Creating great customer experiences requires great data #
The client expectation driven digital transformation is in full swing in the insurance industry. Everyone is building APIs in order become digitally enabled. AI seems to be on everyone’s mind and there is a lot of interest in the potential it has to have meaningful impacts across many areas including Sales, Claims and Underwriting. AI combined with analytics engines can also predict trends and generate business insights that will lead to new product innovation.
But underneath all of that lies the true driver of insurance evolution--digital customer experience.
Those insurance companies who don't capitalize on the data driven, digital advances that enable them to do a better job of understanding their customers and developing offerings that meet their evolving expectations will find themselves lagging behind.
Digital client experience is the biggest driver of success #
Change in our industry is being driven, not just by competitive pressures, but also by the overall raising of the bar when it comes to how to do business digitally in the way that agents and consumers have come to expect from their interactions online with organizations like Apple and Amazon.
They want their transactions to be fast, accurate and hyper-personalized. They want them to be secure and to be able to conduct them whenever and wherever they choose.
The days of calling into a center to make policy changes or sitting with an advisor in their office are long gone for most consumers.
And that puts pressure on all industry stakeholders to evolve. Meeting these heightened customer expectations means implementing digital tools like agent and customer self-service portals and streamlined quotes, illustrations, application and policy issuance solutions.
Legacy systems and data migration #
Of course, to realize the benefits of these tools, organizations need access to the fuel, which is vast volumes of data in their repositories. In many cases, that means modernizing their legacy core systems and migrating their data to modern platforms.
Digital strategy hinges on data integration #
Platforms that were terrific years ago can’t keep up with the pace of technological change. In order to compete, gain market share and increase revenue in today’s world companies need to ensure that they are providing their agents and end consumers with an optimum experience.
Whether it’s buying a policy or providing value add to agents to help them do more business, modernizing infrastructure increases sales and has real impact on the bottom-line.
This modernization requires the development of the right strategy, step-by-step, to get to the end vision of an organization’s digital transformation.
Each insurance company is different when it comes to what that strategy will look like. Their pain points are different. The cost parameters are unique. One-size does not fit all. Companies need to make sure they craft a strategy that is right for them and matches their corporate priorities.
In many cases data migration will be important to consolidate databases into single modern platforms. For some, the data can stay where it is, but data integration tools will enable it to be accessed, extracted and transformed so it can be used by the apps that require it.
The important thing is to audit your blocks of data, understand your business/customer needs going forward and design a data strategy that will become an effective roadmap to providing superior digital client engagement.
The insurance companies that execute on those plans better and faster will be the ones holding distinct competitive advantages in the coming years. Driven by data-powered innovation, they will be the ones to fulfill the promise of digital transformation and enhance the lives of all insurance stakeholders.
