How Asia’s latest insurtech unicorn bolttech is transforming the insurance industry by improving customer experience

As the financial services and insurance industry continues to transform for a digital future, we’re witnessing a significant paradox.

Despite most consumers being satisfied with the services they receive, around a quarter of people are looking to switch providers.

At a time when it’s easier than ever for customers to move who they bank with or buy insurance from, there is a major opportunity for providers to increase their share of wallet. Key to achieving this is delivering personalized and tailored experiences, with recent Qualtrics research revealing people are choosing providers that offer products, services, and support aligned with their changing preferences, behaviors, and attitudes.

The rapidly growing insurtech company bolttech is a great example of a provider capitalizing on this market opportunity by creating a customer-centric business. Earlier this year bolttech became Asia’s latest insurtech unicorn, and within 18 months of operation already serves 7.7 million customers across Asia, North America and Europe. Along the way, the company has transacted around $5 billion in premiums on the platform annually, providing a gateway to more than 5,000 products and over 150 insurance providers.

“The vision of bolttech is really quite simple — to connect people with more ways to protect the things they value,” said Ryan Mascarenhas, Chief Customer Officer at bolttech.

“In order to deliver this vision, we knew we had to rethink the way the insurance industry  traditionally approached customer experience. And that meant developing a greater awareness of our customer needs, making customer journeys easy to navigate and making products and pricing easier to understand.”

Identify and deliver against the attributes consumers value most

As an emerging insurance provider, bolttech had an advantage when it came to building its customer experience. Unlike an established provider, which would have to identify and address things that needed changing, bolttech could focus on the experience it wanted to create from day one.

“We knew we wanted our customer experience to be quick and easy and enabled by technology. By listening to the needs and wants of consumers in the market — using tools like Qualtrics CustomerXM — we were able to identify the attributes of a great Customer Experience. Enabled by insight into what people wanted, we could build our customer journeys to address these needs.” said Mascarenhas.

Through its research, bolttech developed rich insight into the geographical differences that existed among consumers in different countries. These insights delivered major value in building a tailored and scalable Customer Experience addressing people’s different needs.

While consumers were becoming more tech savvy, some markets were still struggling with digital penetration. This was both a challenge and a huge opportunity for bolttech.

“Beyond digital, having a product and service that is flexible enough to meet the customer at their maturity level is essential. It’s why bolttech adopted a hybrid channel strategy so that we can meet our customers on their preferred mode of interaction.” added Mascarenhas.

Keep an open mind

Through its CX program, bolttech quickly discovered the company needed to shift what it was focusing on to improve its products and services.

“Initially, our focus area was on things like making it easier for a customer to submit a claim. However, by listening to feedback we learnt what mattered most to customers was faster processes and for customer service to be more accessible. Guided by this insight, we were able to make scalable improvements benefitting the end-to-end customer journey, not just individual moments in the journey,” explained Mascarenhas.

Further value was found in its CX data by combining it with existing operational data, such as sales and retention. This allowed bolttech to understand the how and why behind customer behaviors, enabling the company to make targeted improvements to its CX that are proven to improve business outcomes.  

Drive accountability and action

The final strategy in creating a customer-centric organization at bolttech is making sure the entire organization can access and respond to feedback in real-time.

“With real-time access to customer feedback, our team can immediately close the loop with customers. For example, triggers in the Qualtrics platform automatically alert team members of negative feedback, which means we can respond to and address concerns in minutes. The tool empowers our front-line staff to fix and learn from a negative experience.

“We’ve been focused on embedding a customer-centric behavior across all levels of the organization. Having in place robust governance models allows us to continually create a customer-centric and data-driven company. Our focus on the customer is driven by our CEO and CX metrics are part of our enterprise scorecard.” explained Mascarenhas.

An experience transformation

While there’s no doubt digital is transforming the future of customer experience in the financial services industry, the results, and learnings from bolttech demonstrate that experience is key. Being able to offer omni-channel products and services is essential to respond to the varied needs of your customer base.

Central to this transformation is listening, understanding and acting on the needs of customers by designing new and improved experiences that meet their changing needs. Doing so will ensure strengthened relationships with existing customers by addressing their expectations — while attracting new customers with tailored products and services.

Related News