How can Digital ID Management boost customer experience at insurance companies and banks?

Customer experience at online services of insurers and banks needs improvements

A look at the current state in the financial services industry reveals that many companies lack user-friendliness when it comes to Digital ID-related processes. For example, registrations for online banking accounts or insurance portals require manual processes: a postal letter needs to be sent to identify users and takes several days to arrive. After a Digital ID is created this way, it cannot be re-used to purchase further financial products or insurance policies online – another registration and identification is often required. Users must re-enter data, consequently many users do not complete processes and use the offline channels instead. This causes not only a poor customer experience but also high volumes of queries at customer services centers and costly manual processes for the company. This is especially painful when critical sales journeys, e.g., for life insurance, fail due to process inconsistencies.

Tech companies are way ahead – insurers and banks do not leverage the full potential

From a user perspective, the experience improves massively with the enablement of using digital identities across different touchpoints. Today large technology companies already offer their digital identities to users to access different services across devices. Google for example provides the Google ID to access Gmail, cloud-related services, the Playstore for downloading apps, and many more services – just one login is required to access the whole spectrum.

Effective Digital ID Management also enables companies to collect new and centralize existing customer data at a single point of truth. Customer data that was formerly located in different data bases becomes available on an organization-wide level and can be equipped with an appropriate consent management. For example, insurance companies that formerly had data silos for individual lines of business have now the opportunity of managing customer data across silos and save immense costs through data and system harmonization. With this, insurers and banks are able to be truly customer-centric and manage relationships across the whole organization whilst being compliant and cost efficient.

How to foster customer centricity leveraging Digital ID Management? 

In order to build a Digital ID Management that enables customer centricity three main steps should be followed:

1. Assess your customers’ digital needs and pain points. Design E2E digital user journeys based on design thinking approaches to gain a deep understanding.
2. Analyze your current Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution and assess whether customer-centric processes can be realized. In the majority of the cases a system exchange using third-party solutions is required.
3. Implement the customer-facing processes in an agile manner with a product owner representing the users on the project.

If you want to assess your current customer needs, your customer identity and access management (CIAM) system and related processes or assess the maturity of your agile organization to deliver customer-centric innovation, we offer the expertise to support you when it really matters.

The next article of this series focuses on how Digital ID Management can improve the flexibility of the IT systems landscape and potentially reduce costs significantly.

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