With the insurance landscape ever evolving, it is becoming increasingly crucial for insurance companies to embrace innovative technological advancements that introduce convenience, enhance customer engagement, and redefine marketing strategies to stay competitive.
Africa’s population remains largely underserved by traditional insurance models, underscoring the urgent need for accessible, customer-centric solutions. This highlights an opportunity for insurers to serve this market with innovative tools and solutions that can meet the changing demands of African customers.
Delivering a strong insurance product is no longer sufficient; insurance companies must also focus on delivering a robust omnichannel customer experience. Modern customers expect instant, real-time, and personalised support experiences. They want to buy insurance easily, file a claim, access basic information, and have questions answered anytime and anywhere over their preferred communication channel.
However, it is not only about technology, the key is to also create connected customer experiences that are humanised. This should be at the heart of the digital transformation efforts of insurance companies, and this is where knowing who your customers are, their channel preferences and always being there for them becomes essential.
With the rise of digitalisation, insurance companies are exploring new ways to increase customer engagement, streamline processes, reduce costs, introduce convenience, and boost satisfaction, and one effective strategy is through conversational customer experience.
A conversational experience
To exceed customer expectations, insurance companies must implement new technology, practices and processes. A conversational customer experience ticks all the boxes and focuses on building long-term customer relationships that ultimately result in greater customer loyalty, improved brand image, and more revenue.
For example, conversational experiences use tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots and virtual assistants for conversations initiated via QR codes from advertising on social media pages or click to conversation promotional campaigns. This provides customers with instant and personalised two-way communication over WhatsApp.
By integrating conversational experiences, insurance companies can scale communication efforts and unify internal operations, allowing marketers, agents and chatbots to work together to deliver one customer experience.
AI, particularly Generative AI (GenAI), has democratised innovation, enabling businesses of all sizes to harness its power. GenAI-powered interactions hold tremendous promise for insurers to deliver an enhanced, differentiated customer experience, particularly with its advanced natural language capabilities to support customer service and enhance engagement and satisfaction.
While Africa’s aggregate insurance penetration is still very low, with a penetration rate of 2.78% in 2019 compared to the global average of 7.23%, the industry has leapfrogged traditional services to some extent. This was the result of harnessing digital technology and driving innovation to find unique solutions that suit the continent’s demographics.
Overcoming digitalisation challenges
Despite this, insurance companies in Africa face several challenges related to digitising processes and meeting customer expectations. For example, complex products and policies can make it difficult for agents to effectively communicate and explain the details of policies, leading to customer confusion and dissatisfaction.
Similarly, many insurers lack a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their customers or the tools to engage them effectively at key moments in their journey, thus limiting potential for maximising customer lifetime value. Some struggle to implement the right technology to meet rising customer expectations for quick, accessible and personalised communication.
These insurance companies can enhance their customer service and provide fast, accessible, and personalised support by leveraging AI technology. Introducing AI will open up the potential to make this more accessible and efficient.
By embracing technology and adopting digitalisation and omnichannel communications strategies, insurance companies on the continent can boost customer engagement, streamline processes, reduce costs, introduce convenience, and increase satisfaction. Finding the right omnichannel communications partner with a full stack of digital channels and conversational solutions is essential to effectively digitise customer communication.
About Infobip
Infobip is a global cloud communications platform that enables businesses to build connected experiences across all stages of the customer journey. Accessed through a single platform, Infobip’s omnichannel customised engagement, customer segmentation and profile management, user authentication and contact centre solutions help businesses and partners overcome the complexity of consumer communications to grow business and increase loyalty. With over a decade of industry experience, Infobip has expanded to 70+ offices globally. It offers natively built technology with the capacity to reach over seven billion mobile devices and ‘things’ in 6 continents connected to over 9,700+ connections of which 800+ are direct operator connections. Infobip was established in 2006 and is led by its co-founders, CEO Silvio Kutić, Roberto Kutić and Izabel Jelenić.
Recent award wins include:
- Infobip named number one among Established Leaders in RCS Business Messaging in Juniper Research’s RCS Business Messaging Competitor Leaderboard 2024 (Nov 2024)
• Infobip named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) 2024 for the second year running (June 2024)
• Infobip named to Fast Company’s Annual List of the World’s Most Innovative Companies (March 2024)
• Infobip named a leader in the CPaaS Leaderboard, Juniper Research (March 2024)
• Infobip ranked as number one Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider, in the inaugural MetriRank CPaaS Report from Metrigy (Dec 2023)
• Infobip named a leader in the CCaaS Leaderboard, Juniper Research (Dec 2023)
• Omdia Ranks Infobip as Leader for the second year running in its CPaaS Universe Report (Nov 2023)
• Infobip named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) 2023 (Sept 2023)
• Infobip named a leader in the Juniper Customer Data Platform Leaderboard Report (July 2023)
• Infobip named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) 2023 Vendor Assessment (May 2023)