30 Apr 2019

As automation increases companies are searching for ways to maintain empathy

By Neil Gardner, Chief Customer Officer, Asia

Think about a time in your life when you had to make an insurance claim. It could be the frustrating situation of your tenant not paying rent for several months, or that time when you set off on an amazing holiday – riding a motorbike across India, only to accidentally swerve off the side of the road on the first day and then find yourself in hospital with a broken leg.

During times like these, what would make you feel better -– speaking to a person or a robot?

We all understand the importance of empathy in our personal lives, but it is also vital for businesses and couldn’t be more crucial for insurers. Why? Because at the end of the day, insurance is a business about people.

At its core, empathy is the ability to deeply understand your customers and to truly see and feel from their point of view. Another way to look at it is being able to understand the underlying emotional drivers of decisions. It is what makes customers more likely to stay with a company and what pushes them to one in the first place.

There has been increasing industry focus on empathy driven by technological innovations such as AI, predictive analytics and digital tools that continue to reduce human-touch-points in the customer journey.  The challenge insurers face is how to bring in technology to enhance the customer experience in a way that will maintain the personal touch customers have grown use to. This is especially important when customers are feeling vulnerable, confused and frustrated and it forms a crucial element of our business – insurance is based on trust.

So, how to strike the right balance?

Key is to understand where along the customer journey the human-touch point is essential and then consider how you can maximise its impact. If we take AI as an example, it can be deployed to enhance the customer experience by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks like gathering and sorting data, predictive analytics and processing claims. In turn, this can enable human employees to provide faster service and to focus on making the service more personalised, such as offering empathy with a better understanding of the policyholder’s situation. This service is essential when it is time for customers to make a claim, upon purchase, or when their policy is up for renewal.

The ability to feel emotions is considered one of the few things that separates humans from machines. As technology takes on more work in our industry that was previously done by humans, there is a growing need for connection and authenticity, especially for a business like insurance that is built on the relationships it has with its customers.

Looking to the future, the insurers who thrive will be the ones that focus on maintaining empathy as an essential part of their business strategy.