Digital Transformation and Customer Decision-Making in Insurance: A Review of Digital Touchpoints, Trust, and Intelligent Service

Abstract

Digital transformation is changing insurance from a product-centred business into a data-intensive, continuously connected service ecosystem. This article reviews how research has conceptualised and investigated the relationship between digital transformation and customer decision-making in insurance, with particular attention to digital touchpoints, trust, and intelligent service. A bibliometric-informed review design is used to integrate performance evidence, science-mapping findings, and customer-level empirical studies. The literature shows a rapid expansion of insurtech research after 2017 and a movement from technology description toward questions of adoption, customer experience, governance, personalisation, and algorithmic accountability. Three interdependent knowledge domains emerge. The first concerns the digital infrastructure of insurance, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, Internet of Things devices, telematics, blockchain, mobile applications, and conversational agents. The second concerns the customer journey, in which perceived usefulness, information quality, convenience, personalisation, and service continuity shape evaluations across multiple touchpoints. The third concerns trust, privacy, perceived risk, fairness, explainability, and human involvement, which determine whether technology-enabled value propositions become actual behavioural intentions. The review identifies a fragmented evidence base, excessive reliance on cross-sectional survey and structural-equation designs, limited longitudinal and cross-cultural research, and weak integration between technology adoption theory and insurance-specific decision processes. A research agenda is proposed around longitudinal customer journeys, hybrid human–AI service, explainable personalisation, fairness, vulnerable consumers, and causal identification. The article also specifies reporting requirements for future Scopus-based bibliometric studies and clarifies why bibliometric mapping must be followed by theory-led interpretation.