We recently posted a poll on where insurers see digital transformation making the biggest impact on their business. Decision Management Solutions has helped many leading insurance businesses modernize over the years – so we have lots of experience in this area – but we were curious where others were focused.
Well, the results are in and here’s what we found:
Top of the list was the automation of claims handling with over half of respondents putting it as their number one. This was not a surprise, as claims is a great place to apply digital decisioning and digital transformation more broadly. Fast, accurate claims handling improves the customer experience and being able to effectively detect fraud and waste is critical.
As one commenter said “It’s expensive to maintain a trained workforce in this area and customers expect fast, perfect-the-first-time service.” Plus, many legacy claims platforms are built around an assumption of human intervention that is increasingly insupportable in a digitized, always-on, real-time world. If you’re not already digitizing your claims handling decisions, call us and we’ll share our experience.
Next Best Offer or Next Best Action came in second, with about a quarter of respondents. This is slightly lower than we expected. We’ve seen great results for multi-line insurers when they add an intelligent cross-sell or up-sell decision to their sales process. One CFO described our approach to next best offer as “..like finding dollar bills lying in the street. The ROI is enormous and the effort tiny.” Perhaps some respondents were put off by worries about integrating their agent channel or that offers might not be compliant. These are problems our #decisionsfirst approach addresses particularly effectively. If you’re a multi-line insurer, this is a great focus area so get in touch if you want to learn more.
Agency Management brought up the rear with only about 1 in 8 of respondents identifying it as key. This is a pity as using intelligent decisioning to improve agency management has proven to be very effective in getting new agents productive more quickly, in rapidly onboarding and certifying agents and in calculating commissions and fees. Lots of good agency management use cases for those who rely on agents, either tied or independent.
How about the Others?
Underwriting is probably what most were thinking of when they selected this option. We see some real value in automating some underwriting decisions – more consistency, more data about how underwriting decisions were made and the ability to target your human underwriters more effectively on high value activities. Plus, you get to learn from your own data, rather than hand it over to the company that provides you with an underwriting engine.
Digital decisioning is a critical component of digital transformation in insurance. Claims handling, next best offer, agency management and underwriting can all be transformed when you apply decisioning technology like business rules, machine learning and AI effectively.
If you didn’t have a chance to complete our poll we’d still love your feedback, please reach out if you would like to discuss or have questions about how you can digitize your business.