The results are in and the analysis has taken place. Modern core systems and agility are the name of the game. Shreyas Vasanthkumar, Managing Director EMEA at Duck Creek Technologies, highlights the calls to action for insurers, brokers and third parties following the Global Consumer Insurance Insights Survey
The 2,000 respondents to the Global Consumer Insurance Insights Survey – conducted independently by Research in Finance – certainly had a lot to say. After all was said and done, five central themes emerged for the insurance market to take action on in 2022 and beyond.
1. Accelerate Speed to Market
Consumers are more discerning and demanding than ever before and what they want is easy-to-access, transparent products that are timely and represent good value – without exception. The number of touch points needed at the point of purchase or renewal is also a key consideration and determined by the complexity of a product. While speed to market is also an important factor in achieving a positive customer experience, insurance providers must have a good understanding of which products their customers actually want and need; relevance is critical.
Getting new products to consumers quickly involves a number of elements working seamlessly together – infrastructure, regulatory compliance, pre-packaged content, and flexible technology – but it ultimately reflects an insurance provider’s confidence to deliver in a fast-paced and ever-changing market.
The results of the survey show that consumers are increasingly receptive to new types of insurance, as well as to purchasing, amending, and switching insurance through apps. But this goes hand-in-hand with high expectations for customer experience. Consumers expect a seamless omnichannel experience.
2. Maximise Operational Efficiency
Speed to market is also about the wider context of operational efficiency. Insurers relying on old, “home grown” core systems simply can’t offer the processes, data access, and integrations necessary to support today’s “within minutes” sales requirements. In contrast, those who use the most agile technology architectures are able to consolidate products, improve on their ability to cross and up-sell, and enhance self-service opportunities, all within their core systems. And they can do this in weeks or months, and scale a new product roll-out across their regional markets if their data indicates demand is there.
Cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery solutions for core systems can provide all the services, support, and computing resources insurers need. By leveraging the best available technology and continuously delivering new functionality to solve evolving insurance business challenges, cloud architecture enables a fundamentally new and evergreen approach to maximising operational efficiency and to competing in today’s market.
3. Optimise Experiences
The critical message from consumers in this survey is that they want a personal experience, and they want the right experience for themselves. This is true whether they are happy to conduct the entire transaction online, or whether they should be triaged for human intervention.
Multiple customer records across different legacy systems and third-party integrations do not make for an optimised customer experience. Insurance providers must gain a 360-degree view of not only their customers but end-to-end visibility into all of their relationships, and deploy agile technologies that empower them with a centralised, complete understanding of the customer. This allows them to make an addition or alteration to a customer or broker record and see it reflected across their entire relationship within their business.
4. Harness Innovative Technology
Innovation and technology can sometimes be implemented by insurance providers without really thinking through the what and the why – whether that be through a customer, data, or an efficiency lens for example – and then looking at the right technology to enable that rather than looking to innovate for the sake of it and getting paralysed by the amount of choice.
A single, unified suite of SaaS-based insurance solutions can take inconsistency, poor integration, and lack of transparency off insurers’ lists of worries. Building on this, an insurer’s core systems provider should also connect them with global, regional, and local ecosystems to empower seamless insurance purchases and claims management.
By accessing intelligent ecosystems diverse with the best technology available, insurers can move away from closed-box silos to open, adaptable, and evolving systems of partnerships with innovators – such as those harnessing artificial intelligence, or telematics data – that work seamlessly with their core systems.
5. Grow Distribution Channels
The feedback in this survey clearly shows the diverse nature of consumers’ buying preferences and it is incumbent on insurance providers to adapt distribution channels so that people have a choice as to how they buy the products they need – and all delivered seamlessly through a slick and nimble pre-and post-sales process.
Nurturing and expanding relationships with brokers and third-party agents is critical to any insurance provider’s strategy. Having a modern producer relationship management system that enables insurers to tailor all aspects of the producer lifecycle to attract, retain, increase productivity, and build trust with agents, brokers, MGAs, and other intermediaries is a prerequisite for today’s insurance provider.
Deployed as a modern core system cloud application, effective distribution management technology can digitally transform workflows to increase business agility, streamline operations, and ensure continuous compliance.
Download the Global Consumer Insurance Insights whitepaper to see the full results and analysis.
