The Service Moment P&C Has Been Waiting For

A year ago, I pushed my daughter into her first customer service experience with a contact center. She’d downloaded her Epic Pass for a ski trip, something had gone wrong, and I figured- she’s 14, she’s tech-savvy, she’ll figure it out. I showed her how to open the web chat on the app and told her to wait for someone to come on.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard a scream for Dad.

The conversation had crashed. She’d been waiting, finally navigated to a different page, come back, and been told someone was looking for her- but the session had been closed. She had to start over. Her first contact center experience. I chuckled, welcoming her to the world of being frustrated with poor customer service.

Her second contact center experience came not long after. I was helping her open a bank account and asked her to lead the call. The IVR came on, asked what she needed, and she just… froze. Looked at me like I’d asked her to defuse a bomb. She handed the phone back without saying a word. She’s perfectly capable of communicating. She just doesn’t communicate that way.

My daughter isn’t an edge case. She’s the customer P&C carriers are going to be serving for the next 40 years. For me, her experiences highlighted two problems our industry needs to solve.

Channel Challenges

Insurance has reached a channel inflection point. Not because carriers haven’t invested in digital. Most have. But customer expectations have continued to evolve, and many service experiences still feel fragmented across channels, systems, and handoffs. The opportunity now is to make communication feel more connected, consistent, and aligned to how customers prefer to engage.

My daughter’s Epic Pass experience is one that every carrier’s service team has replicated thousands of times: a customer reaches out, something breaks or a piece of information is missing, they lose their place and have to start over, and they walk away more frustrated than when they started. The channel itself became the problem.

And the phone? For a significant and growing portion of your customer base, it’s not a preferred channel, it’s an obstacle. They’ll tolerate it when they have to andthey’d rather not have to.

Loyalty in a Low-Engagement Category

I’ve spent most of my career in insurance, and we’ve always struggled with the fact that building customer loyalty is hard when your customers barely interact with you.

When my daughter had her experience calling the bank, it was an unknown entity to her. There was no relationship, no trust, and it was like calling into a foreign world.

On average, a policyholder contacts their carrier about once a year. That’s it. In that environment, building the kind of trust that weathers a rate increase or a difficult claim is nearly impossible. By the time the hard moment arrives, when you haven’t done the work, the relationship isn’t strong enough to hold. You can’t expect to retain someone you never really connected with.

Creating Channel Flexibility

The channel problem has a straightforward answer: meet customers where they are, and don’t make them start over.

That means persistent conversations that don’t disappear, in the customer’s channel of choice. (Text happens to be a great channel for that.) It means a customer who starts an policy change on Tuesday can pick it back up on Thursday without re-explaining everything. It means the experience feels like a thread, not a series of disconnected transactions. We need to stop asking customers to navigate insurance company siloes. Let them state their need in their chosen channel, get them to where they need to be behind the scenes, and provide the support they need.

For carriers, this is the foundation of a different kind of relationship. Consistency and ease build trust over time, even when the interactions are small.

The Trusted Contact

The engagement problem requires something more deliberate: regularity and continuity across the customer lifecycle.

Imagine one consistent point of contact that walks a customer through onboarding, reaches out around billing, is available when questions come up, and is there throughout the life of the policy. Now, the carrier is the other end of a relationship that builds over time; not some foreign entity that a customer must re-acquaint with every time they want to interact. The customer data and experience persists, for the benefit of customers and insurance professionals servicing the customer.

This engagement model allows a carrier to pre-empt common points of friction or confusion; keeping customers informed and educated. And when the customer does need to reach out, the context of their ongoing interaction history is right there, allowing better service delivery.

The relationship starts to feel real, and that’s how you build the kind of connection that survives a $200 rate increase at renewal. That’s how you compete on something other than price.

The AI Layer: Service Immediacy at Scale

The concepts of channel flexibility and trusted contact become even more powerful when layering in AI.

Proactive communication can look more like back-and-forth interaction instead of one-way notifications. It can get better and hone messaging over time by learning what works and what doesn’t with different customer segments. Some customers value more communication, some less; AI-enabled proactive communication opens the door to better catering to those preferences that are most likely to drive loyalty for individual customers.

And when a customer does reach out for support- service can be provided immediately; no IVR navigation, hold times, no transfers. Low-stakes moments are handled with speed and consistency, so your service teams can focus on the moments that require judgment, empathy, and nuance. The seamless handoff to a person when the moment calls for it is critical. When human involvement is required, the insurance professional needs to be enabled with the full context of previous communication, whether human or automated.

This Is the Moment

My daughter is 15. She is not a policyholder yet. But the generation just ahead of her, Millennials and Gen Z customers buying their first homes, first cars, and first policies, is already here. They are bringing a different set of expectations to every service interaction, shaped by the digital experiences they use every day.

These customers aren’t just tolerating AI-assisted service; many prefer it for speed and routine interactions. They want easy access, fast answers, and a service experience that respects their time.

Customer behavior and preferences are shifting. Carriers who build for this now will position themselves to retain customers more effectively now and even more so in the future. P&C has always been an industry that manages risk well. The question now is whether it can manage relationships just as well. I think it can- if we use the right tools and technology to do so.

My daughter, by the way, got her Epic Pass problem sorted- eventually, over a new chat session, after starting over. She has not voluntarily opened a web chat since. That’s the thing about a bad service experience: you don’t forget it.