Personalization in Insurance: Where Insurers Are vs. Where They Can Be

While the research (and the final report) are extremely extensive and cover a wide range of topics insurers are focused on today, we also took a deep dive into many of the most topical and relevant areas.

For example, the survey examined the current state of personalization in insurance and revealed that the majority of insurers have not completely capitalized on this trend. For example, only 7% of respondents indicated that they have fully implemented personalization in their company.

Where Do Insurers Stand with Personalization?

On the other hand, the vast majority of carriers (90%) reported that they plan to fully execute their personalization strategy in the next four years. To put a positive spin on it, only 3% don’t have a strategy, which seems to mean that most of them do have good intentions and that they’re currently working on it.

Insurers Are Aware of the Benefits of Personalization

More positive news: The research clearly demonstrated that insurers recognize the benefits of personalization in a wide range of areas of their business: 

• Cross-channel experiences

• Better customer service

• Faster response to customer questions

• Better alignment with insurance agencies to meet customers’ needs

• Customer segmentation

• Supplementary coverage/endorsement offerings

• Gaining a single, 360-degree view of the customer

• Bundling/customized policy options

• Usage-based insurance

• Customer service chatbots

• Tailored social media ads

With so many benefits, for so many parts of the business, it’s puzzling why more insurers haven’t fully executed their personalization strategies.

What’s Preventing Personalization in Insurance?

To understand why insurers weren’t further along with personalization, and more specifically, what they perceived as the biggest challenges to developing personalized products and services, the survey asked them to name the three most significant obstacles standing in their way.

Respondents reported a wide range of answers as seen below (with percentages by respondent): 

• Data security or data privacy concerns: 48%

• Competitors’ personalized offerings: 47%

• Expected ROI is difficult to quantify: 40%

• Meeting customers’ expectations: 39%

• Legacy systems do not support personalization: 36%

• Lacking skills to develop/manage personalized offers: 33%

• Lack of organizational alignment: 30%

• Expected ROI is too low: 27%

All of these perceptions are consistent with what we hear as we work with insurance carriers around the world, yet none of them should be considered to be insurmountable since personalization strategies can deliver such powerful results, including conversion, growth, profitability, and customer engagement and retention.

Looking to Do More

Yet there are signs of continued progress. For example, more than 75% of respondents reported that they would be using third-party data such as telematics or IoT data in their personalization offerings in the next two years – evidence of their commitment to larger, more innovative personalization strategies.

Similarly, integrating third-party data is vitally important to more than 90% of executives, regardless of their current level of personalization.

Turn Personalization Into a New Competitive Advantage

Successful personalization strategies can help you create new interactions that make all the difference to your customers and prospects. There’s a real opportunity to go beyond just inserting a customer’s name in a digital field or attempting to target a broad demographic. With real-time, individualized communications, pricing, and insurance offers, you can transform every interaction into a true one-on-one connection.

Today, Insurers are accelerating their personalization strategies with insurance technology that uses predictive modeling, advanced data analytics, third-party data, and other capabilities to bring cross-channel personalization to life.

Earnix has helped many leading insurance carriers quickly develop and deploy effective personalization strategies and achieve superior business results. Our solutions let you model, simulate, and compare the impact of various pricing scenarios in real time. Discover how you can take advantage of personalization to stay a step ahead of the competition and achieve the business results that matter most with AI-powered personalization from Earnix.

To help insurance executives understand new changes in the insurance industry, Earnix partnered with 
the Market Strategy Group, LLC to conduct a comprehensive independent research survey. Our report, “2023 Industry Trends Report: Insurance Operations in a Changing Industry” summarizes key findings to show how other insurers are thinking about and reacting to so much change.