Audience identity resolution—the technology-enabled process of capturing and matching a diverse, growing list of attributes to identify the omnichannel customer behind multiple digital identities and deliver a singular, unified view of them—has undoubtedly become an essential capability for brands.

It is no surprise, then, that audience identity resolution has become key to a customer-centric industry such as Insurance. Indeed, its applications encompass everything from customer service and claim making to fraud detection and risk management

The challenge to identify for insurance brands

Despite their consistent focus on serving the customer’s unique needs, insurance brands have long faced the challenge of matching audience data across touchpoints. This challenge is only exacerbated by the proliferation of digital touchpoints as well as the multitude of systems employed by different distribution channels for policy processing and information storage.

Insurance brands, as a result, are hampered by serious data silos, preventing insurance brands from sharing the right insights across teams to seamlessly support and engage customers at any time and place. This also makes it difficult for the brand to recognize the multiple identities that the insured may present across policies and systems.

For example, George just purchased a bike insurance from Vision Insurance online, and he also happens to be covered by a health insurance policy where his father is the proposer. Here the insurance provider has details on George from both policies. The bike insurance was purchased online, whereas the health insurance was bought through an agent.

Without a unified customer data platform and sufficient audience identity resolution capabilities, George’s identity will be scattered across all these systems and touch points, requiring time-consuming manual efforts for consolidation, organization, and activation for relevant communications. This greatly increases the risks of incomplete insights, uncoordinated communications, and unprecise attribution.

Why it matters across the customer lifecycle

The ability to maintain a unified identity of the customer is especially important since multiple teams across the insurance brand will have to access the information for different purposes.

The customer service team may retrieve it when George contacts the call center for a service query; the operations team will rely on it to prevent duplicate entries; the claims investigators will utilize unified customer records to administer claims and assess possible frauds; the sales team will need to stay updated on not only who the prospects, leads, and customers are but what exactly their preferences are. And of course, the marketing team will find a unified customer view essential to the avoidance of irrelevant communication and the delivery of seamless omnichannel audience journeys.

When a customer reaches out to the call center, the customer service team is required to retrieve their policy information, past interaction history, claim history, channel of sourcing, and so on. With audience identity resolution and the right solution that delivers it, this process becomes instant and enables much more effective cross/upselling. When implemented at the point of sourcing, audience identity resolution also assists fraud detection by identifying customers that try to purchase or apply for multiple policies through digital numerous distribution channels.

Identifying the right insurance customer is about more than matching names. Introduced at the right channels and supported by a unified data foundation, audience identity resolution capabilities help prevent errors, maximize communication relevance, and help achieve holistic, highly personalized insurance customer experiences that optimize engagement, conversion, and retention.