Success for Insurers in the Emerging “Post-Digital” World Will Require Enhanced Customer Engagement Through Personalized, Real-Time Offerings, According to Accenture Report

The next big competitive advantage in insurance will be created by the ability to capitalize on “momentary markets,” or personalized policy and service offers tailored to customers’ unique life moments and delivered in real-time, according to a new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN).

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Five Key Trends from Accenture's Technology Vision for Insurance 2019 (Graphic: Business Wire)

The report, Technology Vision for Insurance 2019, notes that we’re entering a new “post-digital” era, where success is based on an organization’s ability to master artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technologies. The post-digital era doesn’t mean that digital is over, but rather, that it’s no longer a differentiating advantage — and now the price of admission.

As technology-driven interactions create an expanding technology identity for every consumer, insurers can tap into customers’ digital demographics to deliver hyper-personalized, on-demand services that meet customers’ specific needs, according to the report. More than four in five respondents (84%) who participated in the Technology Vision survey believe that digital demographics give their organizations a new way to identify market opportunities for unmet customer needs.

The report notes that while the average insurance customer engages with his or her insurer only once or twice a year, insurers are looking to increase engagement through real-time risk protection and mitigation services. Three in five insurers (60%) are already using technology to build products or services that boost the frequency and quality of customer engagement, with another 35% planning to so in the next year.

“There’s an opportunity for insurers to increase and improve their touchpoints with customers and forge a stronger, more personalized experience by harnessing customers’ digital footprints, but they’ll need to digitalize their core before they can reach these new heights,” said Daniele Presutti, who leads Accenture’s Insurance practice in Europe. “Most traditional insurers are behind the curve in this ‘post-digital’ world, with a heavy reliance on mainframe technology. This makes it difficult for them to explore opportunities in the cloud and technologies such as AI to transform their operations, accelerate time to market and improve security. It also makes them vulnerable to the early adopters of these technologies as well as the nimbler ‘post-digital’ upstarts.”