Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business process with outcomes that optimize customer satisfaction, revenue and profitability by organizing around customer segmentation, fostering customer satisfying behaviors and implementing customer centric activities. Every time customers approach an office, they arrive with a set of expectations, which may be related to the existing services provided by the company or new needs. What happens next will determine their experience, which in turn will shape their future behavior. A good experience may increase their loyalty and tendency to deal with the insurance company again; while a poor experience may make them take their business to a competitor. The ability to recognize this phenomenon and actively manage it forms the basis of customer relationship management. The promise of customer relationship management is to build a customer-oriented strategy. CRM focuses on nurturing customer loyalty, thereby gaining market share, profitability and business growth. Several commercial CRM insurance packages are available which vary in their approach to CRM. However, as mentioned above, CRM is not just a technology, but rather a comprehensive customer-centric approach to an Organization’s philosophy in dealing with its customers. This includes policies and process, front-of-house customer service, employee training, marketing systems and information management. Hence it is important that any CRM implementation considerations stretch beyond technology, towards the broader organizational requirements.

Insurance companies can no longer view the customer from the perspective of specific products or a snapshot one-time transaction. To maximize lifetime profitability from valued customers, companies must move out from the traditional storage tower mindset. Technology, commoditization, deregulation and globalization have changed the face of insurance business forever. The traditional model of the personalized neighborhood insurance activity is outdated, and is now replaced by national and multinational service providers, backed by technology system and a proliferation of product choices. Insurance companies are realizing that they can no longer look at a customer from the perspective of a specific product or a limited time frame, but must visualize the entire long-term customer relationship to fully understand a client’s profitability. From a strategic standpoint, insurance company needs to reconsider their traditional focus on product lines. And so, it is time to adopt a comprehensive view of the customer as part of a continuum – not just individual transactions, but a lifetime relationship.