Whether you are just beginning your insurance transformation journey, well en route, or encountering a detour, there is no doubt that as digital technologies continue to reshape the insurance industry, remaining agile is crucial to meeting your future goals. To help you adapt your business capabilities for the journey and measure your progress along the way, here are three key insights:
1. Keeping Customers – and Employees – at the Fore
In the drive to transform, broadening your focus from improving an individual transaction to enhancing the experience of being your customer is key to achieving a successful transformation. Understanding every customer’s journey, with their needs, problems, and interactions with your company, gives you the opportunity to identify their pain points and tailor your transformation to resolve them.
However, as much as everything in the transformation journey must be customer-centric, equally as important is the employee. Behind the scenes of a business transformation, there must be equal effort directed to improving the employee experience. Questions should be asked around the ease of processing data. If process automation is one of your goals, look at enabling your employees to achieve more and add value to their daily responsibilities. You could undo all your transformation efforts by not bringing your employees along on the journey.
The claims process has changed substantially with the implementation of straight-through processing. The ability of a customer to submit a claim online, have it automatically adjudicated, and paid, means a process that used to take many days can now be completed, with the customer paid, often in less than five minutes. Working alongside adjudicators, analytics can flag claims for closer inspection, priority handling, and more, thereby enhancing both the customer and employee journeys.
2. Unlocking Insights from Business Data
One of the ways that organizations can achieve a successful business transformation is by taking a closer look at their own business data and learning from it. Every organizational process, from customer-facing transactions to internal support, creates data and within that data lies business intelligence.
Although accruing business intelligence requires a combination of business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices, its value lies in its ability to give you a comprehensive view of your company’s data. This information gives you the ability to take a data-driven approach to supporting your employees, improving your products, and retaining customers.
Consider the process of underwriting insurance. Although often considered a time-consuming, manual task, the ability to streamline and improve it is game-changing. By leveraging data-driven insights from both customers and employees, you can implement extensive digital capabilities that will reduce human error, automate workflows, and increase efficiency. Data analytics is playing an increasingly important role in the insurance business to improve underwriting processes.
3. Measuring Your Success Along the Way
On any journey, the best way to measure how far you’ve traveled is to define what success means and looks like to you, and then assess your progress against those goals. You need to understand where you are, what you can be, and how to get there.
Organizations are often challenged to measure their progress, either in employee processes or against goals on their transformation journey. They don’t have an accurate representation of how quickly they are progressing on their journey, whether they have the right tools, or if they are providing the right support, knowledge, and training. They know they’re spending time and money, but they’re unsure how to measure their progress and success.
Business intelligence provides the answer. By using the business insights discussed earlier, you can choose the appropriate metrics to determine the distance to your milestones. Be sure to select key, measurable metrics that can provide useful information both during and after the transformation is complete.
Transformation programs will often forecast the vision, cost, and benefits. Supporting the electronic submission and processing of life applications or claims relates directly to digital revenue. The capabilities to process applications automatically will be measured using converted revenue through applications submitted electronically. Measurable metrics give you the agility to adapt and respond to the changes as they occur in the program.
Guideposts for the Journey
You should think of your digital transformation journey in years, not months, as real change can take three to five years and often requires multiple projects. Maintaining your focus on customers and employees, unlocking existing business insights, and measuring your own success are three strategies to consider that can help you achieve your transformation goals.
