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“For insurers and distributors, there are great opportunities for growth and increased productivity thanks to digital solutions and new customer access points. We can help you realize them! Our approaches for success range from optimizing existing sales channels to building new channels and realigning sales support!”
Dr. Philipp Faber, Partner, zeb
Digitalization and changing customer needs are influencing the relationship between insurers and policyholders in a fundamental way. As a result, there will be new opportunities in customer contact, for example by promoting digital and hybrid advisory services. This applies to insurers, but also to competitors from other sectors. Traditional providers need to open up to these new ways. In addition, the broker market is also changing, with a tendency towards increasing consolidation. Overall, insurers need to acknowledge that market power is shifting further towards their customers and partners (e.g. pools and large brokers). They should therefore expand their sales interface and generate new customer contacts, sales channels and new partnerships.
Traditional insurers have large customer bases but often limited policy penetration because many of their customers have only one or few policies. Selling additional policies to existing customers is often difficult for traditional insurers. The declining number of insurance intermediaries due to regulatory requirements and the shortage of skilled workers, among other factors, does not make things any easier. To counteract this, the efficiency and productivity of the sales organization must be increased and existing cooperations expanded.
Digitalization and intensifying competition, combined with recruitment problems among insurance agents, are leading agencies to become more professional and act as larger units or teams. New digital tools and hybrid customer behavior present both challenges and opportunities for insurance agents.
Our approaches enable the agency of the future to successfully meet the challenges and, in doing so, increase the active selling time of insurance agents as well as the conversion rate. The result is a significant increase in sales success.
The customer journey to insurance products is increasingly taking place in the digital world. For example, 80% of customers now do their research online, and one in two customers has already taken out an insurance product online. Accordingly, the written premiums of the largest direct insurers (P&C) in Germany increased by around 8.5% per year from 2010 to 2020. The trend towards direct, digital sales of insurance products has been given a further boost by the coronavirus crisis. In the insurance sector, organic growth will no longer be possible without a well-organized direct sales unit in the future.
We know the market and have worked in partnership with our clients to implement a variety of digital sales solutions with impressive results.
The profitability of banks is coming under increasing pressure. Against this backdrop, banks need to counter the pressure on earnings by tapping new sources of revenue. One way out of this dilemma is to expand the insurance business. According to our analyses, the German bancassurance market has growth potential of 6% p.a. in terms of gross written premiums up to 2024e.
We know the best-practice examples and success factors for insurers and banks from the European market to achieve long-term growth in bancassurance. In various project settings, we have realigned bancassurance models for insurers along our “Bancassurance” framework and transformed and digitalized banks’ insurance distribution models.
Increasing the number of policies per customer is a huge lever for growth, a fact not lost on most insurance companies. However, they have trouble utilizing this knowledge: they need to rethink the way they advise and approach customers by offering innovative solutions and improving customer-centric communications in order to attract customers to new policies, retain them over the long term and ultimately increase their upselling and cross-selling rates.
We know the success factors and have assisted our clients in implementing solutions that ensure long-term success, e.g. direct sales centers and next best offers in brick-and-mortar and digital sales.
Insurers are facing the challenge of changing requirements of insurance agents for which current support models have not been designed. Insurers therefore need to react and take the changed requirements of these agents seriously, develop and consistently use digital tools, and set up insurance agency support both functionally and efficiently.
Based on insurance agent journeys, we have implemented modern sales organizations at our clients that are characterized by a clear division of various functions. For instance, focused hunting units are responsible for the development and expansion of business partners. Central farming units quickly and pragmatically resolve the agents’ issues.
