By Alex Llorens, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Contentsquare
Consumers in Asia today expect seamless digital interactions with brands — not just when they’re shopping but also when they’re browsing for policies or managing their insurance online. The digital customer experience (CX) allows carriers to differentiate their offering in a crowded market and focus on nurturing meaningful relationships with their customers and driving retention.
Many carriers have responded by doubling down on self-service capabilities and automation, as they race to provide the slickest and most satisfying online experience possible.
And yet despite all the progress and innovation observed in the CX landscape, many businesses are still falling short of customer expectations, including in the insurance sector. The recent Contentsquare 2023 Financial Services Digital Experience Benchmark report reveals that one in three insurance website visits in 2022 caused frustration to users.
To raise the bar on CX excellence in the industry, here are four key considerations for insurance CX teams to improve the digital experience.
1. Pinpoint and eliminate friction from customer journeys
With user frustration a feature in over a third of insurance site sessions, insurance still needs to catch up to the banking sector, where one in four sessions are marred by some type of frustration.
While both sectors were equally impacted by slow page loads —the most prominent frustration factor — visitors to insurance sites recorded more frustrating behaviors than visitors to banking sites, including multiple field interactions (7%) and rage clicks (5.6%).
Long, complex forms and rigid digital journeys are often to blame for these types of obstacles, and unfortunately, both are fairly commonplace across industries.
Carriers need to up their game when it comes to detecting and rooting out frustration in their digital customer experiences. Using a speed analysis tool is an easy way to combat the most common and damaging form of frustration, while AI-enhanced error analysis tools can detect symptoms of poorly designed, counter-intuitive or broken experiences, so teams can eliminate friction along the customer journey as it occurs.
2. Optimise CX for all channels and devices
Contentsquare’s report shows that traffic to financial services sites is overwhelmingly organic (89.1%) and desktop-based (61.1%).
But mobile traffic is increasingly important: Paid mobile web traffic jumped +11.3% and 55.2% of new visitors to financial services sites were on mobile. And in Insurance, the percentage of desktop visitors who were new dropped from 38.6% in 2021 to 31.9% in 2022.
The complexity of traffic to insurance sites means that, while insurers certainly should be optimising their web experience for mobile (particularly for new visitors) they really have to optimise for every traffic source and channel.
Monitoring experiences via a digital experience analytics platform that enables segmented analysis will help carriers understand how different user groups behave on their site.
3. Encourage user activity to cut bounces and improve engagement
One of the most powerful metrics uncovered is user activity—the proportion of time per session users are clicking, scrolling, swiping and typing.
Compared to financial services sites with the lowest level of activity, financial services sites with the highest level of activity per session see -58% lower bounce rates and +41% deeper sessions (i.e. more pages viewed per session).
The most active page types on insurance sites are Category and search pages. This makes sense, given that customer acquisition remains the biggest focus of insurance sites. (With search being used to zero-in on products.)
With insurance carriers pivoting to a retention model, monitoring activity levels on ‘my account’ pages could be pivotal to gauging the success of customer retention strategies.
In any case, digital experience analytics can help insurance providers closely monitor activity levels throughout their customer journeys. Pages with high levels of activity are ripe for testing and content optimisation; pages with low activity levels could require more interactive options to encourage more engagement from visitors.
4. Track session consumption metrics to understand where to make changes
Visitors to insurance websites consume more content than visitors to banking sites—and, in fact, more than visitors to most sectors.
They spend more time per page than visitors to banking sites—on every major page type other than the homepage. (Spending the most time on product and category pages.)
Insurance sites also have a notably high scroll rate: 63.3%. That’s significantly higher than the scroll rate on banking sites (52.5%) and the average scroll rate across the 9 industries (50%). Critical content and calls to action should be placed as high up pages as possible.
Insurance products are complicated, and insurance sites tend to contain a density of detail, often below the fold.
It should also be noted that users spending longer on pages is a potentially ambiguous signal. It could indicate absorption and engagement in content—or confusion, hesitation, or boredom.
To truly stand out in this era of intense competition and economic uncertainty, insurance CX teams need to actively increase engagement and user activity, while reducing user frustration at every stage of the customer journey. Having the right digital analytics tool will offer the macro and micro view of that journey to understand what’s frustrating and engaging site visitors and how their frustration and engagement is impacting bottom lines.
