Insurance has always had a visibility problem. It’s one of the few products customers pay for regularly but rarely think about, until something goes wrong. For a long time, that didn’t really worry the industry. The expectation was simple: be there when the customer needs you.
What’s changed is not the product, but the context around it.
Today, the same customer who can track a food order down to the last mile or get instant updates from their bank doesn’t switch off those expectations when it comes to insurance. They may still not want to “engage” with insurance in the traditional sense, but they do expect it to be easier, clearer, and more responsive when it matters.
That shift is subtle, but it’s important.
Where The Old Approach Starts to Fall Short
If you look at how most insurance journeys are designed, they still revolve around two key moments, i.e. purchase and claim. Everything else sits in the background. From an operational standpoint, this made sense. It kept things efficient. But from a customer’s point of view, it often meant long stretches of silence. And that silence creates small gaps. Not always visible, but they show up at the wrong time.
For instance, a customer trying to locate their policy document during a hospital admission. Someone unsure whether a particular situation is covered. Or simply not knowing whom to reach out to when something goes wrong. None of these are major failures. But put together, they shape the overall experience.
The Gap isn’t Technology. It’s How We Use it!
We often talk about digital platforms as if their job is to increase interaction. In reality, more interaction doesn’t always mean better engagement. Most customers don’t want more messages. They want fewer, but more useful ones.
We’ve seen this in simple ways. When a motor customer gets a timely alert during heavy rains—not a promotional message, but something practical like a reminder around waterlogging risks—it tends to get noticed. Not because it’s sophisticated, but because it’s relevant at that moment. Similarly, in travel, a disruption update along with a quick pointer on how the policy can help is far more useful than a generic notification about “coverage benefits.”
These are small things. They don’t dramatically change the product. But they do change how the product shows up in a customer’s life.
Rethinking What “Engagement” Actually Means
There’s a tendency to think of engagement as something we drive through campaigns, nudges, reminders. But in insurance, that approach has limits.
Engagement, in this space, is more often a by-product of clarity and usefulness.
If a customer understands what they’ve bought, can access it easily, and knows what to expect in a moment of need, they are already more engaged than someone receiving multiple notifications but still feeling unsure.
In practice, this means getting a few basics right:
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Explaining coverage in a way that doesn’t require interpretation, keeping things direct and transparent
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Making documents and policy details easy to access without friction
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Giving customers a clear sense of what happens during a claim, before they are in that situation. Moment of truth needs better engagement than any other stage.
None of this is particularly complex. But it is often overlooked.
Why Claims Experience Still Defines Everything
No matter how much we improve the front-end journey, the claim is still the moment that defines trust. Speed is important, of course. But what we’ve seen is that uncertainty tends to create more anxiety than delay.
A customer who knows where their claim stands, what is pending, and why something is required is far more at ease—even if the process takes time—compared to someone who is left guessing. This is where digital can make a real difference. Not just by automating steps, but by making the process more visible. Sometimes, it’s as simple as reducing the need for repeated document submissions or giving a clear status update at each stage. These aren’t headline features, but they matter a lot at that moment.
Insurance is Slowly Becoming Part of a Larger Journey
Another shift that’s easy to miss is how insurance is showing up in other ecosystems. You see it when someone buys a car and insurance is part of the same flow. Or when travel cover is offered at the point of booking. Increasingly, insurance is not a separate decision—it’s becoming embedded.
For customers, this reduces effort. But it also changes expectations. The experience has to match the rest of that journey. Any friction stands out immediately. This is where the role of technology becomes less about adding features and more about staying connected and being able to plug into different ecosystems without making the experience feel disjointed.
The Less Visible Challenge: What Sits Underneath
A lot of what we want to do on the experience side depends on systems that customers never see. Legacy platforms, which many insurers still rely on, were designed for stability, not flexibility. They do their job well, but they make real-time interactions or quick changes harder to implement. So, while the conversation often focuses on apps or interfaces, the bigger effort is usually behind the scenes—modernising systems, enabling better data flow, and making integrations easier. It’s not the most visible part of transformation, but it’s the one that determines how far you can go.
Measuring What Actually Matters
Another shift that’s slowly happening is in how we define success.
For a long time, the focus has been on issuance numbers, growth, and distribution reach. Those will always matter. But they don’t fully capture how customers experience insurance. Things like how often customers access their policy, how smoothly claims are handled, or whether they choose to stay with the same insurer—these are becoming equally important signals.
They’re harder to measure neatly. But they’re closer to the reality of what customers value.
Where This is Really Heading
Insurance doesn’t need to become something customers think about every day. That’s not the goal. But it does need to become easier to deal with. Easier to understand. Easier to trust.
The shift from transactions to relationships is not about increasing touchpoints. It’s about improving the quality of the few moments that actually matter. If we get those moments right—when a customer is buying a policy, trying to understand it, or relying on it during a claim—the relationship builds on its own. And in many ways, that’s what digital platforms should enable. Not more noise, but better experiences where it counts.
