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Insurance CIO Outlook | Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Modernization and digital transformation have accelerated in recent years, but there still needs to be a gap between what clients expect and what carriers deliver.
FREMONT, CA: Modernization and digital transformation have been happening at a breakneck pace in recent years, but there still needs to be a connection between what customers and advisors anticipate and what they get when interacting with carriers. This occurs for numerous reasons:
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Frequency of encounters
Insurance plans are distinct from bank accounts and investments and do not require daily care. Thus, the volume of interactions is significantly lower than in other businesses. Nevertheless, 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
Consumers 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.
However, the industry lags behind others.
Hyper-personalized interactions
The modern insurance customer needs to consider how personalized their online interactions are; they want all transactions suited to their specific requirements.
Is insurance capable of making 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 a set of 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.
Legacy insurance policy administration software was designed with something other than the modern consumer in mind. When many of them were developed, self-service only existed, possibly at a gas station or buffet. Information was delivered, and the reports were printed on paper and mailed out—possibly annually or monthly maximum. There was no assumption that policy specifics could be reviewed, let alone altered. Advisors 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. However, older policy administration systems cannot deliver the capabilities required to provide superior, cutting-edge digital consumer experiences. Because of the closed design and hard-wired code, practically all changes and developments necessitate writing new code. And this is frequently COBOL or RPG code, a language that is no longer taught in schools and is 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 do not support digital solutions like portals for advisors and customer service.
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