You've got a digital strategy and your customer base is strong - so where do you go from here? At this point, it may be time to develop a renewed roadmap for growth, and create your plan of attack for the future. In this panel discussion, learn from top execs what to do when the only way is up (hint: don’t look down).

• Developing stronger service based strategies and innovative products
• Using partnerships and alliances to advance growth
• Implementing emerging technologies such as AI, Machine Learning and cloud
• Developing a newly proactive and preventative approach

2020 brought about rapid transformation to the insurance industry, from dramatic shifts in consumer behavior to the virtualization of operations overnight. Join Microsoft, as we explore:

• Changing customer trends (behaviors, preferences, buying patterns, etc.) that are emerging to help insurers secure loyalty while managing costs.
• Review key statistics from a Microsoft Industry Survey that supports the trends.
• Components of building a Differentiated Policyholder Experience for Insurers (key technologies and strategies insurers should utilize to evolve their customer experience)
• Case Studies – Review of a few examples of where Microsoft has worked with insurers to evolve their customer experience

With rapid technological changes to the insurance ecosystem, newcomers disrupting the status quo, and an increasing amount of large players who have dominant share and awareness comes a new era of customer acquisition - and navigating it isn’t easy. Whether you're at a large carrier or small agency, being unable to get the attention of the right consumer in a saturated and short attention spanned market can seriously slow you down. In this panel discussion, you'll learn from insurers at the top of their digital game as they discuss what it takes to truly capture long-term, quality customers, compete in the marketplace and drive high speed on the road to 2030.

• Meeting customers where they are on the purchasing journey
• Quickly demonstrating value and provoking instant decisions
• Evolving pricing and underwriting as an acquisition tool
• Educating the consumer as a means of acquisition
• Determining where to spend your marketing dollars & acquiring customers at a reasonable cost for your company
• Using marketing data, web analytics and your CRM to decipher which campaigns led to lead to higher LTV customers
• Determining the right distribution channels & best Omni channel strategy for your org
• Taking advantage of multi-touch attribution and implementing a unified measurement platform
• Keeping brand messaging and experience consistent across all channel

Customer experience is the only thing that matters in a world of ever increasing competition and consumer expectations. Within the insurance industry, marketing technologists are being charged with leading the digital transformation efforts required to become a CX-centric organization . This is a challenge without a simple solution, but one that requires vision, investment, and follow-through from the entire organization. In this session, we will share a martech guide to help you wherever you may be on a direct-to-consumer journey.

You will learn:

What does modern insurance CX look like

What role martech plays, and why strategy is more important than technology

What will the biggest CX opportunities and challenges be in 2021 and beyond

How to build a future-proof CX foundation while delivering value today

• How are products evolving to meet changing customer needs?
• How must pricing and underwriting departments respond to these needs?
• What tools can insurers use to better identify, attract and retain the most profitable customers?
• How can dynamic pricing lead to increased profitability?
• How can you make your pricing more transparent? What are the benefits to the customer?

Meeting the ever evolving and increasing digital needs and expectations of today’s customer requires insurers to be able to pivot quickly and get to market even faster, while still focusing on cost savings, operational efficiency and business continuity. It takes strategic partnerships and a strong ecosystem for insurers to be able to provide a truly personalized digital customer experience. In this session, learn more about leveraging the power of digital ecosystems to accelerate your digital transformation.

·        In what ways can strategic partnerships provide speed to market and reduce risk?

·        How can you utilize a digital ecosystem to deliver quick wins and promote growth?

·        How can you develop partnerships that solve complex insurance use cases?

·        How do strong ecosystems help to promote innovation and growth?  

• What are the promises of tech investments across the insurance industry?
• How can agility and resilience of new tech be achieved?
• How can analytics and AI be applied in the most optimal way?
• What prevents insurers driving real value from tech investments? How can these obstacles be overcome?
• How can you begin to embrace the concept of ‘failing fast’ in order to quickly implement new tech?
• How can insurers scale new technology investments?

Onboarding directly impacts customer experience, servicing, and profits. At onboarding you’ll make a first impression that sets the tone for the remainder of your customer relationship. Welcome kits are often that first touchpoint, however, they’re often not particularly welcoming. Despite their friendly tone they can sometimes overwhelm and lead to more questions. Wouldn’t it be great if each welcome kit could be accompanied by an in-person, one-on-one onboarding session at the member’s request? Join this session to learn how the right technology like personalized interactive video can help:

·        Deliver a more personalized customer experience from day one to provide a better understanding of product/service value

·        Eliminate frustration, and build lasting, loyal customer relationships, more open to cross-sell and upsell opportunities

·        Replace one-way, paper-based onboarding with a digital experience that achieves measurable results

·        Differentiate your services from the competition

• How has Covid-19 changed the industry’s approach to innovation and change?
• Has the pandemic sparked new customer demands and needs?
• How do you realign business priorities with new customer needs?
• What challenges will arise from combining an office-based and remote workforce?
• How do you ensure innovation efforts don’t fall by the wayside when budgets are inevitably tightened in 2021?
• How can you measure the ROI of innovation?
• What are the ‘New Normal’ industry trends that you can predict for 2021?

Table One: Rowing the Boat: How IT and the Business Can Work Together to Change Customer Experience

Led by: David Antoline, Managing Director, Commercial, Levvel

Table Two: Getting Ahead of the Next “Storm” with CX

In this case storm can be any number of natural disasters, including pandemics, hurricanes, earthquakes, firestorms…Join this roundtable to discuss how to best be leveraging technology to:

·        How to offer a differentiated claims experience for the policy holder

·        How large insurance companies can compete with boutique firms’ customer service levels

·        Simplifying AI & Chat to immediately improve CX

Led By: Stacey Epstein, CMO, Freshworks  

 Set aside 45 minutes for yourself and join us for this workshop on de-stressing & being mindful in our new overwhelming work from home environment. Expect tips & ideas for how to keep a level head and take time for self-care. More details to follow shortly!

Specially designed for executives who have seen it all and are looking to shake things up, these sessions will be led by those in the industry who are thinking outside the box in order to figure out the future of digital transformation & CX within the insurance industry. 

Whether you’re at a large carrier that's been around for 200 years or a smaller, digital born InsureTech experiencing rapid change fatigue, there can be a huge resistance to actually committing to a culture of change, even though it's in the customer's best interest to do it. The expectation of being digital can be scary to some and exhausting to others, and the speed at which you're playing catch up can be faster than the speed at which things are changing. So how do you get people to adapt to the digital revolution when it may not be apparent where they fit - or on the flip side, when it may be too much all at once?

• Where do you start?
• How do you align business must-haves with project objectives
• How do you develop a long-term perspective that allows sustainability?
• What people and skills are needed?
• What steps can be taken to continuously energize the organization & combat change fatigue?

The global pandemic has left nearly every industry with a new landscape to interact with prospects and clients. Insurance is no exception. Increasing engagement is more important than ever—and the digital expectations have changed. Join us as we cover the critical touchpoints for every policy holder’s customer journey.

We'll cover how to:

•        Optimize online lead flow through client reviews

•        Increase communication in preferred customer channels

•        Nurture leads through messaging

•        Implement more opportunities for feedback

• What has been the impact of technology on CX during the pandemic and what does this tells us about our future?
• How do you harness this shifting landscape of digital transformation by investing in the technology you need?
• What are some practical cases of transforming your business with technology?
• How do you build the new technologies- do you build in-house, outsource work, or bring in startups?

Technology is impacting consumer preferences and companies have to move faster than ever to adopt new technology with a customer-centric mindset. But, customers also want personalization—In an increasingly online world with self-service on the rise, customers are still looking for a 1 to 1 relationship and a personal touch. They expect to see the information and products they want where they would expect to find them. Takeaways from this session include:

• Don’t forget that your customers aren’t just data points, they are humans
• While chatbots & automation might be easier & less expensive methods of contact, are they too impersonal?
• What might be the benefits of keeping some personal lines of communication open?
• How can we strike that balance between making something easy for the customer and ourselves while also making sure they feel heard and appreciated?
• How do you cultivate the element of empathy in a digital world?

You have a vision on becoming a digital first, customer-obsessed organization that wants to take CX to new heights - not just for your policyholders but also your agents and internal associates - all the way from underwriting to claims and more. Liferay and XTIVIA client West Bend Mutual did too.

In this session we'll look at the challenges West Bend faced and what they did to meet their goals. Key discussion point will include:

• The challenges faced in undertaking the digital modernization journey
• The strategy used to design a frictionless CX
• The key components of the West Bend CX and recommendations for any good CX

Financial behavior can be emotional and complex, and especially given the struggles of consumers during the pandemic, all facing an uncertain future, customers want to feel that their needs are understood. How can insurance companies stand out from the crowd and show their customers that they can be trusted? This session will look at different ways to make meaningful connections with your customers:

• How were you working to establish trust with your customers & business clients prior to the pandemic?
• How have you have attempted to help ease the stress of the pandemic for your customers over the past year?
• What does it mean to move away from transactions and towards meaningful engagement?
• Given data privacy attitudes and the regulatory landscape, how can insurers encourage consumer trust and handle data appropriately?
• How can you balance the Insurtech staples of transparency & streamlined customer experience with the traditional operations of your company in order to try to be the best of both worlds? 

• How strongly do you feel your institution and its workplace culture have promoted the importance of the role of women within the insurance industry, particularly women in leadership roles, over the past several years?
• Look at the number of new hires that interview at or enter your organization. How many of your candidates are women?
• Once hired, do women feel included in the culture of your company?
• Are they provided with the same mentorship and/or sponsorship opportunities afforded to men?
• Are they invited to compete on competitive bids and to work on highly visible, revenue generating projects?
• Are they offered roles within leadership or given the opportunity to explore these roles?
• Do women at your company support, share and promote the success of other women? Yourself included?
• Have you noticed a particular strain amongst your female employees with children during this pandemic, many of whom are now expected to juggle childcare, homeschooling & their careers?
• What have you done to try to ease this burden, if it is in fact something you’ve noticed?
• How are you planning to continue to promote diversity & inclusion for women within all levels, but particularly in leadership, at your institution going forward?

• How do you make your organization aware of how important a well-oiled data strategy is?
• How can insurers align the data agenda to wider business priorities?
•  What other obstacles stand in the way of your organization creating an incredibly strong data strategy?
• What does it mean to drive value from your data?
• How can customers be better served through enhanced data usage?
• How can insurers scale analytics across the business?
• From IoT to social media: what types of alternative data are most valuable to insurers?

AI is not just a buzzword anymore. Not only can chatbots and other AI helpers manage customer needs in real time, but AI can be useful in several other ways across the customer lifecycle within the insurance agency. Machine learning can drastically improve your approach to unstructured data and help uncover insights and patterns that can lead to faster business decisions and new products based on your customer’s behavior and feedback. Brands on the forefront of CX are putting data their data to work for them and using AI to help them design and deliver amazing experiences. Join this session to hear how:

·        How AI can help customers in real time through chat bots & other virtual helpers

-         Improve customer experience while at the same time addressing efficiency goals in the contact center

·        How machine learning can refine and improve your CX & Digital programs in real-time

-         Add intelligence to business processes such as Claims, Underwriting, and Operations

·        How digital execs & CX pros can connect and partner with your data and AI teams

·        How AI-driven insights can power your CX strategy and design decisions