Driving value through digitization, hyper-personalized
products, and passion for customers
By Jamie Peers
For decades, maybe longer, the insurance industry has been labeled risk averse and conservative. Technology was a necessity, not a competitive advantage. In fact, much of the industry’s agency-focused technology trends were driven by insurer-carrier partners instead of being purpose-built for agents and brokers.
No doubt change was in order and, fortunately, insurtech firms delivered. Research conducted by Willis Towers Watson indicated that in 2020, annual insurtech funding reached an all-time high of just over seven billion, the highest dollar amount in any year.
Like most tales of revolution, there is always a hero. For insurance, the hero role falls to data. The need for accurate, accessible data touches every aspect of today’s insurance customer journey—from application intake by an agent to potential premium increases or renewals.
Today, there are three data-driven trends that will shape the future of insurance, including automation, hyper-personalization, and customer-centricity.
The move to automation
The only way for traditional members of the insurance value chain—agents, brokers, insurers, and reinsurers alike—to compete against emerging and innovative insurtech firms is to rapidly digitize. Fortunately, most of the industry’s tech stacks can be rapidly modernized by integrating contemporary cloud-based solutions into legacy applications. This minimizes transformational costs and simultaneously limits business disruption risk.
Taking advantage of tried and tested technologies, such as hybrid integration platforms, can make it easier to manage data requirements and provide a short time to value.
With modernization, insurance organizations can become more scalable, flexible, and make the journey to higher levels of automation easier as well. Investing in a hybrid integration platform provides a clear path to better process automation and enables once static data to be accessible to the right person in the right system at the right time.
Providing hyper-personalized products
Another growing trend in insurance is the hyper-personalization of products. With agents and brokers on the front lines of data acquisition in the new business and application process, real-time and near real-time data provides greater insights into coverage needs and makes it easier to deliver content, products, and information that are more relevant to each policyholder.
Like most tales of revolution, there is always a hero. For insurance, the hero role falls to data. The need for accurate, accessible data touches every aspect of today’s insurance customer journey … .
Hyper-personalization means tracking and acting on customer data in real-time.
Customers today want to be instantly recognized and expect agents and brokers to have immediate access to information about every interaction on every channel, immediately understand customer issues, and to have ready-made solutions based on captured data. This requires rapid visibility into a 360-degree view of the customer.
If data is used correctly, hyper-personalization can be a significant competitive differentiator.
Putting the customer at the
center of delivery
Hand-in-hand with the hyper-personalization trend is a lean in to customer centricity, which has become key to the success of digitally-transformed insurance organizations everywhere. Knowing everything possible about customers means having the ability to design optimized customer journeys.
Making use of data collected from sophisticated customer relationship management and agency management systems means that supporting processes can be leveraged to increase the average lifetime value of a customer.
Proactively and intentionally creating and mapping customer journeys is particularly useful when looking to build long-term engagement and loyalty. Mapping customer journeys helps to isolate pinch points where there is increased risk of process failure. This is particularly important in an automated environment where it is critical to identify when and how clients need to be assisted at high-risk junctures.
What’s more, by capturing and analyzing the enormous amounts of data produced along the customer journeys, agents and brokers can tweak processes and optimize the entire experience from the very start of the interaction.
Turning data into insights
It’s clear that data lies at the heart of many key insurance industry trends. However, for far too many insurance organizations, this data lies trapped in silos across the organization. By investing in a modern data integration platform or a hybrid integration platform, insurance IT leaders can access powerful data management capabilities in a single platform.
Such platforms often bring together extract-transform-load (ETL), integration, API (application programming interface) management, and data laking into one solution to create a tool that is nimble, simple and powerful. By modernizing legacy agency management systems, integrating CRM systems to better understand customers, building out data warehouses and lakes, or adding in APIs to connect customer portals, it is possible to build a more cohesive customer experience and better unleash the potential power of in-house data.
The author
Jamie Peers is vice president for Synatic. He can be reached for further information or comment via email at jpeers@synatic.com.
