Customer Intelligence – Analyzing and Acting on the Data

Part one of this topic addressed leveraging social media to improve customer satisfaction.  This is the initial step towards a broader goal to create a robust Customer Intelligence framework that allows P/C insurers to listen, connect, analyze, respond and market to customers in a much more proactive and targeted way.

Customer Intelligence is the process of collecting relevant and timely information about customers and prospects, consolidating the data from all the different sources into a cohesive structure, and providing the sales, service and marketing functions with tools that can leverage this intelligence.  The sources of this data not only include the obvious ones such as a carrier’s Customer Service Center, and Policy or Claims Admin system, but should also originate from the Agent, Marketing Surveys, Telematics, and Social Media, including Twitter and Facebook – all mashed up to produce a Balanced Scorecard and Predictive Analytics.

Most CRM systems need to be updated to include new columns in their user profile for data in addition to email and phone number such as Facebook name, Twitter Handle, etc. With the social listening and response management connected to your CRM, a social inquiry can be viewed in context and the activity recorded for future interactions, available to Customer Service Reps or even Agency personnel. This level of social customer intelligence is going to differentiate companies that do it right, becoming a key element of a carrier’s business strategy.

A fully integrated Customer Intelligence platform provides benefits such as:

• A single integrated interface to many social media outlets
• The ability to manage multiple writing companies
• Create and track cases, contacts, accounts, and leads from real-time conversations
• Manage marketing campaigns and track social media marketing ROI
• Cue CSR’s on upsell and cross sell opportunities

A carrier should determine the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter most to their business goals, then view the appropriate data in graphical dashboards to track effectiveness of their efforts.  It’s important to tie those KPIs to their influence on customer behaviors such as loyalty and increased sales.  But carriers must also be aware to not look at positive or negative changes in the wrong way and fully understand the reasons for success or failure.  Reacting to success by following up with more online advertising in certain media outlets, may not produce the desired results, when in fact the reason for an increase in sales is due to the upsell and cross sell efforts of CSRs.