Unhappy insurance customers don’t stay customers for long. So what? You might ask. 

Customer retention is crucial for the financial health of your insurance business. Research from Bain & Company shows that retaining just 5% more customers can increase your profits by over 25%. 

Now, most insurance customers don’t get genuine joy from their insurance products. Safety, security, and comfort, yes. But joy… no, sorry. 

So, you need to increase satisfaction in other ways — like offering good customer service. 

Customer service is very important to today’s customers. According to a study of 2000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K., 86% of consumers have abandoned a brand they previously liked after two or three “bad customer service experiences.” 

Keep reading to find out how you can increase customer satisfaction by using an insurance self-service kiosk.

1. Self-Service Kiosk empowers the policyholders

It’s an understatement to say that customers don’t like feeling out of control of a service they pay for. They don’t like waiting on hold for an operator at a busy call center. They don’t like confusing and business nomenclature-heavy documents, and they hate losing vital insurance documents (especially when they need to make a claim!). 

What they do like is empowerment. 

In the field of customer service, “empowerment” refers to giving customers access to the resources and tools they need to make informed decisions and take action. 

For example, insurance customers like to be empowered with 24/7 access to their insurance policies and ePink™slips, and they like to be empowered to troubleshoot basic issues themselves. 

Self-service kiosks give customers these tools. Pathway’s Self-Service Kiosk empowers customers to do the following things:

• Download documents, policies, and proof of insurance papers
• Update their customer details (like when they move)
• Make payments with their credit card or via bank transfer
• Find local services (including gas stations, tow trucks, and locksmiths) via Pathway’s mobile app 

The kiosk is open 24/7, and customers can access it from their computer or smartphone.

2. There’s less room for error and inefficiencies

We’ve all had a bad experience with a brand because of a simple error that spiraled into a massive problem. Maybe, someone misspelled your name on an important document, or maybe you missed a signature. Either way, you likely had to speak to multiple people to fix it — costing everyone time they can’t get back. 

Using an insurance self-service kiosk lets you automate many of the tasks a person normally needs to perform manually. 

Automation will reduce errors that come from mistyping something, misreading something, or simply running out of time and rushing a task. Insurance automation is most useful in collecting data from forms, processing claims, sending insurance marketing content to customers, processing customer payments, and managing customer data. 

Additionally, automation (especially Robotic Process Automation (RPA)) is especially valuable in accounting. According to a study of roughly 150 finance departments, automation can save large departments 25,000 hours of “avoidable rework” that was caused by “human errors.” 

At a business strategy level, you need to use automation to stay level with the competition. 

Top insurance firms are succeeding with automation. In Insurance Business Mag’s Insurance Business webinar, presenters showed an example of a firm that increased “superior enterprise enablement” by 450%, “unplanned value gains” from efficiency by 150%, and overall efficiency by 150%.

This efficiency passes on to customers. Their claims are processed faster, mistakes are rarer, and they can reach customer service agents more easily. If customers can get better service elsewhere, they will. So, if you want to keep them long-term, offer a self-service kiosk and embrace insurance automation.

3. Self-Service Kiosk personalizes the customer experience

Every customer is unique, and they want to be treated as such. The days of referring to customers by number or addressing them with general “hello valued customer” style greetings are over. 

Today, research shows that 42% of U.K. and U.S. consumers find digital personalization to be either “very important” or “somewhat important.” 

Providing digital personalization is difficult and time-consuming without automation. That’s where a self-service kiosk comes in. When your clients log into your self-service kiosk, the system greets them by name. They can see their specific policy and information instantly. And they can view their payment history and next expected payment. 

Pathway’s self-service kiosk also pairs well with another of Pathway’s tools — Marketing Bot. You can use Marketing Bot to automate your email marketing and send essential communications like:

• Policy updates
• Seasonal greetings 
• Newsletters 
• Anniversary or birthday emails 
• Cross-selling emails 

Marketing Bot also allows you to segment your customers into lists. So, you can, for example, send one set of cross-selling emails to your boat insurance customers and another set of cross-selling emails to your business insurance customers. Both parties will appreciate not receiving emails designed for the other. 

Additionally, you can send trigger emails. These emails are sent after a lead or customer completes an action like receiving a quote but not purchasing a plan.

Marketing Bot provides an extra level of personalization, as it addresses people by name and helps you tailor your insurance marketing so customers only see things relevant to them.

4. Reduces the strain on your customer service team

If you ask anyone who’s worked in customer service, they’ll likely tell you that one of the things that make the job hard is handling a high volume of cases from customers quickly.

Customer service agents need to diagnose a complicated problem, think of a solution, and apply it thoroughly in the span of a single phone call. And, if they aren’t cheerful or don’t have the authority to take any action, customers get frustrated.

Now, you might say “hire more agents,” but this doesn’t always make customers happier. Some cases will always be hard (and sometimes impossible) to solve and will take multiple agents. Unless you have one agent per customer, you can’t eliminate wait times completely.

Instead, one way to boost customer satisfaction is to reduce the number of calls they need to make to your agents. Self-service kiosks can help with this.

Pathway’s Self-Service Kiosk has an inbuilt live chat tool that customers can use to reach their staff without a phone call. By drafting pre-written responses to common questions and using scripts agents can copy and paste from, your agents can answer customers within seconds. Agents can also handle multiple chats simultaneously with little effort.

You can also add resources to your self-service kiosk, including a FAQ section, video tutorials, and a knowledge base full of detailed information customers can turn to for help.

Additionally, self-service kiosks allow customers to complete many of the tasks they would normally call customer service for, including making payments or checking the details of a policy.

Both customers and customer service agents benefit from self-service kiosks — they’re an efficient way of meeting both of their needs.

5. Provides real-time feedback and analytics

To stay competitive in a data-driven world, you need to master your analytics and make decisions based on data.

According to a study on 728 companies, only 40% of top-of-their-field firms use gut feelings to make decisions, while a whopping 70% of “laggards” rely on gut feelings. 

But while data is extremely valuable, only some organizations have embraced it. Only 48% of companies value it for decision-making, 34% use it to “predict future trends and behavior,” and only 24% use it to generate revenue.

So, if you use data, you’ll stand out. 

Using a self-service kiosk gives you access to valuable data about your customers. For example, it:

• Helps you monitor what services people engage with. You can see which functions, features, and tools the majority of customers use. Then, when you want to upgrade your services, you’ll know which much-loved tools you should focus on to make an impact.
• Helps you identify which problems are most common. You can see what tasks people are trying to complete and, thus, spot common issues. 
• Helps you track payment information. You can identify trends in how customers pay (like the time of day, payment method, how quickly before the deadline, etc.) and which customers have overdue payments.
• Helps you understand your customers’ motivations. You can use this data to deliver services that are more aligned with what they want. 

As you can see this data in real-time, you can respond and make adjustments quickly — delivering a superior customer experience.

6. Increases value and revenue through upselling

When brands think of ways to boost revenue, they typically think of fresh and fun ways to market to new leads or target audiences. 

Often, however, one of the best ways to boost your revenue is by cross-selling and upselling your customers. Research shows that the probability of making another sale with an existing customer is 60 – 70%, compared to just 5 – 20% for a new customer. 

In case you aren’t familiar, cross-selling is when you sell customers a complimentary service, and upselling is when you sell them additional services for their policy. For example, selling a work car insurance policy to business insurance policyholders is cross-selling, while selling them on the next plan up is upselling. 

You can use self-service kiosks to upsell and cross-sell customers on things that will benefit them. Specifically, you can use the platform to show customers other offers and send customers notifications about exclusive deals. Pathway’s Self-Service Kiosk also works great alongside Marketing Bot.

In a similar vein, you can also use the self-service platform itself to sell your policies more effectively. Self-service kiosks provide a lot of extra value to customers, as they give them control, features, and fast customer service access. Whether you’re a small firm or an insurance marketing agency, advertising these benefits can make your offering stand out against competitors with outdated tools and old ideas.

7. Improves connectivity among devices

We use our phones for more purposes than ever before in 2022. And as of the fourth quarter of 2021, 54.4% of global website traffic came from mobile phones. 

Your customers expect to be able to manage their insurance from their mobile phones when it’s convenient for them. When you offer a self-service kiosk, you give them that functionality. Pathway’s Self-Service Kiosk comes with a mobile app that works on iOS and Android devices. 

Inside the app, your customers can make payments, file a claim, connect with customer service through live chat, download documents, and connect with local services. 

Anything your customers do in the app is logged in the cloud. So, any changes they make will be reflected in their account when they next log in to the kiosk via a computer.

Speaking of connectivity, self-service kiosks let you connect your insurance agency to other services you rely on daily. Pathway’s Self-Service Kiosk connects to QQCatalyst, NowCerts, HawkSoft, Acturis, PowerBroker, SIG, AMS360, and ePayPolicy (among other integrations). These integrations speed up your internal processes and help you provide customers with a more seamless insurance experience.

Use Pathway’s self-service kiosk today! 

Customer satisfaction is vital to the success of your business. Happy customers will renew their policies, leave positive reviews, and refer new customers. Unhappy customers will leave at their earliest convenience. 

Using an insurance self-service kiosk will boost customer satisfaction by:

• Empowering policyholders
• Reducing errors
• Increasing the value you provide 
• Providing you with analytics you can use to make your business better
• Improving cross-device connectivity 
• Personalizing the customer experience
• Freeing up customer service agents

And for a kiosk you can trust, try Pathway’s Self-Service Kiosk. We make it seamless for policyholders to make payments and get access to ePink™slips, policy summaries, and policy documents. Pathway comes well recommended — it’s used by agencies like Horton, AGR, Wayfarer, Morison Insurance, Cowan, Brokers Trust, and NFP. 

To see what the Self-Service Kiosk can do for you, book a demo with an insurance marketing expert from Pathway today.