What makes an insurance carrier stand out among the competition? What areas enable carriers to grow? Accenture believes customer centricity is a key to both areas for insurers and has a new research survey available to back up their views.

To achieve a better understanding of their customers, insurers need to invest heavily in predictive analytics, according to John Cusano, managing director of North American insurance practice for Accenture.

Nearly every insurer surveyed by Accenture listed investment in analytics as being either critical or important. Cusano maintains the value carriers place on analytics comes from a combination of better understanding of the data and improved technology.

"The technology allows for additional analytics to be available for carriers," he says. "More data is available and technology is making that data available."

A second point for consideration involves the ability of carriers to do things with that data in real-time fashion and serve up insight to users at the point of service.

"The online real-time nature of the [analytics'] systems allows for analytics to be used more frequently or readily at the point of sale of service," says Cusano.

Cusano believes investment in analytics is based on where the insurer is in their level of maturity.

"Some investments could be in areas such as customer files being put together or being able to get a common view of the customers across the different products an insurer would sell," he says. "Another area would be the ability to deliver that data to the point of sale and service. A number of insurers have the data but can't bring the insight directly to the service rep or the sales rep and need to build technology to deliver that data. Some folks are working on building technology to get the [telematics] data out of automobiles and deliver it to the underwriting process or back to the customers."

The maturity level Cusano mentioned also is related to the nature of the insurer: whether they are a direct distributor; an indirect distributor; or a captive-agent distributor.

"The indirect distributors tend to be more product focused and less customer focused because the end customer was managed by the independent agency channel," he says. "The direct model insurers need to deal with the customer face to face. In general, you see a different level of maturity depending on the distribution model of the company."

Cusano maintains there are a host of challenges facing insurers on the mobile front.

"Just keeping up with the fast pace of evolving mobile technology is point one," he says. "How does an insurer build a platform to enable mobile service, sales, and interaction that they don't have to keep changing?"

Security and data privacy issues have become a challenge in mobile, but another trend insurers are trying to digest is what social media means to them from both sales and service and brand perspectives.

"There are a host of new issues insurers never dealt with in the past that are driving investment and time in that area," says Cusano.

With the focus heading toward mobile, 13 percent of insurers interviewed by Accenture still showed no interest in the technology. Cusano believes one reason for this is some insurers are just missing the boat.

"Coming back to the different distribution models, there are certain insurers that are very product centric," he says. "If they are comfortable with that as their strategy, they might leave the mobile interaction to their agency sales force."

The survey shows significant increases—up to 45 percent for p&c insurers—in mobile technology.

Cusano believes there are two areas of investment for mobile: the front end and the back end.

"There is spending to actually deal with the new mobile technologies and then there is spending on back-end systems in order to support that need," he says. "Some of that back-end spending may be about serving up quotes and service and the way the back-end systems do that or to deal with things like auto data that is coming in. It involves both the actual mobile technology and tinkering with some of the older systems to enable the mobile technology."

Spending on the actual mobile technology is low, adds Cusano. But when carriers look at spending on analytics and back-end policy systems, adding customer-centricity capabilities that goes behind mobile movement, that's where you will begin to see a bigger piece of the spending pie.

"[Mobile] is becoming a bigger piece of the spending for insurers because it is now a major way they sell and service their products," he says.

Cusano explains that what strikes him is the gap between what customers expect and what the industry is delivering right now across the whole customer-centricity topic.

"It's a great opportunity for those that can meet those expectations sooner and better; and a great risk to those that don't [meet those expectations]," he says.

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