When it comes to influencing customer behavior, gamification is one of the most powerful digital levers for insurance agents and insurers. It can transform an otherwise tedious task into a fun and an engaging process. With radical changes in customer expectations and low tolerance for long drawn out processes, what becomes the turning point for an insurance business is the experience it consistently delivers.
Challenges to an Ideal Insurance Experience
Gamification applies a game-design approach and various gaming mechanics and dynamics to a non-game application like insurance. It turns the related business processes such as customer acquisition, insurance purchase and claim settlement into a customer-centric framework. They are able to capture and sustain customer attention, gather critical customer data, propose attractive proposals, and conclude a successful engagement. Both the insurance carrier and the customer are thus able to realize an ideal, productive insurance experience.
Though gamification applications have been growing gradually, their acceptance is still sporadic in the industry. One of the biggest challenges with insurance products is the complexity of the products and their many variants. As a result, customers have to grapple with a number of competing alternatives seeking broker/agent help to clarify the confusion. One way to impress customers and successfully capture their business is through the experience offered. When the process of engagement is simplified and made into a compelling and even a fun activity, it directly builds customer loyalty that reflects in repeat purchases. When the insurance businesses leverage their customer understanding into more personalized products, customer loyalty gets further strengthened.
Typical Insurance Process with Gamification
In a typical insurance purchase process, the challenge to customers after they determine the appropriate product for the level of their risk is having an easy reference to historical data of similar customers for the same product. Gamification can collate and illustrate the larger customer data in a game format so that customers can quickly reach their final purchase decisions quickly. A common problem with insurance purchases that customers face is the risk of under/over insurance. Gamification can lay out the information clearly for the customers so that they always get the appropriate product at the lowest premium.
Business Benefits of Gamification
Beyond inducing new energy into insurance processes, customer engagement, and loyalty, gamification delivers a number of tangible business benefits to customers and the carriers:
- Better brand awareness, affinity, and product understanding
- Fine-tuned products that provide the right level insurance coverage
- Higher product sales
- Better motivation for people to act in areas such as financial planning and sustainability, safe driving, and health and wellness
- More effective marketing
- Ease of introducing new products
- Improved collaboration among the insurance partners
- Improved insurance underwriting and proposals
- Ability to impart more effective customer training
- Higher customer well-being and satisfaction
Gamification is Here to Stay
Getting involved in an accident or being affected by a health incident is never easy. But, a better-designed insurance process can ease the customer’s journey without further challenges. Gamified solutions can be effectively deployed for various insurance domains like risk management, customer service, product development etc. Gamification, when designed and implemented through a strategic plan, can be turned into a significant tool to help insurance carriers take their digital offerings to a new level and touch a new generation of digitally-immersed consumers. Using Gamification, consumers are likely to make well-informed choices while carriers improve their products to suit changing market needs. Gamification in insurance is here to stay but, needs more focus from the insurance carriers worldwide. It has immense potential to create lasting business value.
