Knowing your customers’ health is good for business in the digital age

Business value from understanding your end-users’ health

The opportunity for a business to know more about its end-user has been a cornerstone of the digital economy and the driving force behind the rapid adoption of platform business models. With the possibility for business to gather real time insights about an end-user and influence end-user behavior comes the ability to personalize the entire user experience. This personalization of the user experience delivers increased customer satisfaction, more convenient and compelling offers for the end-user which lead to a combination of increased sales and increased profitability.

Simultaneously individuals are becoming more aware of and gaining insights into their health through the capture and storage of health-related information, use of wearables and new technologies that make previously intrusive and expensive medical in­struments easy to use and at much lower costs for users. This Quantified Self movement combined with tools to interpret and make the information actionable will be essential for businesses and service providers that wish to harness the most important human aspect of health into their customer journey and customer experience.

Business value from engaging your end-user in a journey of health

The opportunity to engage the end-user throughout their product and service life cycle has been an area of strong growth in marketing. The engagement offers the provider real time interactions, relevant and timely feedback on the product and services, as well as a manner to communicate with the end-user. When combined with a relevant purpose, such as health and wellness, the end-user appreciates and welcomes the engagement. Offering a genuinely supportive role in health and wellness, such as the dacadoo Health Engagement platform and the dacadoo Health Risk Quantification, will provide business with improved marketing effectiveness.

Discovery

In the digital age, end-users predominantly research goods and services through a series of internet searches, seeking recommendations from trusted sources, and reading materials or experimenting with the product, if available from the producer. For more complicated goods and services, such as those offered by insurers, this process can be very difficult for the customer, with little to no guidance or framing of expectations early in the process. Often in the process of buying Life & Health insurance there is very little personalization of the product done for the potential consumer. The impact of a customers’ health is not included in the framing of the product until much later. The ability to personalize the discovery phase of the customer journey is therefore of high importance.

Purchase

After a potential-customer has completed a satisfactory level of discovery they will engage in the purchase process. It is worth noting that many customer experiences are not fully digital. Efforts to digitize the customer journey are ongoing as customer’s preference for immediate response and convenience, and this expectation includes Life & Health insurance. A typical Life & Health insurance purchase process has the customer proceed through a long series of data gathering via a set of complex and very personal questions and the insurer would reserve the decision to present a product and the cost for the consumer until after all data is collected. Often this can take from 10-30 days. While this process may seem a reasonable expectation for the insurer, it has become far from the expectation of customers in the digital age.

Decision

In the insurance buying process, the decision is typically made by the product seller, based on the ability to offer the coverage for the risk being insured. Due to the high costs for an insurer to make a decision on risk classification and price for the consumer, the ability to generate even small improvements in closing ratios can have material improvements in the financial returns of the business. The ability to reduce the time an insurer spends to decide, reduce the cost of a decision, and opportunity to create personalized product offer to improve the buyers’ acceptance of the purchase, can all lead to improve business metrics.

Ongoing

The opportunity to engage customers throughout their life with the product has been one of the areas of strongest growth in marketing. This is an emerging concept with Life & Health insurance, though there are successful examples that have been in the market for over a decade such as Auto Insurance (good driving incentives), health insurance (quit smoking incentives). More recent examples of ongoing relationships with Life and Health insurance have generally focused on health, and health improvement as this creates a business model that improves the financial benefits of the insurer while simultaneously improving the lives of their customers.

Conclusion

There are many opportunities to improve the customer experience and simultaneously increase the business performance with the power of the dacadoo Health Risk Quantification and dacadoo Digital Health Engagement platform. Simply put, knowing your customers’ health is a powerful insight for any business to create improvements throughout the customer lifecycle, in particular Life & Health Insurance. To learn more about the power of the dacadoo products for your business reach out to a dacadoo representative by emailing sales@dacadoo.com.