Industry experts have been repeating the phrase “digital technology is the future” for so long now that it has become quite the familiar refrain.
3 Capabilities of a Well-Designed Digitalization Program for Insurance Companies
At this point, though, it is safe to say that digital innovations and solutions are no longer in the realm of “things to come”—rather, they are now well and truly part of the present age. The rise of consumer electronics, changes in customer attitudes and expectations, and certain global events have necessitated the push towards digitalization for many key industries.
While industries such as banking and retail have embraced digitalization with open arms, though, others have lagged behind. The insurance industry, in particular, has been known to be especially resistant to change and slow to adopt new ways of doing things.
Insurance companies can be set in their ways and tend to be unwilling to explore options when traditional methods continue to be sufficient.
However, failure to evolve in the digital age means fading into irrelevance. Even now, the insurance industry is struggling to capture the attention of the generation that is currently at their peak earning potential—millennials.
Your insurance company needs digitalization in order to survive. Here’s what a well-designed insurance management system should be capable of:
Digital Capture
Insurers—especially those who continue to make use of traditional methods to this day—may still view technology with distrust. However, digital innovations in capturing information for paper-based documents have matured considerably in recent years, and are now highly capable.
Both the hardware and software used for these processes have become incredibly sophisticated, and there’s simply no reason not to take advantage of them.
Digital capture solutions enable insurance companies to quickly create customer records, satisfying the modern consumer’s need for speed and efficiency.
Relevant and related documents, as well as the information contained within them, can also be more easily ingested, understood, classified, sorted, and indexed for the insurer’s convenience. These capture capabilities should be fully integrated into the company’s core systems and made an intrinsic part of the workflow for maximum effectiveness.
Improved Customer-Facing Interfaces
For the most part, the entire insurance experience should be relatively straightforward. However, there are clear bottlenecks to the process that can be improved or eliminated entirely to suit modern consumer behaviors.
Millennial customers, in particular, deeply value their independence and uniqueness. They expect businesses to offer them a plethora of options and are known to patronize those that will give them flexibility over those decisions.
As part of the generation that grew up with smartphones and the internet, they are well-versed in obtaining information. This upbringing also leads them to crave immediacy.
A modern customer-facing UI is one of the best visual indicators of a business’s digital competence, but it still needs to be supported by back-end processes that are equally advanced.
A modern UI that is backed by out-of-date systems from 30 to 40 years ago is a major pain point. Customers nowadays simply do not have the patience to wait 24 to 48 hours just for a quote. They also will not hesitate to find another insurer if the products they are offered lack flexibility or cannot be personalized according to their needs.
Finally, they will abandon insurance companies who are unable to communicate the advantages of buying their products in a language that they can understand.
All of these issues can be solved with a modern insurance management system that promotes digitization and automation to create an improved customer experience.
Enhanced Claims Processing
If there’s one thing that the insurance industry is infamous for, it’s the plodding pace at which claims are processed.
This is only made worse by the fact that most methods of merely filing an insurance claim can be unnecessarily complicated. Repelled by the inconvenience, most modern consumers simply don’t bother buying insurance, even when they have a need for it.
Cost is by far the number-one reason why insurers are hesitant about improving the claims experience for their clients. Claims processing and management are inherently expensive processes that insurers spend billions of dollars on each year.
Going fully digital gives insurance companies the chance to hit two birds with one stone, so to speak, enabling them to save more on administrative transactions while also helping to eliminate bottlenecks and create faster turnaround times for customers, who can then receive their payments faster and more conveniently.
The insurance industry’s prevalent mindset of not fixing something when it isn’t broken simply cannot be sustained in the digital age. Customers want more now, and it is on insurance companies to fulfill those needs lest they fall by the wayside.
There are few reasons not to invest in digitalization for your company today. It can improve your workflow, make insurance attractive to customers again, and even help reduce costs.
