What is the Customer Journey?
The customer journey is the path that your customers take to explore more about your company, its offerings, and contact points. All the touchpoints that bring customers to your product, including your website, social media page, mobile app, and Google business info, build a customer journey map that pushes them towards decision making.
If you search customer journey for insurance on the internet, the results will focus more on developing a customer journey map. Only a few will tell you how to build a successful roadmap, keeping in mind the challenges that customers face.
In this article, we will discuss the different stages of the customer journey for insurance to help you understand each phase in-depth.
Mapping the Customer Journey for Insurance
Customer journey mapping is a strategic approach that helps understand customer expectations. It is a process that gives insurers a powerful insight into the method that the customers use to interact with brands when buying a product or dealing with insurance claims.
In general, a customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s digital experience across various touchpoints within the insurance organization. Customer journey mapping is designed based on the following aspects:
- Chronological order
- Customer goals
- Customer sentiments
A successful customer journey map gives insurance brands multiple benefits that include:
- Higher customer engagement/acquisition
- Improved customer experience
- Predict customer behavior
- Improve business operations
The Insurance Customer Journey Stages
A customer journey map is designed considering the customer lifecycle so that brands can identify improvement opportunities across various stages.
1. Customer Awareness
As the beginning stage, customer journey mapping for insurance focuses on how new customers perceive your brand and the information they have about your product at the time of purchase. It can help insurers identify opportunities for improving initial customer engagements.
This stage includes marketing campaigns that help customers become aware of your insurance product through online and offline channels. You can use multiple strategies to highlight the need to improve search engine optimization tactics at this stage.
Insurance marketers must create high-quality content that helps the business rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). It is also seen that many customers step back after waiting in long queues for customer care representatives.
2. Product Consideration
Customers research and ask questions to consider whether your insurance product matches their needs. They analyze the features of a specific policy and compare them with similar products offered by other insurance providers.
Customer journey mapping at this stage enables insurers to identify opportunities that can help increase engagement across digital channels. It helps highlight areas with the scope of future improvements. Map your customer journey across touchpoints to develop an efficient solution.
The website’s design, navigation, layout, and other digital channels that boost customer engagement may need improvement. Build healthy and powerful strategies that can positively influence the customer’s buying decision, such as omnichannel support via email, phone calls, text messaging, and more.
3. Policy Purchase
Customers decide to invest in your product and purchase a policy that best fits their requirements. Whether they are looking to buy life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, or any new product, they must get value for the purchase in terms of profitability and satisfaction.
At the purchase stage, the customer should understand the product’s features and benefits before purchasing it. Insurance companies must simplify the purchase process to make it easier for customers. Turning complex and content-heavy PDFs into compelling infographics can make the process easy to consume for customers.
Customer journey mapping must focus on building a straightforward and user-friendly new policy acquisition process where the customers can purchase through a mobile app. Self-service digital insurance purchase platforms will reduce the effort customers will have to put into purchasing insurance policies.
4. Customer Retention
The customer retention phase focuses on the value of the digital experience that your clients gain from onboarding through the use of the policy. It considers how the policyholders engage with your brand and what they perceive about it after using it for some time.
Emphasizing customer retention is essential during the customer journey mapping as happy customers stay with your brand for longer. Most marketing campaigns in the insurance industry are designed to target existing customers for better retention.
Cross-selling and upselling products based on the customer’s previous purchase history can help at this stage. To improve the customer retention rate, marketers must focus on understanding customer purchasing history and behavior.
5. Customer Exit
At this stage, customer journey mapping focuses on determining whether the customer stays or exits the brand. Even if the customer chooses to exit, you should ensure the exit process is simple and seamless.
Track why customers are leaving and how you can better retain them by improving operational workflows. Highlight opportunities to improve customer satisfaction through seamless services such as a simplified claims process and real-time omnichannel support through chatbots and humans.
In most cases, overpriced products, complex claim processes, and unresponsive customer support compel customers to switch to another brand. Analyze your customer’s needs to build a powerful strategy that can help reduce the exit rate.
Track the Customer Journey with Ease Using iLife’s CRM Tool
Customer journey mapping is essential to build and implement viable strategies that improve customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle.
Analyzing customer behavior across touchpoints helps insurance providers to understand the scope for improvement and improve offerings for better customer satisfaction.
By going through various stages of customer journey mapping for insurance, companies can get an in-depth understanding of purchase behavior.
With this journey map, insurers can create powerful marketing strategies to improve customer experience across touchpoints. Leveraging an advanced insurtech tool can help insurance businesses understand what their customer needs from the brand.
iLife is a dedicated CRM tool that allows insurance businesses to keep their customer data and sales records in one place. The tool is designed to solve pain points in the sales process by helping potential customers find appropriate policies, streamline communication, and identify qualifying leads.
