Industry Perspectives

Modernizing the digital computing environment within the insurance industry requires business and technology investments that innovate and streamline processes. Ensuring digital effectiveness requires insights into how policy and billing processes can better provide optimal financial and revenue performance. Effective digital environments maximize technology investments and provide the policyholder experiences desired by consumers through direct engagement and agencies. Insurance organizations that use applications to unify agent and customer interactions require digital platforms that utilize insights from analytics and data. Ventana Research has identified three key technology trends every insurance organization should consider as part of the path forward to achieve its objectives.

The first highlighted trend is the need to digitally interact with customers in any channel regarding marketing, purchasing and customer service with conversational virtualized agents. Policyholders desire simpler engagement across all interactions from questions to payments to incident claims. Supporting these interactions requires technology that provides digital experiences across mobile applications, devices, and increasingly through other social and communication applications in message or video formats. The technology is now available to enable smarter conversations and support the digital self-service that can address and resolve issues in a more automated and intelligent manner.

It is essential that the process of filing claims is simple and timely while mitigating the risk of fraud from those looking to take advantage of insurers. The wave of automation to streamline the steps in workflow was not designed for consumers and policyholders, creating continued frustrations and dissatisfaction. Utilizing a more modern generation of automation and workflow technology can more intelligently digitize claim verification to ensure proper processing and payment to policyholder.

Policyholders prefer to use their mobile devices to digitally engage their insurance provider. The last highlighted trend is the shift toward applications designed to allow customers to manage and engage policies for claims, renewal and payment in a secured digital environment. The customer experience is enhanced by utilizing the mobile device itself to capture photos for claims or using augmented reality to help best assess the process for filing a claim and potential damage incurred.

Possessing and using the right technology and intelligence is necessary to achieve optimal value in customer interactions. Modern technological approaches provide higher levels of efficiency within operational processes that have specific managerial and analytical needs from their internal and policyholder applications. Ensuring differentiated digital and policyholder experiences requires a reexamination of existing approaches that are not designed for retention and cost optimization. By 2025, over one-half of insurance organizations will determine the chaos of digital technology usage requires a rationalization of vendors to ensure operational excellence.

The insurance industry has a significant opportunity to advance its digital effectiveness, gaining a competitive edge through technology. Organizations should assess the level of digital transformation required to utilize readily available advanced technological approaches to deliver the experiences customers expect for their insurance policies. Our analysis finds that digital business and technology investments must be aligned to effectively support fundamental policyholder and claim processes. Ventana Research recommends that insurance organizations dramatically shift their technology investments to more agile and modern digital and cloud architectures that support the policyholder and a unified claims process approach.