Before tackling how change should happen, it is very important to understand why change is needed. According to Roland Scharrer, the group’s chief data and emerging technology officer, AXA, this is because the primary relationship between insurer and insured is changing. “You’re building a partnership with the client and you shouldn’t be seen once a year.” This is part of AXA’s ‘from payer to partner’ strategy.
“If more consumers invest in their connected devices – cars, homes, watches – you’re partnering with them,” added James Barnard, CIO, Aviva tech shared services and divestments. “Wherever they go, they are with you. You look like an difficult guardian. ”
There is no doubt that there are definitely many more opportunities through digital transformation to play a bigger role in consumers ’lives-increasing engagement and, ultimately, ROI. But it is also a place to tread lightly. “It’s important to lead on what the customer wants and where we think we can add value to the process,” warns Anita Fernqvist, UK chief data officer and director of operations, Zurich Insurance. He said not every step of every insurance relationship requires ‘white glove’ treatment. Simple, automated efficiency can also add value.
“That point of interaction can be touchless, it can be automatic, it can be empathy – it can be all three,” announced Chirag Jindal, head of insurance, Americas, ServiceNow. “Insurance is a promise and we need to end the narrative of the customer’s journey with that promise in mind. But how do you incorporate that into the technology to deliver it and let the customer choose – that’s the problem we’re trying to solve.” And, he added, “we need to be cohesive”.
Here is the biggest challenge insurers face. There are customer expectations, set not by other insurers but by the likes of Netflix, Amazon and ASOS. They just hope the process works. Enabling that process end-to-end, whatever happens, is far from simple.
“You expect a lot in a digital experience like Amazon but insurance is a very complex product and you have to serve the client in specific moments of reality,” Scharrer warns. This is something that insurance companies may have been doing for centuries, but while that delivers a large amount of experience, it also carries some important hurdles.
You expect a lot in a digital experience like Amazon but insurance is a very complex product and you have to serve the client in specific moments of reality.
“For an organization like ours, the real challenge is updating our core infrastructure, cloud capabilities, robotics and intelligent automation to bridge what consumers expect of us today,” Barnard announced. Being always available, using digital currency and providing a seamless transition to what could, often, be 70-plus years of legacy estate.
So the unity that Jindal mentions is starting to look like a pipe dream, given the size of the challenge. The challenge of bringing a comprehensive, global insurer with decades of legacy systems and customer information into a seamless, end-to-end experience in a single, orderly action.
We should add to this that the insured are not just large organizations, they serve a wide diverse audience. “We have very different customer segments and that means one size doesn’t fit all. We need to be clear on what real-time really brings to customers, for example. Elsewhere, [the importance could be] dominated by relationships [interactions] with digital interventions, rather than end-to-end, ”Fernqvist stressed.
Sometimes, there seem to be obstacles at every turn. The cloud transformation, for example, is seen as bringing major improvements in insurers ’ability to overcome legacy issues, but it also has its own set of challenges. “On the one hand, we need the cloud to provide infrastructure elasticity, size and availability,” Scharrer said, “and at the same time you must ensure a high level of data privacy standards.” And yet, he added, change the legacy environment.
How the data is treated in the change phase is critical. As a heavily regulated industry, one could argue that insurance really has an advantage in the face of a public skeptical of the data. Its confidence certainly falls as a result of strictly defined parameters. Fernqvist agrees: “Trust is critical. For us to serve [our customers’] needs, we need their data. We need to handle it the way we got it and maintain that trust. Regulation helps us protect our customers and make sure we build with the customer in mind. ”
Data management, therefore, is a major concern and again, due to the often diffuse and complex nature of insurance organizations, not one that is easily managed. “Ethical use of data is very important. We have 18.5 million unique customers and that’s a huge amount of data. The use of third-party enrichment increases the level of play but comes with more responsibility, ”Barnard suggests.
Scharrer added that developing a data-driven or data-fed culture is critical. He said it’s about bringing “a data -driven culture that is understood from the manager of claims to business decision makers. Bringing the entire organization behind it, whether through incentivisation or management, so that it is be protected and used as an asset. ”
Of course, it can only be used as an asset if the right people can access the right information at the right time. Organizing where data is held and how it fits into diverse workflows can be a task of surprising complexity, but Jindal has some suggestions that are closely related to how it can be. work more effectively integrating new channels and technologies across the organization as a whole.
At every point of the journey, everyone should know what the status is. How you organize that has been the biggest challenge insurers are talking about.
“You need some kind of orchestration layer that can tie in broker experience to middle and back offices, and bring that across the value chain,” he advises. “At every point of the journey, everyone should know what the status is. How you organize that is the biggest challenge insurers are talking about.” Specifically from a data organization perspective, he added: “How do you present the right data to the right people at the right time? You don’t want to overwhelm them. What exactly does a claims agent or customer service operative need to look at?” Fernqvist agrees, saying: “One of the big challenges with data is knowing what needs to be centralized but how we make sure we’re decentralized to allow change.”
Change in this context is key. The world is moving fast and insurers need to take advantage of the latest technologies – themselves relying heavily on data quality – to stay ahead of the game. Scharrer teaches the use of AI to be able to ingest other data sources such as documents, images and satellite technology to speed up and enrich customer interactions but warns about being too hasty and insists on importance. of data quality. “There was an expectation that AI would solve all of our problems with databases and customer journeys. But people realized it was still hard work.
However, Barnard didn’t hold back: “Cognitive learning is a very powerful tool. That’s where we start unlocking the value of rich data and that has come a long way over the past three years.” This whole process, according to Barnard, “was a really exciting journey that we had just begun.”
To learn how ServiceNow can enable digital transformation and improve experiences in your organization, visit servicenow.com/transform-insurance