How End-to-End Visibility Can Drive Carrier Growth

One big challenge carriers face is the informational black box, the missing insights that obscure parts of the customer lifecycle, from marketing to policy administration to lapse rates and claims. 

In this article, we’ll break down the link between knowing and growing. More specifically, we’ll explore the business value of end-to-end visibility into the life insurance customer journey, and how Bestow’s unique tech and data infrastructure makes it possible.

How end-to-end visibility can drive growth

In the past, a life insurance application was submitted, and that moment of submission was frozen in time as the best representative data about a particular applicant and their policy. But what if you could thaw out that frozen moment and expound upon it? What if you could easily leverage pre-funnel data, underwriting data, and post-purchase information like lapse rates, claims, and lead sources to make incredibly fast product and strategy decisions?

Building this kind of data and technology infrastructure is no small feat, and it would represent a significant time and budget investment for any large carrier also trying to remain laser focused on what they do best. 

With Bestow, carriers can harness the power of end-to-end customer journey visibility to quickly respond to market feedback and, most importantly, reduce costs and grow revenue. Let’s take a look.   

Finding the right customers

The proliferation of data technology allows businesses not only to begin learning about prospects before they buy anything, but also to predict what they might want, need, or be most eligible for. Bestow’s data environment pools prospect details from a variety of sources, enriches them with available third-party data, builds audience profiles, and provides powerful tools designed to help turn those insights into real activations.

As you can imagine, this has tremendous potential to realize a number of efficiencies throughout the funnel, from targeting and retargeting through marketing activity to giving agents and distribution teams a leg up on finding the right products for the right customers.

All of this also translates into a more positive customer experience, as well. No agent or carrier wants to walk a customer through a cumbersome process that results in bad product fit, a likely lapse, or worse, a decline. Utilizing modern data technology and practices help reduce customer friction and carrier cost at the same time. 

Underwriting and everything after

Once the application is completed, carriers need to continue to track funnel performance. Of course we all know there’s a wealth of information to be gleaned from an application and from the underwriting process, but what if you had even greater visibility into how your business was performing?

That’s where the beauty of an “end-to-end” platform comes into play. Complete data visibility means that you can track an individual from the time they are a “lead,” to the point when they have bound a policy, all of the way until the policy terminates (for whatever reason). Tracking total performance of multiple channels throughout the entire customer lifecycle can be a game changer. 

As a real-life example, we recently reviewed data from a term product and found a cohort of customers from a specific source that was experiencing a much higher lapse rate than average, indicating that the product may not be the best fit for those customers. Armed with this insight, we were able to effectively and efficiently examine, analyze, and troubleshoot. This wouldn’t have been possible if we would have either looked at just the sales funnel or just examined the lapse experience — we needed to look at both together!

That’s the power of data and end-to-end visibility — it allows you to look holistically at the customer lifecycle, and then start that cycle anew armed with a market-informed, data-backed strategy to help make decisions about things like products, pricing, underwriting, marketing, and distribution. It’s the kind of fact-based market responsiveness that can help business lines refine, evolve, and ultimately grow both their customer base and revenue.