Despite their best effort, insurers are losing touch with their customers because customers don’t have any reason to engage with their insurance provider until they need them. From our perspective, it’s time for insurance providers to rethink and redefine their relationship with their customers to stay relevant. Shifting their focus to preventive healthcare is an excellent opportunity to do so. Insurance companies become life companions by becoming health partners, nurturing a proactive, positive relationship rather than a reactive, transactional one. An opportunity to boost societal impact while differentiating the offering. 

In this blog series, we'll explore how insurance companies can successfully embrace the preventive healthcare revolution and the technologies that drive it. Let’s start by reviewing the current insurance landscape and the opportunities and challenges to successfully adopt this strategy.

No country for old insurances

Financial institutions like KBC and Belfius are going all in for an omnichannel strategy, merging their banking and insurance offerings and building super apps with more than 3.0+ million active daily users. But how often do you interact with your insurance provider? In addition, Fintech companies with a fully digital approach are challenging every aspect of insurance’s business. Let’s have a look at some of the strategies the competitors are adopting to challenge insurers.

The Super-app approach of KBC and Belfius together with intuitive user journeys has created a one-stop-shop for financial products that disrupt conventional insurance channels. Almost all the typical insurance products you need are only a few clicks away. Not only have they enhanced customer experience, but also they have driven down costs and created new cross-selling opportunities and competitive advantages (Data integration, etc). 

On the other hand, Fintech companies like Qover are disrupting the market by leveraging an embedded insurance approach that is fully digital, scalable, and API-based, which enables seamless integration at the right time within the customer journey. They don’t need to think at all about how to engage with the end customers, they just need to enable other businesses to sell their insurance products. Revolut, Qonto, ING,  Bunq, Monese, Fisker, Nio, Volta Trucks, and Niu are all leveraging Qover’s offerings, resulting in some 2.5 million individual coverage across 32 European countries.

And what about pure insurance providers? We all have seen how Alan disrupted the employee insurance market with a fully digital approach. What has enabled Alan’s success is the adoption of the right organisational structure and the latest digital product development methodologies, resulting in a superior digital customer experience that has seriously challenged the insurers’ traditional ones.

The competitors’ success shows the potential of a fully digital approach. However, insurers are still not harvesting the full potential of digital channels. Legacy infrastructure, legacy organisational structure and legacy approach should move towards digital channels. Old infrastructure holds them back from innovation. Their organisation structure is full of silos resulting in a lot of inefficiencies and internal politics. The organisation is still designed for the waterfall way of product development with no plans for multi-disciplinary teams that continuously improve and innovate based on customer feedback and agile product development to achieve a delightful UX. 

If this trend continues and insurance providers don’t find a way to differentiate their offerings and regain their customer engagement, they will lose touch completely with their customers, reducing to a commodity service provider or a behind-the-scenes actor with no direct relationship with the end customers. Insurers need to give more reasons to their customers to engage with them because their value and relevance for the customers is becoming more vague every day. 

It’s time for a change, and adopting a novel way of approaching customers, especially digitally, will be key. But that still does not address the main question: Why would customers want to engage? That's where the pivot to preventive healthcare comes in!

Preventive healthcare, a golden opportunity 

As humans become increasingly conscious about their physical and mental health, insurance companies have a unique opportunity to redefine their relationship with customers. This growing awareness allows insurers to create new touchpoints, significantly increasing engagement and fostering loyalty.

Offering comprehensive health and wellness programs (Fitness and Nutrition Coaching, Mental Health Support, etc) can help insurers become integral to their customers' daily lives. 

Luckily, insurers don't need to reinvent the wheel to build out those services digitally. Partners can help them integrate the latest technology. Amazing state-of-the-art AI is readily available. Cloud infrastructure allows for easy scaling and low-code solutions for launching early. We are living in a golden age of tech: increasing customer delight while lowering costs has never been easier.

However, there are some challenges in implementing digital services successfully. Insurers need to address the following:

• User adoption and engagement: Design intuitive platforms and clearly communicate benefits to overcome policyholders' concerns about adopting digital health tools.
• Personalisation and trust: Provide data-driven, personalised advice while using UX to build trust and manage expectations.
• Data integration, partnerships, and the privacy imperative: Ensure seamless data integration from diverse partners, uphold strong data security, and maintain regulatory compliance.

In conclusion, traditional insurance companies face existential threats because of digital competitors and the reactive nature of their business. A golden opportunity exists to pivot and become a preventive health partner. But this requires best-in-class digital channels, which require a different kind of organisation and expertise to build.

Whether you need a partner to reimagine your customer proposition or build it into a great digital experience, we're here to help.