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All Together Now: Unifying Your Data For Exceptional Customer Service

Context is one of the most powerful tools we can give customer service representatives (CSRs). When they have the ability to see the person on the other end of the phone line, chat window, or email program as an individual rather than a transaction, CSRs can make the leap from “good enough” customer service to “everyday extraordinary.” And context hinges on information – or, in digital terms, data.

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Context is one of the most powerful tools we can give customer service representatives (CSRs). When they have the ability to see the person on the other end of the phone line, chat window, or email program as an individual rather than a transaction, CSRs can make the leap from “good enough” customer service to “everyday extraordinary.” And context hinges on information – or, in digital terms, data.

When your data is siloed between multiple systems, you’re never seeing the complete picture of a single customer. Pulling data from those various sources together is possible, but it’s a lot to ask of a (CSR) during a phone call.

Customer-360 Makes It Easier

A better approach is through Customer-360 technology, which automatically brings all that data together into a unified view, reducing hurdles and giving critical context to any interaction with that customer.
Customer-360, or a 360-degree view of the customer, gives you the ability to see all the information and activity surrounding a particular policyholder at the same time, often through a dashboard. It unifies data from all kinds of different internal systems, like policy administration, claims, and billing, alongside past service interactions and external data such as credit history and data from IoT or telemetry. Embedded analytics use that data to recommend the “next best step” to a CSR, be that up-sell or cross-sell, retention conversations, avenues of customer service, or “trusted advisor” interactions around necessary coverage and customer education.

Getting the 360-Degree View of Other Stakeholders

Unifying your data helps your CSR see the context on the whole relationship with a policyholder, but there are plenty of other compelling uses for the technology that supports a unified data view.
Since it can provide the whole picture on any number of individuals or other moving parts within an insurance company, you can use it to answer critical contextual questions about an individual agent or agency, stakeholder, business unit, product, or line of business.
  • With an Agency-360 view, you can analyze an agency’s performance from multiple angles. What populations are their best buyers of multi-line products? How can we evaluate their ability to use digital tools to increase sales or to provide more bindable quotes? Have performance incentives helped their momentum in the past?
  • A Partner-360 view shows you the range of all of your supporting partners, such as law firms, independent claims adjusters, and body/repair shops. Should a claims adjuster’s extraordinary efficiency be celebrated or re-evaluated, if they investigate claims separated by a large distance on the same day? Should repairs be consolidated with a single repair shop? Are particular law firms seeing higher settlement rates?
  • A Product-360 gives you the ability to monitor how products are performing within the larger portfolio to provide both a granular and global perspective. With an accurate, timely view of product-centric claims and underwriting, how could you improve financial modeling and day-to-day management decisions? Are there external factor affecting product growth, such as a rise in unemployment leading to changes in BOP sales patterns?

Where Do You Go Next?

If you don’t yet have the ability to answer critical contextual questions for these different stakeholders with a unified data view, you can get started by planning which data to bring together and how to incorporate it into your business processes.
If you’ve already made progress on unifying your data, are you really at a point where you’re enjoying all of the benefits detailed above to their fullest extent?
Data fluency is a process, not an end state, and incorporating data driven insights into business processes and value added services is a continuous evolution. Accelerating that evolution is the key promise of unified data.
Read more on the power of the unified data view and a real-life example in the Summer 2022 edition of Pulse, published by PAMIC, the Pennsylvania Association of Mutual Insurance Companies.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

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