“It’s important to meet consumers where their expectations are, and modern expectations have significantly changed,” Steve Johnson, CEO of insured.io said in an exclusive interview with PropertyCasualty360. “Insurance has, you know, notoriously been a little bit behind the eight ball when it comes to implementing technology. Auto insurance has been a little bit faster, but some other lines of business have been crazy slow, and it’s important to give consumers all of the things that they need in one place. It doesn’t have to be super flashy. It doesn’t have to be the most impressive thing ever, but it does have to have everything they need, and all of their channels have to interact and be synchronized and make sense together.”

Across all age groups, 81% reported having a strong preference for handling routine insurance tasks online (like making payments or checking policy information), with 74% preferring it for policy renewals. Half of those surveyed prefer submitting claims via digital platforms, and 55% prefer them for purchasing new insurance policies.

Nearly half of customers (48%) said they are interested in receiving notifications and information from their insurers – including things like personalized tips to prevent loss and other pertinent advice – which could open up another touchpoint for insurers not already utilizing these alerts.

“What’s important when you’re a carrier and you communicate with your insureds is all about relevance and personalization and making sure that the communication that you’re targeting them with is something that is important to them,” Johnson explained. “That’s things like notifying them about actual things that are happening with their policy.”

Johnson said that a survey done last year by insured.io that explored insurance retention showed that reminder texts from insurers about things like upcoming bills and impending coverage changes helped reduce cancellations by around 52%.

At what point, however, does communication from insurers become too much for customers?

“When you start dipping outside of personalization and you start advertising, or you start doing untargeted sales, that is where you’re going to start to lose customers,” Johnson said. “But if you’re a homeowner’s insurance carrier and you send out a notification to your insured that a weather event is happening, and here’s information that you need to do to prepare for that, and here’s our claims link and our claims phone number if anything happens – those kind of communications are super important to the customer experience and how they feel about you as a company, even though they may not have a tangible result out the other end, necessarily.”

Many customers expressed a willingness to jump ship from their current carrier if they found another that offered better claims updates. Nearly 60% of those surveyed said they would likely switch companies if they found out another insurer had an automated service that would tell them exactly where their claim is in the process and when it would be paid. Only 9% said they were “not very likely” or “not at all likely” to switch insurers for this feature.

Offering these updates, the survey report states, reduces customer anxiety and increases the amount of transparency between insurer and insured, which can drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

“Make sure that end-to-end, no matter what, that you are providing services that customers expect, and just letting people know what’s going on, I think, is a blanket statement for all of this,” Johnson said. “People seem to just care that they know what’s going on. That means, send them notifications, send them reminders, let them know how their claim is going; and when they log into the portal, make sure that the information that they see there is what’s going on and what’s current.”

Johnson predicts that the number of insureds who take an insurer’s digital offerings into consideration when purchasing policies will only continue to increase.

“As we move into the future,” he explained, “I foresee these numbers continuing to rise. If we did this survey yearly… I would expect that if we asked all of these questions again and again, it would continue to rise and rise and rise until 100% of respondents said that their mobile app or online portal was the most important thing.”