Social CRM in Insurance: a Deeper Dive...
Looking at Social CRM becoming a hot trend in Insurance domain let's highlight some more scenarios where insurance carriers can actually conceptualize the use of Social CRM.
As emphasized in the previous blog, today's social media aware customer wants to directly interact with the companies bypassing any middle level/agent layers. One of the ways organizations can achieve this is by using social media concept of communities. The massive amounts of data that would start flowing from these communities can be used to address customer grievances or suggestions directly without the intervention of the agents, where a lot of information may be lost in transition.
Making the customer a critical piece of the puzzle would encourage customer advocacy of the brand. Customer advocacy is one of the key outcomes of the social media. One customer clicking "LIKE" on a product/community can trip more users "like the customer" to do the same, increasing the visibility of the product. Also, the same concept of reputation can be applied to Insurance carriers. Lot of research is being done on developing analytical social models and algorithms that can be used to rate companies/brands based on the positive, negative or neutral comments made by the customers on social media. Insurance companies can leverage from the lowering ratings of the competitors by targeting the customers that are not satisfied with their current insurance carrier.
Insurance product vendors can also come up with products or plug-in that can be integrated with their claims management systems. Using this plug-in information can be gathered about the claimant using social media channels. Of course, doing such kind of checks/surveillance would have to be handled at the right places like legal, insurance regulations etc. The companies can also leverage the concept on Social Rep (Social Reputation) as an input parameter to policy underwriting of the customer.
Insurance company can give an option to the insured to voluntarily join certain communities that might guide the customer on benefits of health lifestyle (for life insurance), good etiquettes of driving, links to agencies that can do initial property verifications etc. Customers can join these initiatives and improve their rep scores that would help in lowering the premium amount. Obviously, this kind of strategy would come with its own set of problems and challenges like; differentiating the genuine customers from the ones that misrepresented the online social data, analyzing and tracking customers' online social presence, encouraging the customers to voluntarily share their social profiles etc.
As and when Social CRM concept finds more takers in the insurance sector, more novel and innovative techniques would come up leveraging the social media. Insurance being completely a risk management business can definitely increase its predictability by efficiently using the massive information that is floating all over the social media channels.
