Invited by Hong Kong Baptist University to share the caption with students from Wenzhou-Kean University attending an Adobe Analytics training conducted by HKBU. It is an interesting international university cooperation to bring practical industrial knowledge to students. Wenzhou-Kean University (WZKU) (https://www.kean.edu/wku) is a teaching university in China offering US-based university education based on the curriculum from Kean University in the USA. All teachings are conducted in English and a large portion of their graduates would pursue further studies abroad, typically in the USA. The Computer Science Department of WZKU is championing a transformation that links academic teaching closer to the global market. Web analytics is considered a transborder skill that would equip students to excel globally. With this objective in mind, WZKU decided to adopt Adobe Analytics as the inaugural programme that teaches the best breed of industry tools in web analytics using hyper-realistic datasets. As part of the web analytics programme, practice leaders in the market were invited to share their use cases of Adobe Analytics and highlight the key metrics and KPIs that are relevant to their business domains.

I have been working in insurance for over 20 years but never in hardcore insurance functions, such as actuarial, claim, and underwriting, and I do not have any license to sell an insurance policy. However, with all the time in the industry in technology, marketing, and digital functions, I still know quite a bit about the insurance landscape in Asia and how we can measure customer journeys.

Insurance Industry In Asia

First, what is insurance? As Wikipedia says:

Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to protect against the risk of a contingent or uncertain loss.

It is a way to share and mitigate risk. The basic principle is multiple individuals pay premiums as a pool of funds, where insurance companies invest to grow the pool and compensate policyholders who experience loss per police.

There are many types of insurance and different approaches to categorise them but life and general (non-life) are commonly used in Asia.

Life covers the basic life insurance we know, compensating if someone passes away. But life insurance companies usually offer other types of human life-related products, such as

• medical/health which pays for hospital and other treatment expenses
• critical illness, a lump sum payment upon diagnosis for serious illness from a predefined list
• saving/investment/retirement, are less “life” specific and pay per contract term, in full or spread over years, usually still have a bit of “life” protection but very minimum

General insurances are usually less human life related to cover properties

• auto/home/pet to compensate if an accident happened to the protected subject
• travel protects if undesired events happen for a fixed period and when overseas, usually including emergency transportation back to the hometown
• some industrial specific we may not be aware of but are critical for those businesses, such as marine and aviation

Asia is big, so we have different scales of insurance companies which we can simply group into global, regional, and local. There is no strict definition. I just divided the world into three regions: APAC, EMEA, and America. Anyone who operates in more than one is global (such as Manulife, AXA, and Prudential), multiple markets in one region as regional (such as Fubon, and FWD), and those who are only in one market as local (such as FTLife, Income Insurance, and Kyobo Life).

Again, Asia is big. Different market has different levels of maturity, which are largely based on the economy and usually have a significant impact on doing business. Matured markets like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, and Korea. Emerging markets like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Infant markets like Cambodia and Myanmar.

It is not unique but insurance companies have complicated distribution channels to sell.

The most traditional channel is the agency which is still the most important channel for insurers in Asia. Part of the reason is that insurance policies are traditionally complicated and require someone to support the customer to purchase. Agents are not employees but usually sell insurance for a single insurance company and maintain the customer relationship. Brokers are not employees as well but they can sell products from multiple insurance companies and do less in maintaining customer relationships for the insurer.

There are direct sales channels for a long time, such as telesales via phone. The Internet opens up new channels where customers can buy directly from insurance companies, which usually some simpler products, such as medical and travel.

Partner is another important channel that insurers can tap into the customer base of another company to sell. Bank is the most common and usual partner as both banks and insurers are key members of the financial service industry. There are a lot of new types of businesses partnering with insurance companies, such as Cathay with Cigna and AIA with openrice, a restaurant recommendation website.

What The Internet Can Do For Insurance Companies

I may rephrase it to what the “digital” can do for insurance companies, where the internet is the foundation of the digital transformation in all lines of business nowadays.

There are a lot of things digital can do for insurance companies and here are a few examples:

• Customer experience is one of the key areas for digital transformation as customers are moving into the digital space to search and compare products, conduct research before purchasing and check for opinions and recommendations. The Internet also provides an easy way for customers to manage policies, submit claims, and other services with ease.
• Ways to sell are broadened. Insurance companies can now sell simple policies directly on their websites. The partnership is getting closer as well with direct data exchange with partners and a streamlined online purchase experience from the partner to the insurance company. There are also new emerging partners as mentioned earlier, those new Internet platforms usually have a lot of members.
• The self-service mentioned above is not only for customers to submit requests online but the digital enablement also goes into the Internal operations of insurance companies to provide straight-through processes that those processes usually take days or weeks in the past can be done in real-time and providing the underwriting or claim results immediately back to the customers.
• One of the key features of the digital age is full of data. There is a lot of data generated and collected by insurance companies to better understand their customers to no matter provide a better service, more personalized and suitable products, or mitigate risks such as fraud detection.

The last point is also about life insurance companies shifting from a death-and-pay business model to finance and health/wellness partners with increasing customer interactions and engagements.

Key Customer And Agent Journeys

At a very high level, the customer lifecycle for all businesses can be summarized into learn, buy, and service. Claim is a special type of service for insurance, and retention/advocation is important for insurance companies with a low purchase frequency.

With the Internet, customers can actively search for insurance products using search engines, social media, insurance companies’ websites, financial and news portals, and even online communities. They can perform some protection gap calculations as provided by insurance companies and finally submit contact information for an agent to reach out and discuss the potential purchase.

Purchase is the moment of truth and digitalized no matter if the customer is buying online directly or with an agent. There are product illustrations for the details on coverage, underwriting and finance assessment questions to fill in, personal identification, and payment information being streamlined for a better experience.

All insurance companies have portals or mobile apps to provide online self-service. Registration and login are so simple and important customer journeys as they are the entrance and will be experienced by all customers. It depends on the maturity of insurance companies on how many further services they are providing online. Policy enquiry is the most basic, contact information and payment changes perhaps are the next one, and fund allocation and loan request are more specific and depend on the availability of products.

As mentioned claim is a special type of service where customers are getting value for what they purchased. A smooth and streamlined online submission experience is expected by customers now. Claim status should be timely updated, available online and even with proactive notification to customers via email or text message.

Customers may leave by surrendering their policies, even if this happened, insurance companies should provide an easy and clear way for the customer to do so, with detailed information on what are the potential losses if surrendering the policies and also some other information in hopes to persuade the customer not to do so.

It is not only celebrities who can sell now. Customers can be advocates for brands if they find the brand is providing good products and services. Especially with the increasing engagement for insurance companies changing into wellness and financial partners, customers have more interactions with the insurance companies and some stories can be shared on social media on top of direct and simpler referral programs.

Agents are another type of customer and their journeys and experiences are critical to the success of an insurance company. Insurance companies recruit agents (yet they are not employees directly), provide training on products and how to sell, give tools to help agents conduct sales, and run activities to improve sales performance.

Recruit starts with lead generation as well, getting people interested in being an insurance agent, applications are mostly online and even interviews are conducted online. Suitable candidates will go through processes to onboard not only common HR particular but also mandatory training to obtain basic licenses to sell.

Insurance companies are promoting agents as professionals now which involves a lot of training, and some training/licenses are regulatory requirements to sell different types of products. There should be a clear training path for agents, an easy way to find what training they are required, to enrol for mandatory or optional training, and to conduct some virtual training online if possible.

Sales is the job of agents and many tools are required to help them to do the job well. To manage the list of contacts, prospects, and customers with a good understanding of what they have and what they need in insurance, to set up and manage sales appointments and record results/feedback, generate insurance proposals for discussion on what is the most suitable premium and coverage, and submission online with simple and guided procedure.

Sales is always a competition, no matter externally with other insurance companies or internally with different sales teams. There are always campaigns running where insurance companies collect leads to distribute to agents to follow up, competitions among teams with incentives to hit sales targets, and also scoreboards for team leaders and management to understand the sales performance.

Using Adobe Analytics To Track Journeys With Metrics

Tracking is capturing data as dimensions and events as metrics when the defined trigger happens to describe the user behaviour on digital properties. I always love to describe:

• Data are nouns
• Events are verbs

Sample sentence: a user clicked a button and downloaded a product brochure, where “click” and “download” are verbs to describe what events happened, and “button” and “product brochure” are nouns to describe the data of the event.

Using Adobe Analytics to track journeys has limitations by the number of custom dimensions and metrics we can use, and also the length of data to be stored in a dimension, that is 100 or 255 characters. The limitation is more severe in some other tools, like Google Analytics. The new Customer Journey Analytics removes those limits, but the underlying tracking requirements, principles, and design are still the same.

We want the tracking to be flexible, scalable, reusable, and at the same time, specific and descriptive. This is somehow contradictory. However, with Adobe Analytics, we can capture data in a granular with the potential to build dashboards to describe journeys in specific. It is a Lego block metaphor I love to use in that the data and event being collected are Lego blocks that are small, simple, standardized and can be repeated. But when putting different Lego blocks together differently and in meaningful ways, we can create different models.

So to capture data in fine granularity, we need to break customer journeys into detailed steps, identify similarities, and define reusable data/events to be collected. At a high level, it can be something like

• Basic traffic information, such as page name, server name, site section, page title, and campaign ID
• Contextual information, such as user ID, policy number, product name
• Critical UI interaction, such as hero banner click, button click, media playback, popup/drawer/error display
• Business transaction information, such as lead form submission, protection calculation, fund switch/allocation

With these fine data captured, we can use different Adobe Analytics tools and skills to rebuild the journeys

• Mix-and-match of dimensions and metrics
• Multiple-level dimensions breakdown
• Segmentation to include/exclude data
• Sequential flow of dimensions and metrics

Critical Success Factors (CSF) For Insurance Companies

Like other businesses, customer acquisition and conversion are a critical success factor for insurance companies, business is business. Insurers need to target appropriate customers with suitable products at scale so it can have a high chance for agents to close the sales.

Cross and up sales are utterly important for insurance due to the low purchase frequency. The cost to sell to an existing customer is always lower than acquiring a new customer and usually repurchases from existing customers generate a major part of the revenue of insurance companies.

Processes and procedures for insurance companies usually take time, with all the available technologies, there are lots of improvements that can be made for operation efficiency for an insurance company to remain competitive, who will buy from an insurer take weeks to process a claim instead of days.

As mentioned before, most insurance companies are already shifting from pay when bad things happen to wellness and financial partners. Moreover, with all the digital transformations happening now, the adoption of market changes, to respond to what customers need and expect is also important.

Finally, trust is the cornerstone of insurance. Customers have nothing on hand except the trust that insurance companies will compensate when in need. The transparency on how businesses operate, adherence to law and compliance, due diligence in all processes and procedures, and customer centricity are contributing to building trust for customers.