Insurance businesses today are under immense pressure to serve savvier customers and faster-moving markets. To remain competitive, insurers are now looking at removing various inefficiencies in their processes, particularly in their back offices.
Getting a better digital insurance platform may be key to improving back office performance. Here are some of the ways current-generation insurance platforms may help empower your back office staff:
1.) Save Time with Faster, More Accurate Reporting
While older insurance systems may have formidable data management capabilities, extracting data from these systems and creating timely, transparent, and trustworthy reports could be challenging. This often means that creating reports could take up a considerable amount of time, making the information on them less relevant by the time they are presented.
Modern digital insurance platforms allow back office workers to spend less time on reports and more time acting on data. Current insurance software products now usually come with powerful reporting features, including straightforward report templates that could be modified for any need. Better automation features also remove much of the need for manual data consolidation during reporting.
2.) Stop Paying Fines and Penalties with Automatic Compliance
A failure to comply with legal requirements can result in fines or even a revocation of one’s insurance license. For this reason, most insurance companies take legal compliance very seriously.
In the past, compliance activities took up a significant amount of back office resources. With modern digital platforms, requirements for existing standards as well as incoming ones such as IFRS 17 and LDTI can be automatically complied with as soon as the correct data fields are filled out. These and other requirements can be taken care of in the background without the need for additional human input. This frees back office teams to do tasks that help grow the business directly.
3.) Improve Human Resource Management across the Whole Organization
Better insurance solutions can be used to effectively centralize and streamline human resource operations, allowing insurers to better hire and retain the best sales agents. This can be an important advantage, as high-quality customer experiences are highly dependent on competent, proactive sales teams.
Switching to an improved digital platform can also give HR teams a “single source of truth” for assessing employee metrics, even when employees are located in a different geographic area. This can be important for reducing employee attrition and maintaining high production and quality-of-life standards across entire organizations rather than at just one office.
4.) Reduce Billing Errors
Current digital insurance platforms are designed to make data immediately accessible to everyone in the organization that needs it. This reduces the need for manual data entry or ad hoc solutions using basic spreadsheet software.
One major benefit of taking human input out of the process is that billing errors can be reduced considerably. Billing errors can take a lot of effort to correct, and most of these fixes have to be facilitated by back-office personnel. By reducing the need for human inputs, the rate of billing errors can also be reduced, freeing up back-office workers to do other important tasks.
5.) Amplify Customer Remarketing
Newer generations of insurance software enable better customer journeys through seamless and comprehensive remarketing. As soon as a policyholder is entered into the insurance management system, their information can be automatically extracted for the insurer’s marketing and product development programs. This speeds up remarketing cycles and eliminates data duplication and excessive siloing between departments.
New digital insurance platforms could even be set up to automatically send policyholders updates through their preferred channels. They could also be configured so that customers can make some modifications to their policy themselves, further reducing the workload on back-office personnel.
6.) Improve System Utilization
Many older insurance platforms, while powerful, often lacked a user-friendly interface. Even with extensive training, users regularly committed errors and system utilization was often poor. This often translated into work slowdowns and negative experiences for employees and policyholders.
Modern insurance platforms are now designed to be easier to use than ever. This improved user-friendliness, allowing back office personnel to use the system to its full potential while also reducing training and familiarization costs. This effectively helps improve the quality of life for back office personnel, allowing them to process more data.
7.) Develop and Deliver New Insurance Products Faster
Newer insurance platforms can also be used to quickly develop new product offers or create bespoke policies specific to one customer. Marketing, sales, and customer data on the system can be immediately compared and analyzed with confidence, allowing product managers to quickly develop and deliver innovative products in an increasingly crowded insurance market.
8.) Engage with Clients Whenever
New systems include highly configurable AI-enhanced customer service modules. These can be used to effectively reduce the load on customer service teams by automatically addressing common customer service concerns over the phone, through chat, or email.
These modules allow customer service teams to concentrate on facilitating important claims rather than on less important but more common issues. Additionally, these AI-enabled tools can be used to address customer queries off-hours, on weekends, and during holidays, effectively raising customer service levels without making additional hires.
Should You Update Your Digital Insurance Platform?
If you want your insurance business to be more responsive, agile, and competitive, it’s important to look at the performance of your back offices. And to improve back office performance effectively, it’s important to have an insurance platform that brings out the best in your teams.
Regardless of what business unit they’re in, employees are likely to enjoy some efficiency and quality of life benefits when newer systems are introduced. Newer digital platforms promise to remove most of the drudgework typical of back offices, allowing smaller teams to manage more data and serve more policyholders at higher service levels.
