Gamification In The Insurance Industry - Improve Sales And Efficiency

Insurance as an industry has been considered uninteresting for far too long. With the kind of churn that the insurance industry is going through and the deep lack of interest by millennials in working in the insurance sector, the insurance industry has been pleading for a revamp, and how. Well, the times really are a-changing', and as a few early adopters have come to find out, some organizational changes are literally game-changers. How so? Welcome to the world of gamification.

What is Gamification?

Gamification involves adapting game-inspired elements to business tasks, which results in a bevy of emotions associated with playing games, coming into effect for participants. Companies are using gamification both internally and externally to give them the desired business outcomes while ensuring that the whole participant experience along the way is as much fun as playing a real game.

Did you know? Research suggests that playing video games can increase dopamine levels in the brain by up to 100%. The human brain rewards players by flushing dopamine when they do well in a video game.

So You’re Saying Insurance Can Be...Fun?

Absolutely! But there is logic to the magic. With gamification, insurers can transform mundane tasks and processes and make them exciting and fun to perform, leading to happy participants, including both employees and even customers. Stakeholder happiness is not the only outcome of gamification, and gamification can be used to elicit a variety of results in areas like behavioral changes, learning, and product education, enhanced productivity, increased sense of competitiveness, accomplishment, and social recognition.

For example, if you are in health insurance, a gamified customer-facing process would encourage those who have taken health insurance to keep ahead of their health goals and reward them for doing so with reduced premiums. The gamified process can take data from wearable devices to track progress and vital health metrics.

Gamification In Insurance Industry

Internally

One of the greatest complaints from agents in the insurance business is that daily tasks can be repetitive, boring, and unrewarding in nature. With this being the nature of the job, more and more agents fail to hit their yearly targets, and attrition levels rise through the roof. How can bringing in gamification help? Well, with gamification, internally, you can:

• Use leaderboards to increase competitiveness within a team.
• Use reward points to increase efficiency as well as increase a sense of accomplishment.
• Use badges to increase social bragging rights.
• Use performance graphs to help participants gauge their improvement.
• Give your employees a clear pathway to master their skills.

1. Gamification in Sales in the Insurance Industry

Have you ever thought of providing a sales comparison dashboard to sales team members and agents to help them become more competitive and motivated? How about an education program that functions on a learning platform with game-like features for your operations and sales team? Or even a game that rewards sales team members for on-time entry of sales data. Again, all are great ways to gamify the experience internally and get your employees to raise their performance - and early adopters in insurance have already started implementing them.

Insurance companies often have multiple processes on the agent side or claim processing side manually operated, for example, on Microsoft Excel or any other system. When you try to collate these points from various systems onto one manual incentive program, your feedback processes end up getting delayed significantly because the program is not designed to function seamlessly. This leads to delayed gratification for the end-user, whether it is your customer or internal stakeholders like agents, resulting in disengagement.

The solution? Digitize the processes involved and gamify them to a large extent. Here, you are better positioned to convey your goals and ideas much better and penetrate deeper into your audience, leaving people more motivated and engaged as they can associate your business goals with their behaviors.

Employee Onboarding and Training: There’s a lot that can be done via gamification to improve the entire Learning and Development process regarding training and onboarding new employees.

Agent & Sales Team Productivity: It’s great if your existing CRM has an incentivizing feature on it, but does it carry the transparency that it should? There’s no point if only you can view the incentive data. Your agents and sales team members need to know how much they are being incentivized and on the go and a gamified system can do that for you. This will increase competition and motivate them to do better based on their peers’ data.

Read More: 4 Steps to Building a Friendly Sales Competition (+ 4 Sales Contest Ideas)

2. Gamification for Sales Teams/Agents

Motivate your sales, channel partners, delivery, care, and gig workforce with these sales gamification ideas.

• Real-Time tracking of Sales information: Can the system nudge all the stakeholders involved every time a sale is made, so they know what’s going on in the organization in real-time.
• Leaderboards / Scorecards to create competition: This is a highly needed aspect for any gamification system. Leaderboards and scorecards increase engagement, competitiveness, and get sales employees and agents to perform better consistently over a period of time.
• Incentives for completing product education cycles: There may currently be no motivation for agents to educate customers on new products or allied products, but bring in rewards for doing the same, and everything changes.
• Incentives for efficiency: Have your team process and issue policies faster, or update customer data on systems quicker through gamification. Rewards for providing additional information for reports or for complying with new policies.
• Nudges: Nudge your team (literally) to perform better through notifications and real-time updates to align with their targets, which you have defined for them.

Gamify with Leaderboards, Contests, Badges, Milestones, and Rewards. Try Compass Today!

Externally

As mentioned before, gamification also works on external stakeholders - sales staff, customers, etc. Here are some ways insurance companies have gamified their approach to influence customer behavior to their benefit:

Examples of Gamification

1. Gamification in Automobile Insurance

Companies like AVIVA UK are employing a mobile app, called DashCam, to track and reward good driving. The app gauges the driver's driving skills, like braking style, how turns are taken, etc., over 200 miles to give the customer a rating. If the rating is good, customers are eligible for up to 28% on auto insurance. It’s a great example of using gamification to influence customer behavior.

2. Gamification in Health Insurance

While the adaptation of data from wearable devices to determine health insurance costs is not new, more health insurance companies are joining the wearable tech bandwagon. Insurance companies are looking to reward customers who are maintaining their health and fitness with discounts and penalize those who turn a blind eye to their health. In the US, for example, companies like Humana and John Hancock have already adopted this approach. They have reported that their participants have taken twice as many steps as the average American in ensuring lifestyle-related illnesses are kept at bay by adopting activities like biking, hiking, and walking.

3. Gamification in Auto, Home Insurance

Reward customers for staying loyal to you through a loyalty score. Use this loyalty score to create and offer loyalty-based value-added services, bundle products, and reward customers for referring family and friends.

4. Gamification in Property & Casualty Insurance, Life Insurance

You can use gamification to educate customers on the claims scenario in specific regions through comparison charts and dashboards. You can also rate customers on a scale to represent the extent of coverage, based on need analysis. Help identify the goals of a customer and help them reach that goal through different insurance schemes.

The insurance industry is fast-changing by adopting gamification technology and other areas like data analytics, rewards, etc. Most insurance companies have large workforces, and the one thing that’s important when it comes to managing a people-driven organization is that people have emotions. Leverage those emotions and allow your people to associate them seamlessly with your business goals to bring about the behavioral changes you need to take your organization to the next level. Even if you want to influence how your customers are reacting to your policies, gamification can be a great bet in guiding that behavior towards what your business outcomes require. Here’s to your business success!

Conclusion

Just keep these tips in mind if you’re planning to introduce gamification into your workplace. This can help facilitate a smoother transition from a traditional setup into a more dynamic and fun work environment within the office. With gamification and sales leaderboard software like Compass, you can fully reap the benefits of gamification and get better results in the process.

Turn your sales programs into games; with your own game-rules, challenges, and incentives. Try Compass, the Holistic Incentive Gamification Platform now. Want to know more? Book a demo now.

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