Insurance Onboarding Made Easy for New Customers & Policyholders

What is Insurance Customer Onboarding?

Insurance customer onboarding is the process of welcoming new policyholders to your business. You’re setting expectations, explaining how your company works, collecting relevant information, and more. Customer onboarding takes place after marketing and sales – it happens when you have made a sale.

Statistics say that only 36.1% of customers have positive after-sales experiences with their insurance company. This shows that insurance companies have yet to adopt clear onboarding strategies to build valuable customer relationships.

There are many different types of insurance companies, but they will all share some common factors and requirements when it comes to customer onboarding. The US, China, and the UK have the largest insurance markets globally, with a mixture of domestic and international providers. The potential for improvement is huge.

Insurance can be as simple as a click-and-buy process for two-day travel insurance or as complex as the process of shopping for health insurance for life. Many different factors come into play and customers can easily end up feeling bemused. 

The Importance of a Smooth Client Insurance Onboarding Process

Everyone needs insurance, whether that be home insurance, car insurance, life insurance, or something else. Insurance companies must make dealing with them as pleasant as possible, especially during onboarding when they are making a first impression.  

Even though insurance is something that everyone needs, it’s provided by private companies, and the service can be variable. A great onboarding experience levels up your company, especially considering the increased competition in the market.

A good onboarding experience not only helps create a positive customer experience but perhaps helps you mitigate the risk of policy misuse. Customers may not be fully aware of the claims and policies when purchasing the policy. To ensure your customers are aware of the claims, you must educate them through online self-help tutorials (Knowledge base) during the onboarding.

Also read: 5 Key Steps for Seamless New Client Onboarding in Wealth Management

Reduce Policy and Procedure Misconception

Any contract can be complicated and hard to understand. Nothing’s different about insurance contracts, policies and procedures. If customers have misconceptions about what your policy can offer, this leads to dissatisfaction and even anger later down the line. You’ll save time later with fewer customers challenging their policies due to surprises.

Customers depend on your insurance policies, so you had better make them clear during the onboarding process without requiring customers to scroll through reams of unreadable text. Customers need to know exactly what they are signing up for – and what they’re not.

You can also use onboarding as an opportunity to collect all the relevant information from your customers. Standardized forms make data collection much easier, and digital tools can automatically flag problems.

Enhance Customer Retention

When you take the time to onboard customers, you increase the chances of retention. Customers feel more of a connection with your company, even if they aren’t dealing directly with an account manager. Onboarding creates memorable experiences for customers and shows your company cares, even if they are dealing with a digital system.

Rather than feeling trapped in your policy, customers come to trust your company. As you might know, customers are 50% more likely to stay with a company with an effective onboarding process. Start as you mean to go on with customer onboarding.

Remain Competitive in the Insurance Market

When you optimize the onboarding process, you help yourself stand out in the competitive insurance market. There’s always another provider that can offer the same package as you, but if you distinguish yourself through service, then customers will feel more satisfied and valued. Onboarding is your chance to deliver a superior level of service, even when other providers might seem to offer better quotes or policies.

Remaining competitive also means eliminating waste. Better onboarding increases the number of customers retained by your service, even post-marketing and sales. It’s hard to stand out with the dizzying array of policies and coverage, but customers who enjoy your onboarding will recommend you to their friends.

Operation Cost Reduction

Since you have fewer customers canceling and negate the need for an account manager to personally handle the customer, onboarding leads to cost reduction in the long term after implementation. You have lower customer dissatisfaction, so more customers stay with you and even upgrade to more valuable policies. They recommend your business to people they know, which means you spend less on acquisition.

Employing automation with onboarding tools such as a knowledge base is another way to save costs. The beauty of a digital onboarding process is that customers often appreciate it while it is also good for your bottom line. These savings can also be passed on to the customer.

Hides the Complexity from Customers

As we’ve already mentioned, the insurance business is incredibly complex. A well-designed onboarding process makes obtaining insurance as simple as possible for customers, even though your company may be working furiously behind the scenes to make it happen. Customers don’t need to know how much work it takes to draw up their policy in compliance with the law.

Translating the essentials of your policies during onboarding can help customers understand contracts. This avoids nasty surprises later. Customers won’t stay with your business if they feel like you’ve misled them in some way. They’ll look for a provider with more transparency. Customers don’t need to know about the inner workings of the business – only how you will help them.

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Also read: New Member Onboarding Process: Importance & Methods

Essential Customer Onboarding Process Checklist for Insurance

Many obstacles can get in the way of insurance companies providing a great onboarding process. Not least because of all the paperwork, due diligence, and boxes to check. It’s not easy to provide insurance. There are many rules and regulations.

Insurance companies can follow this broad checklist to build the best customer onboarding process.

Use a Digital Platform to Create the Welcome Kit

Sometimes, customers appreciate contact with an account manager or support agent, but you must provide the convenience of a digital platform. A tool like Document360 allows you to create a welcome kit with essential documents, policy details, and contact information.

69% of insurance customers begin their search online before ever scheduling an appointment. The journey also ends digitally for 25% of them, although most will want to speak to a live agent along the way. Since customer preferences are changing, insurance companies must keep up with digital tools.

Features of Document360 that insurance providers can use for digital onboarding:

• Analytics that tell you how customers are interacting with your content
• In-depth workflows for content collaborators to write and edit articles
• AI features that accelerate content creation and augment user search
• Highly appealing user-facing knowledge base to improve user experience

Since customers are so often digital-first, especially today’s millennials and Gen Z, onboarding knowledge bases can support them in the journey of buying an insurance policy from you.

Check out our video on Knowledge Base for Financial Institution

Provide Personalized Communication

Although automation and digitization are key to great customer onboarding, ensure the communication is personalized to connect with customers. 78% of insurance customers said they would respond to personalized communication.

Understanding your customers and their needs and preferences guides how you speak to them. Using customer personas helps with this process because conducting research stops you from guessing about who your customers are.

Although your policies will fall into broad categories, each customer is unique and requires a personalized onboarding process. Make sure your onboarding technology can accommodate various customer needs, and combine it with white glove onboarding.

Enable Customer Self Service Support

75% of customers purchasing insurance online reported problems. That’s why you need to provide self-service support for customers in this position. These can include educational materials, FAQs, and video tutorials. Self-service support reduces the risk of customers dropping out through frustration. You must anticipate their needs and map the customer journey.

This is where Document360 provides so much value. When you build a self-service knowledge base with our AI-powered tool, creating content is less of a headache. This means you can provide support to customers during onboarding with the minimum effort. If customers have common questions, they expect them to be answered with FAQs.

Renewal Reminder System

Satisfied customers are more likely to renew their policies – 80% more likely. But they won’t renew if you don’t remind them. When customers enter your onboarding process, ensure they are simultaneously enrolled in your renewal reminder system. When the time comes, their policy can be automatically renewed.

It’s in your customers’ best interests to be covered at all times, especially in an industry such as car insurance. If customers are used to dealing with your company digitally through an onboarding system, it’s one short step to online renewal. Customers happy with your service won’t need much persuading to continue with their policy.

Also Read: How to Create Effective Bank Policy and Procedure?

Insurance Onboarding Example

Lemonade

Lemonade is an insurance provider that offers a highly intuitive and pleasant onboarding process for users signing up for their policies. Digital-first but connected to humans, Lemonade appeals to a younger demographic as well as the ethically minded. Lemonade is B-corp certified, paying claims quickly and only taking a flat fee from their service. They donate the rest of their profits to good causes.