Digital Changes Drive The Need for Better Insights
A multinational insurance firm was undergoing a comprehensive Digital Transformation, and needed a better way of keeping up with its consumers – especially on digital channels. They needed better ways to listen and understand what their audience was really saying, and spot emerging trends in the APAC region. The aim was to use these insights to be able to respond to these opportunities or risks with a clear and precise action plan to build brand advocacy and preference.
The company was looking for a consumer intelligence solution, supported by analytics expertise, plus actionable and powerful social insights based on reliable technology. The firm chose Synthesio as their AICI partner to provide the “human-machine teams” needed to power this part of their digital transformation via a combination of technology and advanced insights services.
The Synthesio team analyzed conversations on all relevant online platforms including news sites to give the client a sense of how brands are placed in social media (are their mentions coming from news, or are they consumer-driven). For our deep dives into topics and sentiments, we then looked into social media mentions to get a sense of what is being spoken about the category and associated brands, what consumers seek in insurance, and what drives category and brand conversations.
A Proof of Concept Spots Themes – And New Trends
First, we wanted to understand how the company was currently harnessing social data and how they were using it to plan their brand strategy. In this initial phase, we found they were using it primarily to monitor negative feedback and were getting some high-level reports. However, those reports were lacking actionable insights, and less focused on spotting cultural shifts or answering questions they didn’t yet know to ask (the unknown unknowns). Our observation was simple and encouraging: social data was not being used to its fullest potential.
We proposed to do a proof-of-concept and build a sample report covering one small market in the APAC region with the end goal of showcasing what is possible with “hybrid” AICI. Besides the standard social intelligence outputs, like volume trends, the share of voice, and sentiment, we also included a Social Landscape Mapping, social and search trends, and, most importantly, recommendations on how they could use AI-enabled consumer intelligence technology and a rich set of online data to build their branding.
Benefits and Impact – AICI in Action
While looking at the insurance market broadly, our Topic Modeling feature helped to uncover more than 40 insurance-related topics that people associated insurance with. This included topics such as “Hospitalization” and “Family.” Consumers naturally brought up insurance in their discussions when they have/were going to experience hospitalization. But the topic of family is also prevalent, as we found that people not only purchase and manage insurance for themselves, but for their family members including their children, spouses, parents, and grandparents.
Our analysis also showed that there is a growing trend around buying insurance directly vs going through an agent. More consumers are seeking to purchase or even handle their insurance-related matters digitally, on their own terms – a trend definitely in line with the rise of e-commerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands and models.
The client was impressed with the insights we could bring and the pilot takeaways and insights gave them a fresh look at how social data can be used. According to them, “this report truly demonstrated the power of Ipsos and Synthesio social analytics.”
The success of our proof-of-concept opened the doors for a larger program designed to understand consumer affinity and intentions, identify category drivers, and also dive into brand associations by tracking topic and sentiment evolution.
Look for more highlights of this project in upcoming posts. And to see our AICI solution in action, you can schedule a demo here.
