A couple of years back I attended a session on the insurance marketplace at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Barcelona in which a shocking statistic was raised – that by 2018 only 25 per cent of insurance companies will have a digital business strategy.
It’s shocking because today you need a digital strategy to effectively communicate with ‘Generation D’ (d for digital) as I call it, or better known as Millennials. The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2015 surveyed 7,800 millennials, from 29 countries, on effective leadership and how business operates and impacts society. Some revealing stats: An overwhelmingly percentage (75% to be exact) of millennials believe businesses are focused on their own agendas rather than helping to improve society. Another figure which caught me off-guard was that large global businesses have less appeal for millennials in developed markets (35%) compared to emerging markets (51%). One word: WOW – business is in trouble according to this survey…failure to get to grips quickly with the millennial world-view of business is a sure fire way to oblivion.
Let’s take the millennial mindset a step further shall we? What are some of the largest businesses globally – certainly, banks and insurance companies qualify in this category. One way for these businesses to ensure they demonstrate their commitment to improving society could easily be to highlight the company’s volunteer efforts such as HSBC’s involvement with Junior Achievement or AXA’s various scholarship programs. To effectively get out the message of corporate responsibility front and centre and not buried as a pdf deep within the corporate website – banks and insurance companies then must offer targeted, personalised communications across all currently available electronic as well as physical communications. To be millennial customer-centric, banks and insurers must be able to support real-time customer interactions in the increasing digital and mobile-app driven world, where millennials are equipped with the latest mobile devices and messaging apps, enabling them to exert greater influence in their interactions with banks and insurers. To do this effectively insurers and banks need to improve their legacy IT systems. This involves integrating back-end systems, integrating customer databases and undertaking real-time data analytics.
Banks and insurers who want to be profitable in the coming years as these millennials become the leaders of tomorrow can’t afford to be without a millennial customer-centric digital business strategy. Ideally it needs to be one that includes highlighting their volunteering, foundation, community efforts as part of their customer communications efforts.
Those in this sector who bury their head in the sand are in danger of heading in the direction of another ‘Generation D’ – as in dinosaur.
