Every once in a while, it’s interesting to take a look at McDonald’s, to see if the industry giant’s strategies can be applied to the insurance and financial services markets. Two relatively recent acquisitions focused on streamlining and improving the customer experience are instructive.

Back in March, the company announced it was buying a decision management company. According to Fortune:

McDonald’s Corp., in its largest acquisition in 20 years, is buying a decision-logic technology company to better personalize menus in its digital push.

The world’s biggest restaurant chain is spending more than $300 million on Dynamic Yield Ltd., according to a person familiar with the matter. With the new technology, McDonald’s restaurants can vary their electronic menu boards’ display of items, depending on factors such as the weather—more coffee on cold days and McFlurries on hot days, for example—and the time of day or regional preferences. The menus will also suggest add-on items to customers.

Sapiens has long touted the benefits of decision management for insurers and financial services companies and we are unsurprised to see the growing popularity of this technology across industries.

Evolving regulatory requirements, competitive pressure, new product development and changing customer behavior are compelling organizations to fundamentally change how they operate and govern their business. The exponential growth in the volume and scope of business-driven operational decisions has exposed a fundamental weakness in conventional processes: the business domain cannot articulate business requirements in a clear and complete manner.

Sapiens Decision, a business decision management solution that consistently enforces business logic across all enterprise applications, heals these pain-points by simplifying the planning, implementing and optimizing of business policy changes. It is an enterprise-scale solution to help businesses improve visibility and control.

Another McDonald’s acquisition is also geared at improving the customer experience and further digitalizing. Last month (according to USA Today), McDonald’s announced it was acquiring Apprente, a Silicon Valley-based start-up offering voice-based ordering technology.

McDonald’s said the technology understands different accents and is “expected to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order taking at the Drive Thru” and could also be incorporated into kiosks and mobile ordering.

“Building our technology infrastructure and digital capabilities are fundamental to our Velocity Growth Plan and enable us to meet rising expectations from our customers, while making it simpler and even more enjoyable for crew members to serve guests,” Steve Easterbrook, McDonald’s president and CEO, said in a news release.

This second move by McDonald’s also mirrors and reinforces the trends happening in the insurance and financial services industries, where a streamlined customer experience via innovative digital capabilities has become extremely important.

Insurance carriers have long understood that they risk losing their customers if they don’t provide the type of digital experience that all of us have come to expect from the retailers and service providers we interact with daily. Agents, brokers and other channel and service providers also require a powerful digital ecosystem to capably carry out their crucial tasks.

Sapiens’ digital offerings ensure that consumer processes are completed automatically, with minimal human intervention. Increased automation and self-service capabilities will help insurers significantly improve customer experience and lower costs.

Using the Sapiens DigitalSuite, insurers interact with customers in their preferred channels during a consistent journey, expose only the relevant data and offer new products and services that are the right fit.

That’s almost as golden as a certain company’s arches…

 

  • Customer Experience
  • Decision Management
  • digitalization
  • voice recognition
Eric Danis

Eric Danis Eric Danis is a senior content specialist at Sapiens who manages Sapiens Spotlight and writes original posts. When not creating and editing content, or thinking about the Boston Celtics, Eric enjoys spending time with his wife and three energetic children.