Survey shows growing demand for customer analytics in Asia

According to the survey of senior IT professionals at brokers, insurers and reinsurers, many companies in the region are hoping to increasingly shape their businesses around customer insights. Tools such as customer relationship management software Salesforce and Google Analytics are allowing firms to start predicting buying behaviour, claims experience, product profitability and make business improvements.

John Brisco, chief information officer and chief operations officer at Manulife Asia, commented: "This [Salesforce] has enabled us to attain cutting-edge, real-time insights into customer/adviser usage patterns, marketing campaign effectiveness and social media traffic performance."

Although the uptake is slower, real time analytics, the cloud and mobile analytics are all creating opportunities for insurers to use data to benefit both their customer experiences and bottom lines. Wearable devices and social media are also making data which firms can act upon.

Brisco told Post: "Looking longer-term, the real excitement in our analytics strategy will be to provide personalised analytics that are accessible anywhere and anytime to our customer base across Asia."

As a result insurers are looking to recruit data scientists and technology experts in mobile and cloud related services although talent being particularly hard to find in Asia.

However more data means more risks. Privacy laws and cyber attacks mean firms need to carefully comply with data rules specific to each country and invest in security.

"In the past, data security has traditionally been an afterthought – now it needs to come first," says David Tam, chief information officer at Liberty Insurance Singapore. "We need to be sure that the cloud providers have strong security standards, but they are not all very transparent about the models they use."

The full findings and insights from the survey  available in a Post whitepaper in association with Equinix titled: The Future of Insurance Technology: Customer data and analytics available at our whitepaper resource www.insurancehound.co.uk.