Leading insurers across product lines are experiencing a shift in the expectations of their policyholders and agents. Digital disruptors outside of the insurance industry -- such as Uber, Google, Facebook -- have created user expectations of effortless omni-channel experiences no matter who users do business with. This has disrupted every industry, including insurance.

Policyholders, agents, and employees — particularly the increasing numbers of Millennials — are using a pragmatic approach when selecting which insurer they want to work with. The rise in expectations matched with a greater number of options will affect insurance companies across all lines including property and casualty, life and annuities, specialty and travel.

As a result, insurers need to adopt five strategic imperatives in order to stay competitive in the industry:

I. Dynamic omni-channel: Create seamless experiences via the policyholder’s preferred communication path across the journey of engagement, sale, service, and renewal.

II. Personalized service-at-scale: Allow agents to form cost-effective 1-to-1 relationships with policyholders, even as the agent’s book of business grows.

III. Collaborative engagement: Enable collaboration between employees and/or policyholders on service and sales opportunities through B2C and B2B communities. Many individuals are adopting a “mobile first” approach to this.

IV. Actionable insights: Provide actionable insights at key moments of truth at strategic engagement moments that could benefit the policyholder’s purchase or service experience within the context of his/her life. These insights include customer and household information, enriched with core system info.

V. Culture of Innovation & Agility: Create a culture of innovation and agility on platforms that allow rapid development of “sticky” apps, leveraging a common 360-degree view of policyholder