The future of insurance – intelligent, automation-driven

The Future of Insurance –

Intelligent, Automation-Driven Experiences

Experience defines business today, and insurance is no different. Customers will reward those providers that deliver exceptional experiences (for example, paying up to seven per cent more for car insurance), but they will also punish those companies that don’t by not buying from them again. In fact, 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience.

But what does an improved experience look like? It’s fast, it’s easy, and it delivers what customers want, through a channel they’re comfortable with. Or, to put it another way, good experiences are whatever the customer, not the provider, decides.

In insurance, consumers increasingly expect to be able buy common products (such as home, health, car and travel insurance) with a minimum amount of fuss and time. The demand and competition to simplify the end user experience is stronger than ever, with easy access to a broad range of relevant products (and the ability to buy them quickly) expected as standard. For more complex queries, if a human agent is required, then customers expect the representatives they’re speaking to have all the information they’ve already provided online to hand.

Evolving expectations forcing ongoing change

These expectations have been shaped by digital innovators in other industries and through entrants, such as price comparison sites and Big Tech companies, that do not have the legacy systems or regulatory concerns that established insurers must contend with. One report noted that policyholders’ willingness to buy insurance from non-traditional entities, in particular Big Tech, leapt from 17% in 2016 to 44% in 2020.

With so many options readily available, people do not care about the challenges insurers face – if a process is too hard or time consuming, customers will go elsewhere.

Where does this leave insurers? Some are adapting, developing applications that allow customers to access all their insurance policies in one place, irrespective of the business unit providing the service. This allows customers to review policies, add and make changes, and receive relevant, targeted offers. The insurer receives live data on what matters to the customer and increases the likelihood of selling new products and growing share of wallet.

It’s not front end or back end, but end to end

How do others achieve this? Many will focus on the front end, investing in areas that customers directly interact with. While it’s certainly the most visible part of delivering great customer experiences, purely developing the interface overlooks the importance of being able to generate, connect and share relevant data in real-time, in a manner that meets regulatory requirements and corporate governance.

This is critical. Without the back end and the ability to aggregate data effectively, all insurers are left with is a well-designed interface that provides no value to customers at all. Getting the right data in the right place at the right time is the fuel that drives great experiences.

The challenge is enabling a system that can deliver full end to end services which simply can’t be achieved through a recruitment drive. Aside from the fact that sourcing, hiring and retaining the right talent is harder than it’s ever been, with all industries battling for the same skillsets, humans simply cannot scale and match with technological advancements. They get tired, they make mistakes, they lose focus when faced with crucial yet repetitive tasks, and their productivity becomes inconsistent.

The answer is to automate. To take manual processes, the ones employees struggle with, and let technology do it faster, more accurately, and at greater scale in conjunction with humans.

What sort of processes? Insurance as a sector is full of automatable processes, in everything from risk and compliance to claims and financial administration. It might be updating invoicing contact details, transferring policies between systems, generating certificates, initial responses to enquiries, validating data, handling refunds, opening claims applications and processing assessments; the list is endless. With so much of an insurer’s business model based upon rules and meeting set criteria, much of it can, and in many cases already has, been automated to some extent.

But technology never stands still. Processes that were automated a decade or more ago may not integrate with new solutions and innovations. New digital tools and ways of working means new types of data being gathered. That all needs to be fed into automated processes, which may have been initially set up for very different purposes. It is important to remember that automation is not a one-and-done task, but a system that needs to evolve as the business itself changes.

Today, that change is being driven by heightened expectations of what makes great customer experiences, which means insurers need to deploy automation in new ways to better serve their audiences.

Human and machine, not human vs machine

That doesn’t mean replacing people. While customers may want quick access and easy-to-use systems to buy, when something goes wrong or doesn’t fit a preordained checklist, they want to speak to a real person. Automating the manual administration frees employees to focus on more complex issues, taking over from the machines when a more tailored or empathetic approach is required.

And it’s not just about reducing workloads. Automation can augment employee performance, by providing the data they need quickly and briefing them on crucial customer information in advance. That might be providing a summary of the case in question, sentiment analysis or even the opportunity to suggests alternative or additional services.

This intelligent approach to automation isn’t exclusive to major providers, either. New models of delivery, based on cloud computing, means that insurers of all sizes can access intelligence-as-a-service, paying for what they need as they use it. No major upfront investment, no long lead times waiting to get going. Acquire, deploy, and start automating.

Delivering experience at scale

Automation is not new; many insurers have been using it to speed up certain back-office functions for years now. But applying it to customer experience, to deliver the exceptional levels of service that meet rising expectations, is relatively untested territory for many providers. By combining intelligent automation for the quick, repetitive work with human resources for connecting and building relationships, insurance providers can deliver tailored experiences at scale and safeguard their market positions.

Leon Stafford, UK country manager, Digital Workforce

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https://www.pwc.com/us/en/zz-test/assets/pwc-consumerintelligence-series-customer-experience.pdf https://www.pwc.com/us/en/zz-test/assets/pwc-consumerintelligence-series-customer-experience.pdf https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/uk/news/ technology/report-highlights-impact-of-covid19-oninsurance-digitalisation-233562.aspx

Intelligent, Automation-Driven Experiences The Future of Insurance –