Roy Murphy, partner at Endava, gives his opinion on how the insurance market has evolved its attitude in recent years
The late, great English actor and singer Bernard Cribbins was the most popular storyteller on children’s TV show Jackanory, with millions of viewers - young and old - hanging on to his every word.
When asked about the secret of his success, he replied: “I talk to the camera as if it’s the only person in the world. It’s just me and them - and that makes it special.”
Endava has been in the insurance transformation space for over 20 years now and over that time, unsurprisingly, we’ve seen a lot of change in behaviours, ways of working and in the huge advances in digital technology.
In recent years, we’ve seen the rate of change accelerate considerably and, more than ever before, that’s being driven by both increasing consumer expectation, as well as providers’ appetite to leapfrog their competition with disruptive products and superior levels of service.
Today’s customers expect simplicity and choice. Being able to secure those consumers’ advocacy requires a user experience that is head and shoulders above the standards we saw even just a couple of years ago.
But delivering that simplicity and choice relies on more sophistication under businesses’ bonnets - sophistication that is only made possible with the adoption of more flexible and powerful systems to quickly and accurately process consumer data and present a unique and rewarding customer experience.
To keep up with demand, system vendors are now faced with the triple-whammy challenge of reducing the overall time to implement a transformation system, providing a system architecture that allows future flexibility and enables the user to effect change quickly and easily.
Providers no longer want to simply catch up with the competition - they want to leapfrog the competition and make sure they have the right tools to retain that advantage.
The old ‘build or buy’ argument is obsolete, but with the latest generation of low code and no code platforms emerging, combined with microservice-based architectures and mature application programming interface (API) integration, users can now get the best of both worlds - the advantages of out of the box functionality and automation, combined with user-modifiable processes and business rules.
As customers become more demanding with providers, those providers have become more demanding on their suppliers.
The ability to personalise products and services to the customer’s individual needs - rather than tailoring offerings at a product level - is a trend that is really starting to gain momentum in the insurance industry.
This needs to happen because customers want to feel special and enjoy a uniquely individual experience where they feel the provider really understands them.
Capitalising on the value that customer data can deliver enables providers to further define and refine their product offerings and, as a result, their customers will be far more likely to remain loyal.
