What rising digital expectations means for your brand:
1. Your customers are comparing you to companies outside your industry – Online retailers and streaming media providers have set the bar high when it comes to the digital customer experience. Their services are used so widely that customers of all shapes and sizes now see that bar as the standard for all digital activity. In a recent Assurant survey, 83% of consumers agreed that best-in-class experiences raise their expectations for all companies across all industries. This means you’re being judged not just against your competitors but against all the companies your consumers do business with.2. The connected consumer expects a multi-touch customer experience – Today’s customers easily transition back and forth between phones, desktops, laptops, tablets, smart speakers and a variety of other devices – and they expect you to be able to support them wherever they are and whatever device they’re on. In addition to the protection products that support connected consumers, your customers need direct access to highly-trained experts that understand the ins and outs of consumer devices and their technical needs. The recently-opened Assurant Tech Center was created to be the premier support hub you offer your customers to help enhance their experience with your brand.
3. Ease of use wins business – Because a larger portion of interactions with a brand now take place in a digital versus a face-to-face environment, modern customers are less focused on brand loyalty than they are on experience and usability. To win and retain business, the digital experience needs to seamlessly connect to other forms of support from start to finish. Whether it’s managing protection policies, filing and tracking a claim, or interacting with customer service support personnel online, over the phone, or in person, the expectation is that the process is easy. Recognizing how important this is to driving your business, the Assurant team is laser-focused on making it easy for your customers to get the information and support they need from us – and it shows.
4. Data needs to help focus digital innovation where it has the greatest business impact – At Assurant, we combine thousands of research programs and more than a half a million surveys annually with ongoing tracking of customer behavior patterns. This library of insights is designed to help you inform strategic business investments and help us build the solutions you need to protect your business while gaining a competitive advantage. The result is that we’re able to use that data to develop new innovations that help drive your sales. For example, we were the first major extended service partner for used auto parts and accessories on the world’s largest auction site and the first to embed AppleCare services into carrier protection plans – digital innovations that were based directly on insights and feedback from you and your customers.
5. Infusing disruption into existing processes, expertise, products and services can help you advance business – Digital disruption is the new norm and impacting every industry. As a Fortune 500 company with multiple lines of business, we see digital disruption from every angle – and we like it. Being a mature business with deep expertise in our areas of focus allows us evaluate that disruption from different vantage points: How does it benefit you and your customers over the long term? Does it truly drive business and provide profitable impact to your bottom line? How can we infuse the right digital disruptions into the well-established, financial stable Assurant business model to combine the latest innovations with the expertise and reliability that Assurant is known for? The Assurant Growth Investing team is continually answering these questions when it comes to new opportunities to drive our industry forward. Recently, we’ve made significant investments in artificial intelligence and robotics companies that have the potential to help us develop new products and services that advance your business.
Read Next: The Rise of Consumer Expectations (Infographic)