1. © 2015 NTT DATA, Inc.www.nttdata.com/americas
THINK SMART. ACT FAST. FLEX YOUR BUSINESS.
Fueling Growth in Insurance Through
Customer Centricity
Refined customer segmentation strategies powered through digitalization can increase
product density, improve retention rates, and accelerate new customer acquisition.
February 2015
Perspective
The Opportunity
Successful carriers are evolving their customer engagement
models to reinforce loyalty, nurture cross-selling
opportunities, and build brand ambassadors. As customer
engagement models put the customer at the center of the
business, the very nature of competition among carriers is
shifting from offering standardized products to delivering
products tailored to meet individual needs of policyholders.
By leveraging a core digital foundation and robust customer
segmentation, carriers can serve existing customers better
by identifying their behaviors, deepen product density by
developing innovative new products that are tailored to
specific customer needs, and understand buying habits to
target and bind new customers faster.
The Age of the Customer
Insurance buying behaviors are evolving as consumers
become more digitally empowered. With pervasively
connected devices like smartphones and tablets providing
According to Gartner, “By YE16, insurers leading in
digitalization will financially outperform slower digital
adopters by 100%.”1
Increasingly, the Internet of
Things is providing new sources of digital information,
turning what was actuarial into actual. This evolution
can further the transformation to customer centricity
for those carriers that are ready to support it.
easier access to online information, buyers are leveraging
non-traditional sources, such as search engines and
YouTube, to learn about carriers and products. Instead of
relying on traditional sales channels, prospective customers
are turning to social media and peer reviews to inform and
influence their insurance buying decisions.
As these sources grow in prominence and traditional
methods, such as advertising and insurance industry
literature, become less influential, we have entered the age of
the customer – an era when customers seek to define their
insurance experience and expect products to be tailored to
their unique needs and preferences. While at first glance this
trend may appear to be a threat to the insurance industry,
it actually presents a new growth opportunity for those
companies that can best respond to changing customer
buying behaviors and preferences.
1
Gartner, Inc. “Predicts 2015: Insurance CIOs Need to Balance Opportunities and Risks of Digitalization,” Weiss, Juergen et al, 19 November 2014
2
“Competitive Strategy in the Age of the Customer,” Forrester Research, Inc., 10 October 2013
We Have Entered The Age Of The CustomerAge of the Customer
According to Forrester, the only source of competitive advantage is the
one that can survive technology-fueled disruption – an obsession with
understanding, connecting with, and serving customers.2

2. NTT DATA Perspective:
Customer Centricity
© 2015 NTT DATA, Inc.
Aligning the Business with
Actionable Buyer Insight
Before carriers can harness growth from these new
buying patterns, they must develop the ability to segment
customers more distinctly and establish the customer-
centric operations to capitalize on new insights. That means
reorienting their processes, technology, and resources to
provide a more differentiated experience for each customer.
Finer segmentation is necessary to better identify, target,
and appeal to potential buyers based on their behaviors.
By overcoming traditional data silos, internally focused
business processes, and insular corporate cultures, insurers
can remove obstacles that will inhibit them from achieving a
customer-centric competitive edge.
Carriers can become more customer centric through four
interdependent levers:
»» Establish a Customer Segmentation Strategy. Moving
toward demographically refined,
behavior-based customer segmentation models
enables insurance companies to better tailor products
and services to customer needs and engagement
preferences.
»» Mine Policyholder and Household Data. Carriers
possess massive amounts of household data, primarily
accessible via event-driven views. This data can be
more thoroughly mined to identify the most profitable
policyholders and opportunities to increase product
penetration per household.
»» Apply Predictive Analytics. Robust analytics can help
carriers determine a customer’s propensity to buy
additional products at any given time, converting every
customer touchpoint into a potential opportunity.
»» Develop Customer-Focused Business Processes.
A customer-centric insurance company organizes its
processes to support a unified and seamless customer
experience across channels, with differentiation
provided by target segmentation.
Digital Business Turns What Was
Actuarial Into Actual
Digital Business – the use of technology as a primary driver
of innovation – is key to achieving customer centricity. As
noted by analysts, the insurers who lead in digitalization
and outperform their peers are using new digitized sources
of information to turn real-world behavior into actionable
insight. They’re looking far past the narrow scope of
mobile and web media, and harnessing the power of digital
information to become customer centric.
As you embrace customer centricity, you will discover that
technology is no longer simply a business enabler, but a
driver of innovation itself – spanning the virtual and physical
realms, creating new revenue opportunities and new
business models, and delivering greater value to customers.
This new approach – called Digital Business – operates
across applications, organizational structures, operating
platforms, devices, networks, data sources, business
entities, and physical locations, drawing resources as needed
to satisfy the user’s needs.
Establish a
Customer
Segmentation
Strategy
Mine Policyholder
and Household Data
Apply Predictive
Analytics
Develop
Customer-Focused
Business Processes
The customer-centric transformation is built around behavior-based customer
segmentation, better leverage of existing data, increased use of predictive
analytics, and the reorientation of business processes to align better with
customer needs and preferences.
The Path to Customer Centricity
2

3. NTT DATA Perspective:
Customer Centricity
© 2015 NTT DATA, Inc.
Aligning Organizations with
Customer Centricity
Once target business outcomes and desired buyer behaviors
are defined, NTT DATA works with organizations to develop
a roadmap that aligns defined business outcomes, such
as increasing quote-to-bind rates, with customer centricity
investments. The roadmap reflects a company’s business
goals, as defined by measurable business metrics, and the
particular obstacles it faces in achieving customer centricity.
Know Your Best Customers…
So You Can Find More Like Them
Achieving a granular level of insight about your
policyholders and prospects is key to driving
targeted growth:
»» Who are our best policyholders?
»» Where do we find more of them (demographic
data, social ecosystems)?
»» What buying patterns and engagement
characteristics do customers demonstrate? What
strategies are we using to exploit those patterns?
»» What up-sell/cross-sell/advocacy characteristics
do they demonstrate and we want to replicate?
While each organization’s solutions roadmap is unique, key
components of a roadmap typically include:
»» Data Framework: Combine external data from social
media, government, and aggregation sites (LinkedIn,
Facebook, Zillow, Trulia) with internal data to achieve a
360-degree view of the customer.
»» Technology: Create operational data stores, business
intelligence, and workflows, and enable customer-
centric/digitizalization strategies.
»» Integration: Unify customer experience and capabilities
across channels and devices to provide the mechanisms
for opportunistically presenting targeted customers with
the best-suited products.
»» Analytics: Bring customer segmentation strategies to
life, complementing them with capabilities to support
predictive analytics; dashboards; key performance
indicators; service level agreements; lifetime value
(LTV); recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) value; and
continuous optimization.
»» Tools: Provide support for marketing automation, social
listening, customer advocacy for prospecting, marketing
databases, engagement- and performance-based
media, and video marketing.
Driving Transformation via the Digital
Enterprise Framework
NTT DATA helps organizations better control the levers that
propel a company toward a mature customer-centric model
using our Digital Enterprise Framework. Regardless of your
starting point, the framework assists us in helping clients
quickly define the business outcomes that can drive your
transformation, quickly identify requirements, and measure
and improve business performance.
Digital Enterprise Framework
Define Business Outcome,
Identify Challenges
• Identify business
performance metrics that
anchor transformation
• Articulate business
challenge to be solved
• Understand desired impact
of customer centricity
• Assess current client
maturity and gaps
• Develop customer-centric
business transformation
strategy based on:
• Omni-channel
alignment
• Targeted segmentation
and predictive analytics
• Configurable product
and service delivery
• Identify gaps and define
requirements in technology,
organization, processes,
skills, and culture
• Define value and ROI
metrics
• Build holistic
transformation roadmap
• Migrate to
customer-centric
business model
• Launch omni-channel and
process transformation
• Establish flexible Digital
Business technology
foundation
• Manage value delivered
and organizational impacts
of change
• Measure and report
business performance
metrics
• Refine and adjust
operational design,
as appropriate
• Sustain operational benefits
through continuous
customer-centric
improvement
• Realize digital enterprise
transformation
Build Transformation
Strategy
Define Impacts,
Value, and Roadmap
Achieve
Customer Centricity
Realize
Business Outcome
The Digital Enterprise Framework helps us accelerate your transformation to customer centricity by enabling us to define and focus on the target business outcomes, to
understand the technology enablers and investment required, and to assess data and analytics needs that deliver on the customer segmentation strategy.
3

4. © 2015 NTT DATA, Inc.
2015_02-P-Customer_Centricity
www.nttdata.com/americas
THINK SMART. ACT FAST. FLEX YOUR BUSINESS.
About NTT DATA
NTT DATA is a leading IT services provider and global innovation partner with 75,000 professionals based in more than 40 countries.
NTT DATA emphasizes long-term commitment and combines global reach and local intimacy to provide premier professional
services, including consulting, application services, business process and IT outsourcing, and cloud-based solutions. We’re part
of NTT Group, one of the world’s largest technology services companies, generating more than $112 billion in annual revenues
and partner to 80% of the Fortune Global 100. Visit www.nttdata.com/americas to learn how our consultants, projects, managed
services, and outsourcing engagements deliver value for a wide range of businesses and government agencies.
NTT DATA Perspective:
Customer Centricity
4
Author Biography
Rob Golden leads the Financial Services Customer Centricity
Solutions group at NTT DATA. This group assists clients
in advancing measurable business outcomes by applying
customer-focused business practices across their sales
and servicing channels. Rob has worked extensively
throughout the financial services sector in both advisory
roles and industry leadership positions. He has been a
leader in the development of industry best practices for
channel optimization strategies and has collaborated with
analyst firms on solution papers concerning enterprise portal
solutions and trends.
Rob Golden
Senior Director
Financial Services and Insurance
Your Digital Business Partner
The pace of change in the insurance industry is accelerating,
and the requirements for future success are becoming
increasingly clear. As you embrace customer centricity
and the Digital Business revolution, NTT DATA is ready
today to help you turn your vision into action and achieve
measurable business growth. Benefits include: improved
targeting capabilities, marketing databases, and lead flows;
better targeted marketing strategies and alternatives and
increased net new lead volume; greater value through new
policyholders, premium growth, and LTV through better
targeting and engagement strategies; and increased velocity
of new customer acquisition.