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Insurance CIO Outlook | Friday, March 24, 2023
The technology carriers use to interact with clients, and advisors must be updated, making the process cumbersome and efficient. This can lead to a frustrating experience and a lack of confidence in the company's services.
FREMONT, CA: Although the modernization and digital transformation rate has quickened in recent years, there still needs to be a gap between customer expectation and experience whenever a customer or advisor interacts with a carrier. This occurs for numerous reasons:
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Frequency of interactions
Insurance plans are distinct from bank accounts and investments. They do not require daily care. So, the volume of interactions is significantly lower than in other businesses. Nonetheless, when a client wants to examine a policy, submit a claim, make any form of change, or even make a new purchase, they want to be able to do it conveniently and, in most cases, online.
The difficulty for insurers is that satisfying these expectations is expensive per transaction.
Rapidity of interaction
Customers want their service requests completed through whichever channel is most convenient for them, regardless of the industry. And swiftly. The days of waiting in line to speak with a service representative at a call center should be long gone now that a mobile device can rapidly access a portal and make policy adjustments.
Yet, the industry lags behind others.
Hyper-specific interactions
The modern insurance customer needs to consider how personalized their online interactions are; they want all transactions suited to their specific requirements.
Can insurance make product recommendations to existing clients like Netflix suggests a movie based on your recent viewing habits? Not at all
Has the age of the printed yearly report and the in-person review meeting to evaluate and update customer information passed? Not completely.
These obstacles are difficult to overcome if you must utilize or work around decades-old life insurance policy administration systems.
Why legacy life insurance policy management systems make it challenging to resolve customer experience issues
Due to the plethora of back office systems most insurers utilize, it can take time to resolve customer experience issues. Some of them are older than the millennials they are aiming to attract.
These technologies comprise a complex IT landscape that, while functional in many ways, contributes to the challenges of modernizing the customer experience and fulfilling client expectations for digital sales and service engagements.
Traditional insurance policy administration software was not designed for the modern consumer. When many of them were developed, self-service only existed, possibly at a gas station or buffet. Information was delivered. The reports were printed on paper and mailed out. Maybe annually. Monthly at best. There was no expectation of being able to check, let alone amend, the policy details. Advisers submitted applications using pen and paper, which were then sent or, for the more progressive, faxed.
The current IT architecture was more than capable of managing these procedures. But, older policy administration systems cannot deliver the capabilities required to provide superior, cutting-edge digital consumer experiences. The restricted design and hard-wired code ensure that practically any update or new development requires creating new code. Yet this is frequently COBOL or RPG code, a language no longer taught in schools and only known by a diminishing number of experienced programmers.
Designing new solutions for a legacy policy administration system is costly and time-consuming. You may not get your intended outcome because many legacy systems cannot support APIs and hence cannot make web service calls. They need to support digital solutions like advisor and client service portals.
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