Achieving High Performance in Insurance Through Social Media

Insurers intent on achieving high performance need to understand the opportunities and threats that social media offer them. Accenture outlines the issues and recommends some actions.

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Social media have become a mainstream way to communicate. Increasingly, people are relying on trusted social networks to help them make purchases and other decisions. More than 80 percent of all adults on the Web engage with one to three social networks.

Social networks confer great power on their users. As of July 2009, 66 percent of brand touchpoints were generated by customers. In other words, insurers are no longer in control of the information that people gain or trust about their brands.

Social media create significant opportunities, threats and risks for insurers in five critical areas:

• Dramatically decrease in the cost of establishing a new brand
  
  
• A greater integration of sales, marketing and service—plus the need for new skills to support the proliferation of online and mobile touchpoints
  
  
• Innovative product development applications
  
  
• Increasing precision and improved economics in recruiting, onboarding, training and development
  
  
• Enhancements to the operating model

Based on its research and decades of experience in the insurance industry, Accenture believes that insurers must:

• Create an overall social media policy.
• Design processes and procedures.
• Design content templates.
• Create an ongoing monitoring capability.

Accenture has created a comprehensive set of capabilities and leading practices to help insurers through opportunities, threats and risks of social media. This Social Media Management Framework can help clients create or align a social media strategy that delivers real benefits and ultimately helps enable high performance.

Contact us to discuss how Accenture can help your insurance company create a social media strategy to achieve a competitive advantage.