USAA, a San Antonio, Texas-based insurer and financial-services company that serves military personnel, has become a leader in customer-facing mobile capabilities because of its need to reach its clients when they are deployed. Today, mobile is USAA’s largest contact channel, reporting 590 million interactions during 2013. By contrast, its website logged 350m interactions and its voice-response system received 110m calls, according to Neff Hudson, the company’s emerging channels executive.
USAA aims to provide both high-tech and “high-touch” services, giving policyholders the option to talk to a person when desired while also providing digital pathways that make decision making easy. “That could take the form of text on screen, an avatar or a phone-call offer—the point is to offer help at the decision point and emulate the logical flow of the person making the decision,” Mr. Hudson explains.
Insurers need to provide customers with digital pathways that make decision making easy. “That could take the form of text on screen, an avatar or a phonecall offer—the point is to offer help at the decision point.”
Neff Hudson, emerging channels executive at USAA
The mobile aspect is particularly transformative. For instance, it fundamentally changes the relationship of driver to car and driver to insurer, Mr Hudson says. “Instead of the old paper policy that sat in the glove box, we can put the entire policy on your phone,” he says. “With a driver’s permission, USAA can use GPS to send a tow truck
The proliferation of mobile and other remote devices is rapidly reshaping the insurer-customer relationship, making it more personal and enabling insurers to be more useful to people in their day-to-day lives. “When we see the emergence of connected homes, Google rolling out driverless cars and mobile devices hitting scale, it suggests a very different future for insurance,” Mr. Hudson says. “In this emerging world, insurance will be about individual protection generally, rather than a policy for your car, house, etc.”
In the meantime, mobile is causing insurers to rethink their distribution and service models, according to Rick Roy, chief information officer (CIO) at CUNA Mutual Group, a North American provider of insurance and financial products to credit unions. “Even insurers who haven’t considered themselves direct-to-consumer in the past should engage the consumer directly, taking advantage of the fact that everybody has three devices,” he says. “In some cases, this is an incremental change, in others a transformation.”
CUNA Mutual has instituted a policy that prioritizes mobile functionality for both internal and external users. “This has meant a big change in our application-development approach” to use more agile methodologies that involve rapid prototype development, Mr. Roy says. CUNA recently launched a mobile service for customers and distributors called ZONE, an iPad-optimized app that enables financial advisors and credit union members to customize a “zone” of risk/ reward that aligns with investment goals and is associated with the company’s Members Zone annuity.
CUNA Mutual’s AskAuto mobile service supports the cross-sale of credit insurance and loans when credit-union members visit an auto dealer to purchase a vehicle. “Credit unions have generated over $1bn in loans, and we have been able to offer members credit-insurance options to protect their debt,” Mr Roy says.
The company has also implemented a bring your- own-device policy for its associates. “We still have corporate devices, but we allow employees choice,” he explains. “We want our employees using the same technology our customers are using, which helps us understand devices better and gives us ideas on opportunities to use mobile.”
Combined Insurance, a Chicago-based global provider of supplemental insurance, recently undertook a sales-enhancement program to increase adoption of mobile capabilities by its US agents and eliminate inefficient paper-based processes. “We selected the iPad as the mobile device to enhance agent productivity and provide for electronic submission of applications and other documentation,” says Seamus Fitzpatrick, the company’s senior vice-president for mobile sales technology integration. “Our goal was to boost sales by improving efficiencies of sales agents, field management and back-office operations.”
Now sales agents and marketing field personnel have electronic versions of sales presentation materials, up-to-date underwriting guidelines and other frequently used documents that they can use both online and offline. More than 200 agents are enrolled and active users, and the company has seen significant improvement in speed-of-business and policy-issue rates and more timely payments, according to Mr. Fitzpatrick.
Read on for More on Mobile:
The Changing Insurer-Agent Relationship
Can mobile expand insurers’ relationships with consumers?
With reporting from The Economist.