Every insurance professional knows they’re in the risk business. But in 2021, insurance leaders know that selling any consumer product also puts them in the consumer business. That means your competition for a great customer experience is no longer another insurance company. Instead, it’s Amazon and other online consumer giants. They’re the ones now setting expectations for speed and agility for all product and service deliveries, including insurance.
As you know, customers want ease of use, visual transparency, and access to information when interfacing with your system — and they want it quick. Therefore, your customer service reps must have the same view as customers so they can mirror the customer experience and ultimately lead customers to the most viable solution for their needs.
From time to time, an insurance company will also have to adjust their product mix, time to market for new products or services, pricing structure, access, distribution, and more. Doing so seamlessly and with speed and agility will be increasingly critical to securing and retaining valuable customers.
To make speed and agility a focal point of your digital customer experience, insurance companies need to think and act less like an insurance company and more like a tech company that sells insurance.
This seemingly small but significant shift of mindset should permeate every aspect of the business from the top-down, including the culture, decision making, and ultimately customer service.
This may entail recruiting millennials, and Gens Y and Z, to fill current gaps in the labor force brought on by retiring baby boomers. It may mean enhancing worker training on the digital consumer experience or changing how data-gathering processes have previously been built to accommodate new workflows and necessary information.
Modernizing your process in these ways will ultimately help optimize your digital insurance platform, led by two guiding principles: the speed and agility of integration and functionality.
The speed and agility of integration
The digital platform, first and foremost, must be integrated internally so that the consumer interface is seamless and easy to use. Platform tools must be accessible to allow easy reconfiguration of products, pricing, distribution, and more so that new products, services, and systems can be added, removed, or altered without changing the system and without a significant time delay.
This will require platform tools to be integrated, with an internal map serving as a backbone across departments and systems. When platform integration is established, you can spend more time driving the business instead of driving integration when changes need to be made.
For example, operational and analytical systems must operate in harmony and in real-time. Without this integration, the data gathered may no longer be useful by the time the analysis is completed. In addition, your platform must make decisions to match your digital footprint before deployment to maintain the best possible customer experience at all times.
The speed and agility of functionality
The inherent functionality of your digital platform will help insurers accelerate how they build, test, and digitally launch new products for customers, making them agile and accelerating time to market. This extends to all lines of business and core processing capabilities.
As priorities and products evolve, customer upgrades must be seamless to ensure functionality for both internal systems and customer-facing dashboards. The key is to have an avenue already paved to reduce conflict and allow desired changes to happen quickly and cost-effectively.
EIS Suite is highly configurable, with individual implementations for each customer. Our infrastructure tools and core processing capabilities are built for the insurance industry. With our low-code configuration tools, they can configure and extend those base core processing capabilities to suit their specific business while allowing them to complete implementations and upgrades with speed and ease, without the limitations and risk exposure of multi-tenant applications.
Building on integration and functionality to deliver on personalization
When systems and tools are in place to respond to changes with agility, they’re likely able to anticipate what’s next as well. Insurers want the ability to launch new products fast and personalize policy features, coverage lines, limits, and more. Customers want the same.
Insurance companies that prioritize the desired digital customer experience — and can ramp up with speed and agility — will succeed in today’s consumer-driven environment. Meeting this need is possible only when you’ve already established integration and functionality across your digital platform.
