case study for insurance company

Insurance Case Studies: The Ultimate Guide

How do you show your prospects exactly what your company can do for them? With a case study. Insurance case studies provide buyers with the solid facts, figures and performance examples they need to make a purchasing decision.

What Is a Case Study?

A case study is a powerful marketing tool that is often used in the middle or bottom of the sales funnel, to help buyers develop a preference for your offering. Case studies increase buying confidence and validate the buying decision. They prove that your product or service performs as promised.

Case studies change the conversation from telling to showing. Instead of just telling prospects how great your brand is, you can show prospects exactly what your brand is capable of achieving. This gives prospects a more concrete understanding of what to expect and enables them to step into the shoes of a satisfied customer.

The Elements of a Case Study

An effective case study contains key elements that align with the buyer’s journey:

• Who is the customer? If you don’t have permission to name the customer, describe the customer by industry, size and other relevant details.
• What problem were they trying to solve? When B2B buyers are shopping for a product, they’re trying to solve a specific problem. Identify this problem so other prospects with similar problems can relate. Sometimes, there’s more than one problem.
• What other solutions did they consider? B2B buyers usually consider multiple options before deciding. This is a key part of the process, and including the details can help emphasize why your company stood out.
• Why did they choose your solution? State exactly what your company offered that other competitors couldn’t.
• What was the implementation process like? Switching B2B vendors can be a major undertaking. Describe the process so your prospects will know what to expect. Of course, you want to put your company in a positive light and focus on the positives, but you can include hiccups that occurred in the process and how you handled them. Prospects know that things don’t always go perfectly according to plan, and this shows that you’re competent and able to overcome any barriers that arise.
• How has the company benefited? In the beginning of the case study, you described the client’s problem. Now touch back on this and show how the problem has been solved. Include specific information about how the company has benefited from your product or service. For example, how much time or money has the client saved? How are they better prepared? How have you helped increase their revenues?
• What are the key takeaways for others in a similar situation? Convince prospects that they should follow the client’s example and partner with your company. Summarize your argument with key takeaways from the case study.

Case Study Dos and Don’ts

To squeeze the most value from your case study, you need to follow some best practices.

• Don’t just list bulleted facts. You might be able to pull a list of bulleted facts from your case study to use in other types of content, such as social media posts, but your actual case study should be at least two pages long to tell the story in a meaningful way.
• Do use names. Your case study will carry a lot more weight if the featured customer is named. You can also use anonymous case studies, but they are not quite as credible.
• Do appeal to emotions. Think of your case study as a story. You’re showing your prospects what it’s like to work with your company, so you need to build a narrative. This is also a good place to build an emotional argument by showing how your company can help clients deal with pain points and reduce problems.
• Don’t make your case study longer than it needs to be. Your prospects are busy, and they probably won’t have time to read an overly verbose document. Provide enough information to create a compelling story, but don’t get bogged down with unnecessary details. An effective case study will often be around two pages.
• Do include quotes. You can say that your company is great, but it sounds more convincing if one of your customers says it. The featured customer may be willing to provide you with quotes and their logo to include in your case study. As a bonus, this is also free publicity for them.
• Do get permission. If you’re naming a customer, you will need to secure their permission and allow them the opportunity to review and approve the final piece before it is used. Be sure to save their written approval in case questions arise in the future.

Case Studies Should Be Part of Your Content Library

Creating a case study can take some time and effort, but they are worth it.

According to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer , 63% of people worry business leaders are trying to mislead people with false or exaggerated statements. If you just say that your company can help people solve their problems, your prospects might not believe you. You need to build credibility, and a case study that provides concrete examples can help.

A case study is also a fantastic way to differentiate yourself from your competition. As mentioned earlier, case studies are often used in more advanced stages of the customer journey, when prospects are already familiar with your company and need information that’s going to guide their purchasing decision. You want to create preference for your company so you can close the sale, and a case study can help you do that.

Your Case Study Can Convert Leads for Years

Some content has a short life, but not case studies. Although creating a case study will require some effort, once you have it, you can use it for as long as you continue to offer the featured products and services, and the featured company is still a customer.

• Feature your case study on your website. You can create a landing page for your case study or case studies so prospects can find them easily. They can be offered as instant downloads or you can generate leads by gating them with a form.
• Promote your case study in social media posts. Spread the word about your case study on social media. You can always just write a post and link to the case study, but also consider designing graphics for the case study. A LinkedIn carousel post is another great way to highlight your case study on social media.
• Encourage prospects to download the study as a call to action in your blog posts . This is a practical way to encourage your audience to learn more about your company.
• Link to case studies in email nurturing campaigns . If you’re nurturing a prospect that has downloaded other content, a case study link can entice additional engagement.
• Build case studies into your sales processes . Sales professionals love using case studies as handouts as they provide a great springboard for meaningful conversations.
• Use content to develop webinars or videos . You can even use case study content as the foundation for very powerful webinars or videos.

Need Case Studies but Don’t Know Where to Start?

Inbound Insurance Marketing can help your company develop powerful, effective case studies. Learn more. Or, if you’re ready to get started, schedule 30 minutes to discuss your project.

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Blog | Insurance

• Insurance Digital Transformation: Improving the Customer Experience

In this insurance digital transformation case study, our design thinking practice drives impactful results to the client's bottom line and customer experience.

JANUARY 29, 2018

As data analytics transform the global business community at a rapid pace, many opportunities exist for insurers to leverage information to grow their bottom line. All insurance companies are sitting on a wealth of information about their customers and operational processes. The biggest challenge insurers face with this data? There’s too much data to sort through, and it’s difficult and time consuming to translate information into actionable insights.

Making your data work harder – and more valuable -- is what the Sutherland Cloud Analytics platform is all about. It has positively impacted many companies on a global scale, combining the power of data analytics with artificial intelligence (AI) to drive insights to fuel decisions that boost your bottom line and customer experience.

Harnessing Big Data Drives Insights, Streamlines Processes

Guardian Group , an integrated financial services organization with a focus on life, health, property and casualty insurance, pensions and asset management, recently partnered with Sutherland to rapidly monetize its data assets to meet their business needs.

Prior to engaging Sutherland, the leading insurer was challenged with disparate, unsynchronized databases and inconsistent data across their organization, and basic financial and operational reporting did not deliver valuable information for executive decision making. The time was right for Guardian Group to make agile adjustments to address changing customer expectations, market needs, and regulatory mandates.

Sutherland’s Cloud Analytics Platform and associated consulting established an ongoing big data capability to facilitate a culture of leveraging insights for business decisions. Thanks to Sutherland’s cloud-based solutions, Guardian Group saw an approximately 25 percent reduction in manual efforts and associated labor cost for some activities, 20 percent reduction in claims-related processing turnaround time, and 100 percent digitization of forms now available online.

An End-to-End Analytics Transformation

Core components of the data analytics solution for Guardian Group include:

Suspense Amount Management for cloud: AI-leveraged analytics that enables insurers to wade through complex data streams and meaningfully allocate premium suspense amounts to the right policies. It’s designed to optimize cash flows to improve loss ratios, combined ratios, and current ratio.

Operational Lapse Accounts Analytics to better understand agent performance and drive optimal account management processes.

Operational solutions to help drive efficiencies and automation in customer-facing and claims management processes.

Precise customer service and predictive modeling powered by analytics capable of turning customer and market behaviors into models.

Strategic customer, agent, and policy profitability analytics to assess emerging risks, identify new revenue sources and optimize enterprise-wide profitability.

Now is the time to leverage data analytics to your drive competitive advantage and positively transform processes throughout your insurance organization.

Reduce Risk. Gain Advantage. Improve Retention.

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Case Study 4: The Digital Transformation of Insurance

• First Online: 06 February 2020

Cite this chapter

• Hubert Tardieu 6 ,
• David Daly 7 ,
• José Esteban-Lauzán 8 ,
• John Hall 9 &
• George Miller 10  

Part of the book series: Future of Business and Finance ((FBF))

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Digital is providing great opportunities for insurance firms. The ability to collect and analyze ever-increasing quantities of data makes it possible to provide insurance that is highly personalised, and AI is enabling claims to be processed faster and more accurately than ever before. However, there are also threats for market incumbents, including the rise of aggregation platforms which can seize control of the customer relationship and relegate insurance providers to mere commodity suppliers. In this case study, we explore these trends, challenges, and opportunities, before finally covering how existing firms can leverage platform-based industry ecosystems.

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Digital start-ups specialized in the Insurance market (FinTech is used for those specialized in banking).

Earnings Before Interest Tax Depreciation and Amortisation.

A discipline that merges telecommunication engineering and computer science to gather and manage information that enables the tracking and controlling of remote objects.

Electronic devices—usually capable of some data gathering, storage and/or processing capability—which can be worn in clothes or as accessories.

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McKinsey. (2018, December). Friends or foes: The rise of European aggregators and their impact on traditional insurers. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financial%20Services/Our%20Insights/Friends%20or%20foes%20The%20rise%20of%20European%20aggregators%20and%20their%20impact%20on%20traditional%20insurers/Friends-or-foes-The-rise-of-European-aggregators.ashx . Accessed October 26, 2019.

McKinsey. (2019, May). A new industry model for insurtech. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/insurance-blog/a-new-industry-model-for-insurtech . Accessed October 26, 2019.

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Tardieu, H., Daly, D., Esteban-Lauzán, J., Hall, J., Miller, G. (2020). Case Study 4: The Digital Transformation of Insurance. In: Deliberately Digital. Future of Business and Finance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37955-1_25

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Achmea Case Study: Insurance Company Digital Transformation

Leading insurance provider Achmea wanted to accelerate its transition to digital records, to reflect changes in customer behaviours.

Real-life example of how iron mountain helped achmea insurance company to elevate efficiency and customer experience with digital transformation.

“Initially our relationship with Iron Mountain was largely operational, but now its technical and strategic. They are helping us make the transition to digital and achieve our goal of becoming an environmentally sustainable company.”

Eric Van Der Heiden, Manager content and output services, Achmea

Leading insurance provider Achmea wanted to accelerate its transition to digital records, to reflect changes in customer behaviours. Top priorities were to safeguard confidential data in compliance with legal and industry requirements, while reducing a vast physical archive and making information more accessible to customers and staff.

Record Information Management from Iron Mountain includes transporting, logging and storing Achmea physical archives in a secure offsite facility. Files can be scanned for downloading or ordered online via the Iron Mountain Connect™ portal for next-day delivery. Image on Demand offers pay-as-you-go scanning for often-used documents.

A strategic partnership with Iron Mountain is supporting Achmea on its digital journey. The insurance company digital transformation resulted in reducing physical archives, cutting costs and increasing efficiency. With information more readily available, Achmea can serve customers more effectively: securely, compliantly and sustainably.

Outsourcing: the best option for physical archives

“To carry out our core activity, we need customer data to be available, secure and legally compliant. Iron Mountain expertise and resources are essential to achieving that.”

Ensuring compliance while mitigating risk

Protecting precious assets.

As the largest Dutch insurer, Achmea provides 10 million customers with health, life and non-life policies. Dedicated to helping people manage risks for more than 200 years, this rich heritage including past mergers and acquisitions created extensive record archives. With so many file boxes to be classified and stored, Achmea just doesn’t have the space or resources to handle the process in-house. That’s why the company decided thirty years ago to transfer static archive management to Iron Mountain and for fifteen years now also its dynamic archives.. It’s a Herculean task requiring stringent legal and regulatory compliance, especially information security. Document destruction brings other complexities. For example, legal documents must be retained for seven years after the last policy beneficiary’s demise, which is why the digital transformation of this insurance company was not an easy task.

A smooth operation

Paper files are collected from Achmea offices, logged and barcoded for tracking, then stored in a secure Iron Mountain facility. Achmea orders file retrieval on the Iron Mountain Connect portal, for next-day delivery. On arrival, the in-house team scans and makes digital files available to the requestor. The pensions department also uses the Image on Demand service, where Iron Mountain scans and makes requested documents available for download. Now, however, customer interactions are changing. Mobile apps, social media and the company’s website are slowly replacing telephone and paper-based communications. This generates different data from images to recorded messages, which all must be archived.

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Case Study: A Single Source of Truth to Increase Data Quality and Integrity

This case study explores how a leading Property Casualty Insurance company in North America, with $39.8 billion in revenue, leveraged Capsifi to overcome these challenges by transforming its data architecture and decision- making processes.

23 August 24

A Single Source of Truth: Transforming Property Casualty Insurance with Capsifi

In the competitive and rapidly evolving world of Property Casualty Insurance, businesses face numerous challenges. From underwriting losses and rising costs to evolving risks and competition from InsurTech companies, the landscape is constantly shifting.This case study explores how a leading Property Casualty Insurance company in North America, with $39.8 billion in revenue, leveraged Capsifi to overcome these challenges by transforming its data architecture and decision-making processes.

The Challenge: A Struggling Business Architecture Team:

The company’s Business Architecture team was in its early stages of development, and the demand for data to support decision-making was growing rapidly. The team faced several hurdles:

• Rising costs and slow premium growth were impacting profitability.
• They were burdened with manual architecture activities, which involved maintaining multiple files of content that needed to be periodically aligned. company unknowingly procured new tech, adding complexity instead of value.
• The process was slow, inefficient, and prone to errors, with different versions of analysis provided to different stakeholders.
• The time taken to respond to requests for insights often reduced the value of the information they provided.

With multiple sources of truth and manual reconciliation, the team found it difficult to keep up with the demands for timely and accurate insights, which further complicated their decision-making processes.

The Approach: Leveraging Capsifi to Simplify and Streamline

Recognizing the need for change, the company identified key objectives that would drive significant improvements in their processes. They chose to focus on small, manageable changes that would have a large impact.

• They loaded and aligned available assets, standardized values, and naming conventions, and iterated to produce meaningful visualizations.
• By minimizing parallel testing and retiring manual files and calculation methods, they took calculated risks that paid off.
• Capsifi’s powerful visualizations were able to tell the story that the team had been struggling to communicate. With the new system in place, the team was able to free up time, which allowed them to provide decision-makers with additional insights, further demonstrating their understanding of the business and its priorities. Capsifi’s speed and efficiency in providing data-rich insights naturally built credibility with stakeholders.

Capsifi allows us the ability to perform our analysis faster to support our recommendations for our stakeholders. ​

Manager, Business Architecture​

The Results: Efficiency, Credibility, and Growth

The transformation was profound. Capsifi became the company’s sole source of truth for strategy and operating model information. The efficiencies introduced by the system enabled the team to extend their analysis into areas they previously didn’t have time or tools to explore. As a result:

• The company eliminated 25% of daily data reconciliation tasks, saving 151 hours per month.
• They retired 65 Excel and Visio files that had previously been maintained and aligned manually.
• Capsifi became the system of record across functions, allowing more time for value-adding activities.
• The architecture team expanded their stakeholder base, including strategy leaders and strategic portfolio leaders, providing trusted data and earning their confidence.

Through this partnership with Capsifi, the Property Casualty Insurance company successfully navigated the challenges of a complex and dynamic industry, ultimately positioning themselves for continued growth and success. This case demonstrates the power of Capsifi to transform not only data quality and integrity but also the way a company operates at a fundamental level.

Case Study: Driving Technology Investment with a Single Source of Truth

The Challenge: Fragmentation and Complexity As the company evolved, so did its technology stack—but not without growing pains.…

150-year-old Local Government Organisation

Reducing new business application processing time from 18 to 3 months using Capsifi.

A Leader in Occupational Health Services

Achieving line of sight traceability across multiple agencies and uncovers opportunities to negotiate improved pricing.

American Fortune 500 Retail Corporation

Expanding best practices in a single market globally, leveraging their operating model as an asset.

Australian State Government Agency

Reducing the average time to digitize a customer interaction by 96%.

Billion-Dollar Financial Services Company

Reducing the cost of improving their banking system, highlighting the impact of risk and enhancing executive decision making.

Financial Services Company embraces digital channels

Embracing digital channels to deliver superior customer experiences and identify which initiatives provide the best ROI.

Fortune 100 Global Financial Services Organization

Overhauls their enterprise risk framework and develops a holistic view of risk.

Fortune 500 Retail Corporation

Achieving supply-chain platform consolidation, aligning multiple teams with a holistic view of business and technology scope.

How an established insurance company became digital-first

UK insurer Hastings Direct wanted to rewrite the conventions of its category by offering seamless end-to-end digital customer experiences.

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Joel Pegram

Partner, Financial Services Technology Consulting, Ernst & Young LLP

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The better the question

How does technology make insurance more human?

Hastings Direct wanted to offer its customers a familiar but more intuitive digital experience.

O ver the last 10 years, the global insurance market has been shifting to include more digital offerings. Consumers have become highly selective and price sensitive.

Once a consumer has taken out a policy online, they often find their insurance provider offers a limited and outdated experience – for example, making consumers call them to make claims, renew or cancel their policies, sitting on hold in the call center queue. It’s a far cry from the customer-friendly, intuitive digital experience that attracted them.

Hastings Direct  is a UK insurer that, recognizing this potential drop-off in customer service for their business, developed the strategic ambition to become the best and biggest digital UK insurance provider. That doesn’t just mean numbers of customers or total revenues, it means enabling customers to perform more transactions digitally with the best experience possible.

Hastings Direct had a longstanding relationship with the EY organization as their trusted advisor, having already implemented and enhanced the core Guidewire InsuranceSuite, including the migration of their products to their new insurance platform.

Together, they worked on a path to achieve Hastings Direct’s ambition.

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Thinking and experiencing digital

Hastings Direct formed a multi-year strategic change collaboration with the EY organization to drive a mobile-first digital transformation.

After working with the EY organization since 2014 building the internal technology foundation, Hastings Direct was confident to move forward with EY teams to drive a mobile-first digital transformation.

Working to a new definition of “best and biggest,” Hastings Direct and EY teams had to think beyond traditional metrics. This meant putting the consumer first, for example, enabling self-service and making the sales journey easier and more straight-forward.

EY teams worked with Hastings Direct’s in-house digital hub, which designed new journeys aligned to their customers’ needs. To make these a reality, Hastings Direct needed the underlying technology to transform too. Hastings Direct completed a migration to the cloud, further invested in data enrichment and management information throughout the organization and launched a core platform upgrade to further enable digital customer journeys.

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It takes the whole organization to embed a customer-first, mobile-first transformation like this – so it was essential to equip all employees with the modern workplace tools necessary for Hastings Direct to become a truly digital insurance provider from the inside out. EY teams advised and collaborated on this process and helped establish internal governance to improve overall efficiency and delivery quality.

Strategically, Hastings Direct wanted to use its innovative new technology to get a holistic picture of customers and offer them the best price possible – this included embedding automation in testing to iterate improvements in the journeys.

On a tactical level, Hastings Direct and EY teams addressed the user experience through simplified question sets (which still maintained information gathering integrity to assess the insured risk), a clearer tone of voice, a consistent look and feel to the familiar price comparison sites, and easy toggling between standard and enhanced cover options.

“Hastings Direct and EY teams have developed an effective collaboration based on trust and doing the right thing. By working so closely, we have been able to react quickly to evolving needs for technology skill sets, and we are able to bring capabilities from all over the globe despite working remotely through the pandemic," says, Joel Pegram, Partner, Financial Services Technology Consulting, Ernst & Young LLP.

Throughout, the EY organization mobilized a diverse and global team, spanning more than 10 countries and encompassing strong technical capabilities to bring Hastings Direct the very best of EY teams.

Customer experience

Generate long-term value and help deliver CX that improves customer engagement, traffic and revenue at lower costs with help from EY teams.

We have been able to react quickly to evolving needs for technology skill sets, and we are able to bring capabilities from all over the globe despite working remotely through the pandemic.

The better the world works

Transformation that benefits everyone

The holistic change across Hastings Direct’s digital operations significantly transformed the customer experience.

At the heart of this transformation was the idea of making transactions frictionless for customers. And the results certainly reflect that.

Hastings Direct had more than 3.1m active policies in 2021. Positive customer opinion also reflects the value of the multi-year transformation journey, with more customers able to complete their visit successfully and purchase or upgrade a policy online. In January 2022, Hastings Direct became the highest-ranked insurance provider within the finance category in the App Store. And digital adoption continues to increase with 350,000 unique mobile app users per month since December 2021.

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Delivery of these improvements comes from the inside out, and the changes also helped Hastings Direct internal development teams deliver an efficiency gain of more than 40%. Now, and for the future, EY teams are working hand-in-hand with Hastings Direct’s IT organization. The team is digitizing the next level of servicing journeys – for example, providing comprehensive FAQs and help text, and offering the ability to message via chat queries. This will give consumers even greater confidence to execute their transactions digitally – all underpinned by new contact center technology.

Looking to the future, Hastings Direct is embedding forward-looking, rich use of data to develop more tailored, relevant and adaptable products for customers.

“Together, Hastings Direct and the EY organization continue to deliver beyond Hastings Direct’s stated expectations enabled by technology. It’s a relationship that helps us go from strength to strength with digital at the heart of our customer proposition,” says Mark Parker, Chief Operating Officer, Hastings Direct.

EY teams provided deep technical experience to Hastings Direct, architecting high-performing recommendations to complex business problems, and remained agile to their changing needs so they can continually better serve their customers.

As a result, Hastings Direct has chosen to extend the relationship and keep the EY organization as their trusted advisor. Together EY teams and Hastings Direct will work to build a better working world, for every customer.

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EY is a global leader in assurance, consulting, strategy and transactions, and tax services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities.

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Elevating customer experience: A win–win for insurers and customers

What is the value of customer experience (CX) in insurance? What sets the industry’s CX leaders apart from the rest—and what can we learn from their examples?

About the authors

In search of answers, McKinsey launched a survey of more than 8,500 insurance customers of the 40 largest North American insurance carriers across the life and property and casualty (P&C) segments (see sidebar, “About the research”). The results were clear: customer experience is a strong predictor and driver of financial and organizational outcomes. CX leaders, defined as those with above-median customer experience scores, outperform their peers across the board—from TSR and revenue growth to employee and agent satisfaction.

About the research

In early 2023, McKinsey completed the North American Insurance Customer Experience Survey, polling insurance customers of the 40 largest insurance carriers, which account for roughly 80 percent of individual net premiums written. Results were collected from more than 8,500 individuals, split evenly between life insurance and property and casualty customers.

In addition to measuring customer satisfaction, the survey also collected insights on nine customer journeys and more than 40 customer subjourneys, asked about preferences across more than ten channels and modes of interaction (for example, speaking with an agent over the phone and meeting an agent in person), and evaluated more than 30 underlying experience drivers (such as wait times and follow-ups). Our analysis offers a granular view of customers’ experiences with insurers across various journeys, channels, and touchpoints.

For insurance carriers, CX matters now more than ever. Customers have come to expect personalized advice, omnichannel experiences, and seamless end-to-end journeys, shaped by their interactions with digital natives both within and outside the industry. Too often, their experiences with insurance fall short of those expectations, especially when it comes to sales and distribution. Meanwhile, rapidly changing consumer preferences, new competitive threats, and a challenging macroeconomic environment have raised the stakes. Insurers must find a way to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse and digital customer base—or they risk watching their customers leave.

Because CX initiatives take months or years to realize their full potential, the time to invest is now. To maximize the value of these investments, insurance carriers should embrace a holistic and agile approach that emphasizes transparency (for example, by benchmarking against peers using customer experience scores and other CX-related operational metrics), data-driven decision making (by anchoring on KPIs across various customer journeys), and a clear sense of urgency that can be sustained throughout the 12 to 24 months it can take to undergo a customer-centric transformation.

Customer experience is a key differentiator and source of competitive advantage in more ways than one. Insurers often find that investing in CX also drives operational efficiencies and that these “stacked wins” combine to improve the bottom line. By harnessing the potential of CX and overcoming its pitfalls, 1 Itai Miller, Kevin Neher, Rens van den Broek, and Tom Wintering, “ Six customer experience pitfalls to avoid ,” McKinsey, March 17, 2022. insurers can deliver superior experience and capture the significant value at stake.

A direct link to value creation

The survey revealed that CX drives material financial impact and unlocks step-change improvements in financial and organizational performance for insurers. Notably, CX leaders outperformed their peers in TSR by 20 percentage points for life insurers and 65 percentage points for P&C insurers in the five-year period from 2017 to 2022. Compared with others, CX leaders also demonstrated stronger revenue growth (by four percentage points), stronger EBIT growth (by four percentage points), lower expense ratios (by two percentage points), and higher employee satisfaction scores. Our experience shows that improving CX can also lead to higher retention, new business, and operational efficiencies for both life and P&C insurance carriers.

The positive (or negative) impact of CX creates ripple effects beyond the four walls of an insurance carrier. Poor CX is often a primary barrier to purchasing insurance, and life insurance ownership already dropped to just 52 percent in 2021—the lowest rate in a decade. 2 Maggie Leyes, James T. Scanlon, and Stephen Wood, 2021 insurance barometer study , LIMRA, November 1, 2021. CX improvements could enable insurance carriers to bridge protection gaps and advance their broader social purpose of protecting lives and livelihoods.

CX challenges and opportunities for insurers

When it comes to consistently delivering a distinctive experience, insurance companies must confront a unique set of challenges. Some are inherent to the complexity of the product and distribution model. Others are the result of chronic underinvestment in specific capabilities and digital offerings. All of them represent a meaningful opportunity for insurance carriers to pull away from the pack and transform CX into a competitive advantage.

Create a seamless, omnichannel customer journey

Customers typically interact with their insurance carrier once or twice a year. This is in stark contrast with other financial-services industries such as banking, in which customer interactions take place ten to 20 times more often. The low frequency of customer touchpoints in insurance means that it’s extremely important to get each one right.

The low frequency of customer touchpoints in insurance means that it’s extremely important to get each one right.

In 2023, “getting it right” often translates to offering seamless, omnichannel customer journeys. But this hardly describes the insurance experience today. The customer journey is typically fragmented from the start: six out of ten customers switch channels prepurchase. Moreover, the transition from online to offline channels can be abrupt or nonexistent. Roughly one in six customers reports no follow-up from insurers after an initial discussion related to financial advice. And of those who do hear back, 40 percent report interacting with two or more people, which can lead to a disjointed experience. Insurers can—and must—do more to close these gaps and ensure that customer interactions can move seamlessly between offline and online channels.

Channel preferences differ between life and P&C customer segments. For example, customers in both industries frequently interact with their insurers through agents, but life insurance customers are significantly more likely to do so. Websites are more popular among P&C customers, who report higher satisfaction and openness toward digital channels than life customers. McKinsey research suggests that life insurance customers would shift toward digital channels if they perceived them to be more secure, reliable, and easy to use. Third-party platforms have the lowest satisfaction scores among channels, however, with an average CSAT score of 5.4 compared with an average CSAT score of 5.8 across all other channels, 3 On a CSAT scale from one to ten. indicating an opportunity to improve CX across the broader digital ecosystem.

Develop best-in-class digital capabilities

Today, a majority of insurance customers are open to using digital channels for routine servicing such as payments and account changes—a trend that has only accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet when customers take advantage of digital channels, they are often left wanting more. More than 30 percent of insurance customers are not satisfied with the digital channels available, and only 20 percent of customers say that digital channels are their top choice for interacting with their insurer. In the meantime, new challengers, including insurtechs and large financial players, are leading with digital and technology capabilities and are threatening to erode the market share of incumbents.

One insurer developed leading digital capabilities with the goal of decreasing underwriting turnaround time for customers. As a result of this CX initiative, the insurance carrier not only experienced higher straight-through processing rates but also made improvements to the overall enrollment experience.

Harness the power of the human touch

Despite the shift toward digitalization, insurers cannot sacrifice the human touch in CX—especially for life customers, who rank agents as the most trusted source for learning about insurance products. Our survey found that agents and advisers are still the highest-rated channel when it comes to customer satisfaction, and 20 percent of customers report that they would likely switch insurance carriers if their adviser left. Life customers who speak with their agents at least once a quarter have an average customer experience score of approximately 50—compared with roughly 30 for those who speak with their agent annually and zero for those with even fewer touchpoints. Yet only half of insurance customers interact with their agent or adviser on an annual basis, suggesting that insurance carriers—especially life insurers—may be missing out on opportunities to deepen their customer relationships.

Solve for a diverse set of customer preferences

A closer look at the data reveals that channel preferences vary significantly by customer journeys and by customer segments. For customer journeys such as researching and learning about insurance or making an account change, roughly half of survey respondents prefer to speak with an agent or customer service representative, while the other half prefer to use digital channels (such as websites or chat features). At the same time, for more-complex journeys such as buying a policy or resolving an issue, more than 70 percent of customers prefer in-person interaction with an agent or third-party representative. It is important to note that as insurers level up their digital capabilities and channel interactions, these preferences may change over time.

Insurance carriers must solve for the preferences not of the average consumer but of a diverse range of customers. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Tired of general product pushes, customers also expect advisers to understand their needs and provide personalized advice. Yet this becomes more difficult as the insurance customer base grows more diverse. In this environment, insurers must effectively deliver solutions for multiple customer types and develop multiproduct relationships that can satisfy a diverse population.

Help customers navigate product complexity

Buying insurance can seem daunting. Customers often find themselves confused and overwhelmed by the plethora of options. The survey found that on average, customers contact their insurer four times in the process of learning about and considering different insurance products. Even after a purchase, customers may not fully understand the value that insurance provides. Roughly 40 percent of insurance customers who considered canceling their policy were considering doing so because they believed the policy was not necessary or did not provide sufficient value. Complicating matters further is the highly intermediated distribution system of traditional insurers that can include agents, brokers, aggregators, and B2B2C (group channels). All of these factors can hamstring an insurance carrier’s ability to deliver a superior experience to its customers.

The inherent complexity of insurance products requires a more deliberate effort from insurers to inform and educate customers. Products need to be simplified and transparent, and product information must be widely accessible and easy to understand. Insurers should also harness the expertise of their agents and advisers to provide personalized advice that can help customers navigate the process and understand the various trade-offs of their decisions.

Actively engage employees and agents in CX initiatives

Customer, employee, and agent experiences are symbiotic. In our experience, the most effective organizations should involve employees and agents as cocreators of change. CX initiatives often call for new ways of working that alleviate the pain points of employees and agents on the front line while equipping them with the visibility and the tools to better serve their customers. Delivering better CX can also tap into a powerful source of meaning for employees, 4 People & Organization Blog , “ Making work meaningful from the C-suite to the frontline ,” blog entry by Timothy Bromley, Taylor Lauricella, and Bill Schaninger, McKinsey, June 28, 2021. which can, in turn, lead to higher rates of employee satisfaction and retention. Indeed, our experience shows that successful customer-centric transformations in insurance typically lead to a 20 percent uplift in employee satisfaction.

As part of its customer-centric transformation, one insurer trained 35 percent of its employees and virtually all of its agents on CX capabilities. In addition to doubling its customer experience scores, the insurance carrier experienced a 25 percent reduction in processing times as well as meaningful improvements in cross-sell and retention rates.

A recipe for successful CX transformations

Customer expectations have soared in the past few years. Noninsurers are raising the CX bar by offering personalized recommendations, omnichannel advice, and digital end-to-end journeys. As more and more companies adopt these new rules of customer engagement, why should customers expect anything less from insurers?

Like their peers in other industries, insurers can follow a proven formula for executing customer-centric transformations. The approach comprises three building blocks: a clearly defined aspiration and road map, an agile transformation approach, and a thoughtful deployment of new capabilities and ways of working. In the initial aspiration-setting phase, leaders can run a rigorous diagnostic to size and validate the full potential of the transformation. This is followed by an execution phase, which involves designing the new CX organization and operating model, reimagining the highest-value customer journeys, and launching CX initiatives with cross-functional teams and agile principles. Such initiatives often target areas that both improve customer experience and deliver operational efficiencies—another way in which CX is a win–win proposition. In the final stage, the insurer scales these initiatives across the organization and builds the capabilities required to sustain CX excellence well into the future.

CX leaders deliver more value to their customers, their employees, their agents, and their bottom lines. Despite the challenges, insurance carriers have an opportunity to invest in their people and their capabilities to drive CX improvements and capture significant value while better serving their customers.

Mathew Lee is a partner in McKinsey’s Miami office; Tim Natriello and Arushee S are associate partners in the New York office, where Dominique Sanders is a consultant; and David Schiff is a partner in the Austin office.

The authors wish to thank Tina Cai, Alex Lapides, Kevin Neher, and Robert Schiff for their contributions to this article.

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3 Case studies demonstrate the power of modern enterprise content management

Customers in insurance, banking, and healthcare find benefits in replacing aging content management tools with modern systems..

From insurance to banking to healthcare, organizations of all stripes are upgrading their aging content management systems with modern, advanced systems that introduce new capabilities, flexibility, and cloud-based scalability. In this post, we’ll touch on three such case studies.

Global insurance company

A large insurance company adopted a cloud-based document management system to enable paperless operations around the world and simplify regulatory compliance. The organization had some tactical document management systems, but they were siloed and based on slow, outdated technology. Plus, all files were stored in U.S. data centers, creating obstacles for a globally dispersed user base.

After adopting Alfresco Content Services and Alfresco Governance Services running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the insurer fully digitized its operations. The IT team worked closely with business users to build a solution “in which paper wasn’t part of the process,” the company’s SVP and CIO said.

The solution provides electronic file and records management capabilities that integrate seamlessly with the company’s core insurance applications, automating everything from document retrieval to records management . The solution is saving the company $21 million over five years thanks to massive reductions in paper, printing, and storage costs.

Large community bank

When a 28-branch community bank decided to sunset its document storage system, it needed a solution that would work with its cloud-based core banking system.

After identifying dozens of company requirements, the organization selected  OnBase  running on the Hyland Cloud. With support from Hyland Professional Services, the bank migrated 2.5 million documents, representing the past 15 years of business documents, to OnBase. Soon after, the bank added WorkView , Hyland’s low-code application builder, to create solutions and address new challenges with speed and agility.

“With WorkView, you can build workable solutions with almost no code at all. It’s enabled us like a force multiplier. We can accomplish so much with a small team,” said the bank’s enterprise process manager.

Among the benefits, the solution helped the bank’s lending department retire its manual, paper-based workflow in favor of more automated processing using OnBase workflows. The results have been significant: a mortgage loan process now takes less than 20 minutes to complete each day, down from two hours.

What’s more, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the bank was able to bring on remote, temporary workers to handle an onslaught of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) applications.

“All the documents needed were visible in OnBase without relying on paper to complete the work,” said the bank’s senior vice president and director of operations and process improvements. “We couldn’t have managed the loan volume without OnBase in the cloud.”

Large pharmacy and healthcare firm

A large American retail pharmacy and healthcare company was looking to upgrade its aging knowledge management systems. Its executive leadership team directed the business to select a knowledge management platform with a modern, open-source approach that would reduce the company’s dependence on IBM, Oracle, and other proprietary solutions.

The company opted for Hyland’s  Nuxeo Platform , an open-source and highly scalable platform that enables the provider’s customer care representatives to quickly access their customers’ current coverage details. It also gives the company the flexibility to introduce new solutions in the future without worrying about being constrained by proprietary technology.

Ultimately, the healthcare firm used Nuxeo to replace two aging platforms:

• A mission-critical solution, previously based on IBM File Net, that’s used by more than 20,000 customer care agents to serve clients daily.
• A content management solution based on Oracle Stellent for managing policies, procedures, and other business content.

Now, the company is confident its agents will be up to date on the latest information they need to do their jobs effectively, from patient details to urgent notices about drug recalls.

“We’re confident the Nuxeo Platform will enable us to inform our reps ASAP,” said a healthcare company rep. “This is critical not only for our business, but also for the well-being of the millions of people who use [our] services.”

To learn more, visit Hyland .

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