In the previous blog posts of this series, I mainly focused on drawing up an overview of how video is transforming the way banks interact with their customers. I would now like to expand the discussion to another adjacent segment of the financial services industry where identical trends can be observed: insurance.

Insurers face a very similar challenge to the one faced by bankers. Insurance branch traffic is declining as customers are more and more embracing digital technologies and insurers have fewer opportunities to physically meet them to build personal relationships or identify more comprehensive needs. Video is a way to overcome this challenge as it bridges the gap between online convenience and interpersonal connections with customers.

It also brings great value in the Insurance-specific process of assessing damages to process claims.

Did you ever have to wait for a few days or even weeks for an appointment to be set with an expert to assess water damage in your home? How did you feel when the expert showed up at 2pm while the appointment was scheduled at 11am and you had to wait at home most of your day on what was supposed to be a working day? These are some of the very frustrating experiences that claimants often have to go through. They are absolutely fundamental to address as it is very often during this particular touchpoint in the customer journey that customers make their mind about whether they want to remain with their insurance company. The claim experience is one of the key drivers of customer retention or churn.

Video expertise addresses these challenges in a very effective way. Claimants can show the adjusters the damages leveraging the high-quality camera that is now embedded in every smartphone or tablet. For insurers, this reduces the cost of sending experts on-site and associated travel time dramatically. Adjusters can manage more claims, more efficiently without leaving the office. For customers, setting up the appointment is much easier and dealing with the stress of missing work to meet the claims adjuster can be eliminated through real-time video engagement. Video claims management also reduces fraud. Adjusters see actual images of the damage and can request different views as necessary. This is a clear improvement over pure trust-based processes or where customers submit photos (which can be manipulated). Geolocation can further be leveraged to ensure that the claimant is at the expected location. If there is any doubt, the expert can also ask to see more of the claimant’s environment for additional control.

DEKRA Claims and Expertise, one of Vidyo’s customers, was one of the early adopters of video claims management. Today about 25% of all their claims are processed via video and the productivity of their loss adjusters increased from 6.5 to 11 appraisals per day. They also report a very significant increase in claimant satisfaction thanks to the higher convenience and faster claims resolution.

Vidyo and Efma recently conducted a market research that validates the high level of interest of insurers for video engagement technology for both use cases – sales and advisory services, and video-enabled expertise. Only a few insurers have already deployed either use case but over 70% intend to do it at some point in time. In the immediate term, insurers are clearly prioritizing the potential benefits of video claims management with nearly twice the number of active pilots as opposed to sales and advisory services. It’s very likely that video will fundamentally change the way insurance services are delivered in the years to come.

Genesys and Vidyo collaborate to ensure that video becomes an integral part of the omnichannel experience that insurance companies offer to their customers. Insurers using the VidyoEngage for Genesys solution can enable a contact center agent to seamlessly escalate an interaction with a customer (via mobile or web) to a high-quality Vidyo-based conference directly from the Genesys Agent Desktop. The agent sees the Vidyo call displayed in the familiar Genesys application and is able to easily manage the video interaction, while also maintaining Genesys routing and reporting on Vidyo-based interactions.

This wraps up our overview of the most common use cases of video customer engagement in the financial services industry. In the next and final installment of the series, we will detail the key considerations to successfully integrate Vidyo in a Genesys environment.

Stay tuned! Visit Vidyo’s listing on the AppFoundry marketplace to learn more.