing products, talk to their employers, and to talk to their customers. This means each enterprise must enhance their customer experiences with agility, smart decisions, innovations, and digital technology to empower their producers. Many industry professionals are saying digital transformation is the future, but digital transformation is now! Just look around you.

The post Digital Transformation is here appeared first on Computer Solutions & Software International LLC.