Insurance companies are falling behind their peers in the financial services industry, this is because they are slow to innovate and take on new technology solutions. Insurance executives have realized that in order to stay competitive they need to increase their direct sales capabilities, improve processes, AND invest in digital technology, (Mckinsey 1). There are many factors that have increased the urgency but none more notably than the current pandemic. The pandemic has increased customer’s need to interact digitally with insurance companies. In Europe alone, 38% preferred the digital experience as their sales channel but this increased to 54% after the lockdown in 2020. With the high competition and client-driven urgency insurance leaders need solutions that they can get to market quickly, like cloud and SaaS solutions which feature ready-made functionality designed for quick launch.
Insurance companies need to ensure that new solutions they acquire have governance and compliance processes thought out since they are in a highly regulated industry. Next and perhaps more important due to increased digital demands, is that customer experience needs to be elevated. Because digital interaction needs to be an extension of the organization’s sales and marketing team, there needs to be more focus on individual experiences. Solutions need to find ways to personalize the interaction for the user while making it easy for them to stay informed and perform transactions. The solution also has to be agile enough to allow them to pivot if they need to change content or reiterate the solution must allow this flexibility.
With the increasing need to have a more personalized experience within the insurance industry more organizations in the space have already started to look for cloud solutions to help them respond to their clients’ needs faster. Veriday’s InsuranceCloud which is an enterprise marketing cloud platform can help insurance marketers modernize their solution and get to market faster while ensuring regulatory compliance criteria are met and help to achieve the best customer digital experience. The solution allows advisors to stay connected with their customers and potential customers by keeping them up to date with the most relevant information to their demographic. Advisors can appropriately represent themselves in a manner they wish to portray to their customer base because InsuranceCloud allows them to personalize their content, brand, and engagement experience.
Specific issues such as resistance to change, lack of ability to prioritize projects, or simply too many siloes are likely holding you back.
Five Practices You Can Implement to Accelerate Digital Transformation in Your Insurance Company
In the underwriting world as well as in any line of business, you may already have some of the core ingredients you need to digitally transform. Any one or more of the issues below can be company-specific issues such as resistance to change, lack of ability to prioritize projects, or simply too many siloes are likely holding you back. While different approaches fit specific organizational needs and appetites, our own work with insurers in commercial underwriting and beyond typically include these elements to succeed:
• Adopt a decision-first approach: Align your decision strategies first and then add data and analytics.
• Improve your agility by optimizing resources: Empower business experts to rapidly modify, simulate, and measure decisions – without getting stuck in the IT queue.
• Automate high-volume operational decisions quickly and effectively: Highly repeatable, “need for speed” decisions can be automated, and encompass any combination of data, analytics and other decision assets.
• Collaborate to operationalize and institutionalize your decision strategies: Decision-first collaboration goes beyond “breaking silos” – it enables business analysts, policy managers to work closely to harmonize and simulate strategies, reuse decision assets, and drive measurable value across the enterprise.
• (Carefully) consider a Cloud-based platform as a digitization accelerator: IT is being inundated with requests to do more, even as data, analytic, and decision systems proliferate. Adopting a Cloud-based strategy is on the shopping list, and a platform-centric approach can help.
