If your insurance organization isn't digitizing, you'll lose clients
Insurance automation: Recent research illustrates a significant change in customer expectations.
The 2022 Agency Growth Study conducted by Liberty Mutual and Safeco reported that digital-first customer engagement has become the standard across industries. Roughly three out of five customer interactions happened online in 2022, compared to less than half in 2019.
While these stats don’t signify an end to in-person encounters, they do illustrate the significant change in customer expectations that companies need to keep up with.
The insurance industry is no exception. Although digitization in the industry grew during the pandemic, the study referenced above suggests insurance-industry modernization has begun to slow down.
The study also found that agencies that had invested in digitization grew 70% faster than agencies that hadn’t, revealing the importance of implementing digital transformation to stay competitive. For agencies still wary of digital transformation costs and processes, the question is actually: Can you afford not to/? Let’s explore.
Making a good first impression
We’re living in an increasingly digital world, where a well-designed user experience (UX) is vital for attracting and keeping customers.
It’s reported that 94% of first impressions are impacted by your website design, while a further 85% of users want a mobile experience that’s as good as on a desktop. Insurance agencies need to invest in the digital experience and craft intuitive online experiences for their customers to keep up with these expectations.
When 72% of customers say they would switch to a competitor after just one bad interaction, crafting a familiar, agency-branded UX is one way to improve the customer experience and increase brand loyalty. Automation can help provide seamless and effortless processes, where Smart Forms auto-fill and personalize the experience.
In fact, 85% of businesses indicated that they preferred to use online tools to submit their insurance applications. Automating brings consistency to the client and agent, reducing the room for human error and speeding application response times.
When quantifying the value of UX, customers say they would share a positive experience with an average of nine people. So you should ask yourself, as an insurance agency, are you providing the best possible customer experience? Improving the interactions between agents and insureds with intuitive UX is the best place to begin your digital transformation journey.
Automating for efficiency
For insurance agencies, crafting an intuitive UX is also beneficial for agents themselves. Online wizards for constructing submissions can reduce errors at the start of the process.
You can tailor each for to be pre-filled with a client’s existing data, as well as automating smart forms using conditional logic to show the next question based on the client’s previous answer. This is how automation speeds up the renewal process, helping iron out any errors before an application is submitted and soothing any friction that could impact customer satisfaction.
Automation can also help avoid human errors and exposure issues. For example, if an agent advises a company on what insurance to take but doesn’t offer flood protection, and then the building floods — the agent can be sued.
Automating the identification of client risk profiles and offering the correct coverage streamlines the customer experience. To refine internal processes, agencies need to invest in efficient data capture tools and dedicated insurtech software, rather than stay with outdated paper based systems and fragmented free versions of software services.
Investing in the digital transformation of your application and renewal processes also gives busy agents more time as they no longer have to chase clients for incomplete forms or minor errors. Agents can then focus on delivering an enhanced customer experience that differentiates them from competitors.
With more time and digital tools, like online Smart Forms, agents can automate their workflow and expand their research capacities. As a result, they can make improved offerings to clients and increase customer satisfaction.
Best practices
Digitization within the insurance industry is now a differentiating factor. Prospective clients are even asking what digital tools an insurance provider uses in order to assist their decision-making.
To stay competitive, the industry has been leveraging Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools for a while now to modernize and save costs. From product development to underwriting, claims, rating, billing, and more, automation is enabling agency success in the digital age while helping to establish industry best practices.
Better-managed data also means more informed business decisions as accurate information is available to assess risk and reduce costs. Implementing new insurtech tools successfully requires identifying key team members who can lead the way.
C-suite executives are pivotal to successful digital transformation, but IT decision-makers are also critical. Companies can also attract younger talent drawn to cutting-edge digital tools, to help solve the insurance industry talent crisis.
For those wary of the costs involved, it’s important to recognize that digitizing the client experience will improve customer trust and loyalty, which translates to customer retention and referrals.
Automating business operations is a fast-track way to increase customer satisfaction. Insurance agencies that recognize the importance of investing in UX will fuel their growth compared to those that continue to attempt to provide high-quality customer service with siloed and fragmented digital ecosystems or paper practices.
Jason Keck is founder and CEO of Broker Buddha.
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