On Digital Partnerships: Not yet offering insurance to your customers? You should be.

In September, we hosted a week-long conference in Singapore, following the launch of digital partnerships proposition, Zurich Edge. Bringing together key partners and our Zurich Edge ’digital squads’ from around the region, the conference was a fantastic opportunity to share insights and ideas on the latest trends in embedded insurance, innovation around the ‘one-stop-shop’ online ecosystem, and what it takes to build win-win partnerships.

At the core of the various discussions was a focus on how strong, strategic insurance partnerships and offerings can help businesses of different industries deliver on their specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Potential benefits may include acquiring new customers, improving customer and brand loyalty, and the opportunity to create new revenue streams. This may be achieved by offering protection products and value-added services along with insurance coverage to create a differentiating feature for online customers.¹

Building Value Driven Insurance Partnerships

As companies around the world have embraced digitization, the value that symbiotic partnerships and ecosystems play, in both driving growth and improving the end customer experience, has become evident. The earliest e-commerce and ridesharing companies, to use two examples, focused on a single product, service, or sector, to build large customer bases and powerful brands that allowed them to expand through partnerships. That evolution, from single product/industry offering, to a more broad-based portfolio of products and services, is a proven model for growth and a way to build toward the ‘one-stop-shop’ experience that customers are increasingly expecting from providers.

Whether you focus on travel services, digital banking, e-commerce, motor vehicles, telecommunications, or almost any product or service, there’s a role for insurance or protection options that the vast majority of your current (and potential) customers already buy or are open to buying when making a purchase on your platform. It’s likely that those customers just aren’t yet looking to buy that insurance from you. Collaborating with the right insurer to seamlessly integrate an insurance offering into your digital customer journey can potentially unlock opportunities in multiple ways.

One way to increase growth is to include a complementary insurance offering that supports your core product or service. For travel providers, it could include travel insurance; for telcos and tech resellers, it could include device insurance; and for digital banks, the options are extensive, including wealth-building products for consumers and comprehensive SME insurance packages. When properly integrated, the addition of insurance offers additional convenience to customers and can increase overall customer satisfaction, which helps attract new customers.

This type of partnership has been shown to be effective and highlights one approach how a flexible insurance partner can potentially augment your overall strategy for sizeable long-term growth by exploring new customer acquisition or new market entry, product differentiation, and customer retention opportunities as drivers for growth. Insurance partnerships are ideal for:

• Differentiating your offering through bundling²: In intensely competitive sectors, where customers may price shop, and/or have multiple channel options for purchase, bundling insurance with your products or services can differentiate your offering and ensure that customers have that convenient option which may lead to customer loyalty and brand preference.
• Offering Premium Memberships/Loyalty Programs: New revenue may be generated through the sale of premium memberships with insurance as an additional component of your overall package of membership benefits.
• Improving Conversion Ratios: Insurance partners with deep technical capabilities can integrate into your existing platform and co-create customer journeys with you, performing A/B testing on your site, and providing enhanced data and analytics on customer preferences and behaviour to improve your conversion ratios.
• Acquiring New Customers: Large global insurers have enormous installed bases of customers, that span all demographics, and partnerships can be potentially structured to leverage those customers. Your insurance partner may have particular access to, and expertise in serving, a market segment that you’ve identified as underserved for your product/service.
• Enhancing your partner ecosystem: Insurance partnerships can be designed to benefit both your company and some, or all, of your existing ecosystem partners through tie ups and promotions. Insurance programs can also be designed so that customers have the option to receive payouts in the form ecosystem partner vouchers, ensuring that future purchases remain within your ecosystem.

What to offer, when to offer, and how to offer an insurance product in your digital journey so that it drives growth, as opposed to alienating your customers, is dependent on the expertise of the insurance partner you choose.

Choosing the Right Insurance Partner for Growth

It’s important to choose an insurer that understands the KPIs for your business and is aligned with your vision for growth. Simply tacking an insurance option onto your existing offering, without careful consideration and planning, may result in disruption to your customer journey and lead to little or no new business.

The number one concern for most businesses, when evaluating potential digital partnerships, is the time, effort, and money it may take to integrate a partner into their systems. An ideal insurance partner will be tech-agnostic, have its own open architecture, full stack technology platforms that can be used to supplement yours, if required, and will have a history of creating the personalized customer experiences that both improve customer retention and attract new customers.

Your insurance partner should understand and value the time it has taken for you to acquire and develop your customer base. An ideal insurance partner should focus on your customer journey, not theirs. Choosing an insurance partner that can provide an end-to-end solution, from integration, to marketing, to claims processing and payment, if that is what you require, is important. It is important that your insurance partner has the flexibility and willingness to limit its interaction with your customers while providing secure, timely services, completely in the background, if your strategy is to lead with your brand for all offerings.

Lastly, an insurance partner with a broad portfolio or product suite, significant scale, and reputed, trusted brand in the insurance industry will have the subject expert knowledge and know how on curating or creating the personalized, relevant, and tailored products and services that will help to attract new customers.

Customers are becoming more savvy with service level standards so service providers should consider having more than a single core offering to extend that convenience to their customer base, especially as customers are becoming more comfortable with purchasing a variety of products and services from the companies and brands that they trust. Whether those customers realize it or not, digital partnerships are everywhere, for certain products and services, and play a critical role in their preferred providers’ ability to fulfil their needs and that’s not always true when it comes to insurance. A tremendous opportunity exists for most companies to drive growth by including a properly integrated, contextual insurance offering in their digital journeys.

To learn more about how an insurance partnership can help your business grow, contact us today. We'll work with you to understand your needs and develop a customized solution that meets them.

You can also learn more about our digital partnerships proposition and services delivered through Zurich Edge, here.

¹ Subject to the applicable legal and regulatory framework.
² Subject to the applicable legal and regulatory framework.