Logic & Emotion direct CX Improvements

Nilesh Parmar, Chief Operating Officer, Future Generali India Life Insurance shares the importance of logical & emotional aspects in customer experience design:

Ravi

Ravi Lalwani: What aspects of CX design do you see as logical and what aspects are emotions?

Nilesh Parmar: Any CX design must balance the logical and emotional aspects. Customers are today looking for a personalized, customized experience irrespective of the channel of interaction. In our industry, the emotional aspects sometimes do matter more, given the nature of the product.

During the purchase journey, the customer is likely to use logic for identifying the need and hence the right product. However, whom to purchase from could be a mix of logic (brand, legacy, etc) and emotion (personal connection with the agent/distributor), as most insurance sales are still done through an intermediary. Postpurchase servicing requirements however will tend to be logical both from a company and customer point of view, except in the event of an unfortunate incident. This however poses a challenge since insurance is a low-touch product category and could result in loss of connection between the company and the customer leading to customer retention challenges.

Keeping this in mind, the CX design must ensure that we create simple, interactive, differentiated customer onboarding journeys which are intuitive with minimal friction. Self-service options (IVR, online portal, mobile app) can take care of customer needs logically, but to create an emotional connection with customers through the policy life cycle, the company needs to create avenues of continuous proactive engagement directly or through the distributor. This would require tools in the hand of the distributor to drive the engagement which prompts for action at appropriate times to connect with the customer at appropriate times (logical connection event leading to emotional connect/bond).

Our CX design, therefore, has 3 components: (i) Proactive customer lifetime engagement (ii) Differentiated service journey, and (iii) Differentiated value proposition.

Anything to do with the service journey (customer-led and company-led) can be termed as logical expectations, as these journey types are both prerequisite and sequential (eg policy issuance, renewal reminder, maturity pay out, etc). Proactive engagement converges with the emotional connection with the customers, these are things that the customer may not be logically expecting (eg proactive service connects, nominee connect programs, customer stories, birthday connect, etc).