In a conversation with Policy, Migdal Deputy CEO Tami Ohana Kol says the insurance companies are nowadays sitting on a goldmine called data – it is possible to extract many understandings from it – for example prior identification of abandonment, enabling forecasting and taking preventive customer preservation action in advance
The involvement with technology can be compared a permanent chase after progress, and the chase after the newest innovation is unending. It sometimes appears that all of the discussion about the technological challenges in the sector ignores the people making use of the technology. With Migdal Deputy CEO and technology division manager Tami Ohana Kol, the impression is that the opposite is the case. The most frequent word coming up in the conversation with her is “the customer”, with all of its derivatives – “the world of the customer”, “the customer journey”, “the customer’s desires”, and “patterns of behavior of the customer”.
According Ohana Kol, the world of the customer is far more complex than the world of the policies, and the technological set up required to maintain his satisfaction is much bigger and more complex. In the last two years, Ohana Kol has been serving as the manager of Migdal’s technology division. Previously, she was the manager of the long term savings sector at Migdal Technologies. Prior to joining Migdal, she served in a number of positions at MALAM.
- How do you regard the sector’s technological situation?
Ohana Kol: Whilst the core systems of all of the companies are still sitting the old platform, all of the insurance companies are today using very advanced technology as a wrap around these systems. They are moving towards managing the world of the customer, and more precisely, the customer journey, instead of the world of policies, which is one which was very dichotomous and simple, but lacking any view of the customer.
- Explain the term “customer journey”
Ohana Kol: The customer journey is one which develops and changes. The customer’s needs change. He wants to receive current information about his policies and savings, he wants to know about bonuses. Today’s customer wants to contact the company in the way and when he wants to. He wants to receive money quickly, without paperwork. This cannot be done by the old world of policies. This is the customer world.
The customer is interested only in his life and what he has in the policy, and how the insurance company regards him personally. Every customer is different. He wants to act in line with his patterns of behavior and desires – this is the direction the world is going in.
From the point of view of technology, the world of the customer is more complex and requires far more technology over and above the core technology, including the use of various clouds, bots and robots for operations, automatic issuing, automatic work processes or bots for service and sales.
The Migdal bot – Boti – today knows how to give a variety of services. Matching to the world of the customer requires adaptation to the customer’s language, which was not needed in the past, with the agent speaking to the customer. On the other hand, all of the services are adapted for the agents, who are also our customers.
