Capco’s 2023 survey of UK insurance policyholders highlighted that consumers are keen to embrace enhanced product personalisation – and are willing to share additional personal data to achieve that benefit. In fact, 28% of those surveyed, answered they would share additional personal data to get more personalised services.
We see four areas in the insurance space where hyper-personalisation can elevate the quality of customer interactions, experiences and journeys and help ensure good outcomes for consumers:
USER EXPERIENCE & INTERFACE CUSTOMISATION
The log-in area of an insurer’s website, or app, will see the highest level of customer traffic, yet the experience is essentially the same for all of them. In the world of digital design, time should be spent analysing and understanding the overall information architecture of a website, app, or digital portal identifying what information should be at what level, and where to incorporate specific actions.
However, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution that will deliver an optimal experience to each customer. So how can we use what we know about the customer to differentiate and enhance that experience for everyone?
Common actions. Drawing on past behaviour, spotlight the frequent common actions for each specific customer by giving them more presence on the website, app, or digital portal homepage.
Inclusive design. While the inclusivity of visual designs has come a long way in recent years, there is much more that can be done here to better fit individual customer needs – for example, a motion graphic that serves to prompt one customer may create a cognitive overload for another. Personalisation allows us to ensure our designs have a far more inclusive nature reflective the variety of customer needs, particularly useful for tailoring solutions to those customers with vulnerable characteristics.
Behaviour-based navigation. Every time a customer uses a website, app, or digital portal they are generating valuable data around particular choices, their dwell time, and other interactions. Artificial Intelligence can potentially allow a customer’s navigation options to be adjusted dynamically in the form of adaptive menus, predictive search, and dynamic content.
PROACTIVE FINANCIAL SUPPORT
Vulnerability is on the rise across the UK – a recent Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) study showing that nearly 50% of the adult population has characteristics of vulnerability, with the same report noting that 12.9m customers have a relatively low level of financial resilience. There is therefore a potential risk of potential vulnerability should there be, for example, a financial shock such as a significant reduction in, or complete loss of, periodic income.1
Identifying vulnerable customers and those with lower customer resilience. Typically identifying vulnerable customers depends on it being recognised by frontline staff during direct contact interactions or from notes taken by colleagues during previous customer contact interactions – often within the span of a call to a contact centre lasting several minutes or longer.
However, there are opportunities through voice and text recognition as well as apps and digital channels to combine available data to arrive at a far deeper understanding of a customer’s actual vulnerability. This also applies to financial resilience, allowing firms to get ahead of a customer’s deteriorating resilience and offer support – such as a contribution/premium holiday, or temporary cover pause – much earlier, alleviating some customer stress and therefore achieving a better customer support outcome.
Supporting vulnerable customers and those with lower financial resilience. Using more sophisticated and granular datasets allows for a more rounded understanding of a customer’s specific circumstances and personal challenges. The application of data science and analytics can ensure staff are being enabled to support customers more proactively to achieves better outcomes, a key imperative of the Consumer Duty regime.
This approach can also be used to tailor the digital experiences a customer receives, and the products offered to them, as well as the guides and other materials presented to customers as well as the appropriate formats for communications to take.
FINANCIAL EDUCATION & GOAL TRACKING
Personal finance remains a complex topic, however for customers, from early years into adulthood, the current UK education system makes very little accommodation for financial literacy, and even in adulthood, whilst advice options are readily available through intermediary and adviser networks, the costs associated with advice provision, can be perceived by customers as prohibitively expensive.
This does, however, present opportunities for firms, to either democratise access to advice, or provide access to lower cost informed choice options, for example, via model portfolios tailored to risk profiles of differing types of customer personas that a customer could relate to, or alternatively via more tailored, personalised and digitised robo-advice.
13% of customers surveyed did not have a clearly defined financial goal, and those that do are not turning to the financial firms they hold products with for support – only 39% say they seek support about those goals from a financial firm they have a product with.³
Customised financial learning and resources. Educational materials are typically communicated by firms as part of campaigns, for instance fraud awareness campaigns. While well received, it is a blunt tool that often focuses on just one (typically current) criminal tactic. There is much more that can be done to hyper-target a broader spectrum of advice and good practices, and to tailor and embed that guidance within existing customer experiences.
Interactive financial goals tracker. Many customers do not have a clear vision of their financial goals, which are often high level and ill-defined. Customers transition through many different life stages, have diverse domestic situations, and different levels of income, expenditure, and savings – whether short term (instant access), medium term (cash, equity based Individual Savings Accounts or fixed term accounts) or long term (retirement savings, such as personal or workplace pensions) – and protection, such as life or health Insurance.
Translating these personal circumstances into a clear and coherent set of short-, medium- and long-term goals, personalised to each customer’s own situation, will allow customers to clarify and progress towards their aspirations (from a savings perspective) and enable them to deal with unexpected life events (from a protection perspective).
PERSONALISED FINANCIAL INSIGHTS
Many customers now have multiple providers providing them with their day-to-day accounts, alongside other products like mortgages and personal loans, and then on top, there are pension, investments and protection products to consider.2 This has given rise to a proliferation in financial services apps supporting different aspects of a customer’s financial affairs, with a typically siloed view of a customer’s holding, often limited to holdings in that particular firm, or the firm’s wider group.
Though visibility is increasing thanks to Open Banking protocols, it is still early innings, with government-sponsored initiatives such as the Pensions Dashboard not due at the time of writing until October 2026, placing an onus on firms themselves in the short term to deliver greater visibility.
While some personal finance apps do offer budgeting tools, none have yet delivered a solution that spans the full spectrum of a customer’s financial commitments. Adoption and use of Open Banking protocols is starting to clear the way to provide personalised insights across a customer’s overall financial life, but there’s still some way to go on this journey.
Personalised financial health dashboards. By combining the data available through, for example, Open Banking and credit records, a consolidated view of a customer’s savings, investments and pension assets can be created that captures and illustrates how well prepared the customer is for their retirement and a consolidated view of their protection holdings will determine ability to successfully mitigate, or at least weather, an unforeseen life event or risk falling into vulnerability to due lack of adequate cover.
Dynamic content presentation. Information and options presented on digital platforms can be tailored based on individual customer data and behaviours. Through data analysis and personalisation algorithms, firms can customise content according to each customer’s unique needs. This adaptive interface highlights relevant services and provides real-time updates, enhancing user engagement and experience.
PRACTICAL STEPS TO ENHANCE HYPER-PERSONALISATION
Firms are advised to take five key steps to introduce and ramp up customer personalisation.
1. Create multidisciplinary teams – bring together Product, Design, Data and Technology experts to ideate collectively and rapidly on opportunities and relevant use cases.
2. Focus technology investment – the strategic infrastructure required can be daunting, but there are critical path routes to live on data and technology infrastructure than can fast-track and focus the required investments, planning for clear transitional states to allow an incremental release of value over time.
3. Focus on objectives – avoid personalisation for personalisation’s sake. Improving customers’ experiences, engagement and financial wellbeing will translate into stronger commercial results for firms.
4. Continuous learning models – instead of relying on rigid generic models, you should adopt Continuous Learning Models (CLMs) that acknowledge and accommodate the evolving nature of customers’ needs.
5. Be prepared to ideate and iterate – not all personalisation initiatives will be successful straight out the gate, and you need to be ready (with the support of senior management) to ideate further, test, build, learn and go again as necessary.
CONCLUSION
Hyper-personalisation represents a transformational shift in how insurers can interact with their customers. By harnessing the power of technology, data, and human-centric design, they can move past today’s one-size-fits-all digital experiences to a future where every interaction reflects and resonates with an individual customer’s needs and aspirations. It is about forging deeper and more meaningful connections, especially with vulnerable groups, for whom tailored experiences can mean the difference between financial exclusion and empowerment.
As with all modernisation journeys, the path to hyper-personalisation will present its challenges, from ensuring robust data privacy to ensuring the personalisation delivers on the outcomes required. Financial institutions must strike a delicate balance, ensuring that while technology drives personalisation, the human touch is not neglected.
Those institutions that put their customers at the heart of their digital transformations, truly understanding their unique stories and needs, will not only thrive but also set the gold standard for the future.
HOW CAN CAPCO HELP?
We can help you prioritise transformations that deliver first class customer experience. Consumer expectations around the quality of customer experience, including tailored services and personalised experiences, are higher than ever. At the time of reduced budgets and increased competition, new ways of reducing this gap are needed.
Capco’s Customer Experience propositions are purpose built to help you put your customers at the heart of what you do, bringing deep consumer insights, integrating channels to deliver a cohesive consumer experience, and delivering hyper-personalised experience that create memorable moments for your customers.
Our core propositions:
Service Transformation
Delivering exceptional customer outcomes and experiences through beautifully crafted services.
Hyper-Personalisation
Designing highly curated service experiences, treating customers as individuals.
Mental Models
Uncovering deep consumer insights that guide human-centric service design.
Communication Design
Enhancing transformation programs by putting people at the heart of change.
REFERENCES
1 https://www.fca.org.uk/data/financial-lives-2022-early-survey-insights-vulnerability-financial-resilience
2 https://www.ft.com/content/c814328c-2bc0-11e5-8613-e7aedbb7bdb7
3 https://financialservices.globaldata.com/Analysis/Analytics/consumer-financial-attitudes-analytics-2023
