Talking about customer engagement is one thing, actually delivering it is another. A recent Forbes Insights study, “Engagement in the Age of the Customer: Using Technology to Build Relationships,” sponsored by Pitney Bowes, discusses two strategies: building a 360-degree view of the customer and—the focus of this blog post—interactive personalized videos.
For Florida-based Security First Insurance, offering a superior customer experience is essential to differentiate itself. The company is one of several small, privately held insurers operating in a crowded insurance marketplace with little perceived difference in the material makeup of its products—homeowners’ insurance policies.
A major source of customer frustration is when policy coverage is unclear. All too often the vagaries of a policy become clear only during the claims process, a time when customers are already suffering. Considering that policies often consist of 80-plus pages packed with legal jargon and murky terminology, it’s unsurprising to find that customers rarely read or understand their policies. “We’ve conducted focus groups over the last four years,” says Marissa Buckley, marketing vice president, “and consumers have told us, ‘I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than think about homeowners’ insurance,’” says Buckley.
Security First Insurance knew it had to do something to help its customers understand the important parts of their policies and clear up common misunderstandings, like the difference between water damage and flood protection—a vital distinction in a hurricane-prone state like Florida. So it turned to interactive personalized video.
Interactive personalized video allows brands to compile videos tailored on-the-fly to user specifics from a combination of pre-recorded content segments addressing, for example, frequently asked questions. Personalization is facilitated both by user input (the customer’s name, for example) and data from internal systems (products held, location, etc.) and external providers (such as demographics and regional news) to deliver specific and relevant information to the viewer.
Security First Insurance’s first video incorporated its own branding and the company’s friendly, relatable voice to quickly engage viewers. The video also provides a pathway to deeper engagement with Security First Insurance’s brand, via hyperlinks to its customer portal and blog.
The new homeowners’ policy video was launched in December 2013, and results have been very positive. Out of 52,000 videos, the open rate is 55%, with 76% of those viewers watching through to the four-minute mark—enough to cover the most important sections of a policy—and 43% watching all seven minutes to the end. Even more heartening is the customer feedback, putting into words the effect of a well-implemented customer engagement strategy: “I’m 70 years old and have never had such great service,” wrote one impressed customer.
Building on the success of the initial video, Security First Insurance has gone on to launch another aimed at condominium owners, and has plans to launch videos for renters and renewal policies next. “Video is the only thing that’s going to be able to get that block of [policy] text across in a world of people living with all these other things going on in their life,” says Buckley. “How do we get their attention? I think video plus relatability is the only way to do that.”
