How insurance technology will enable more humanized experiences
Closing the gap between insurers and consumers is the essence of insurance humanization.
Humanized experiences happen across every touchpoint of the insured’s journey through the insurance lifecycle.
Consider the large multi-line North American commercial insurer creating an intuitive website that makes it quicker and simpler for members to get a quote and buy auto and home insurance.
But humanized insurance experiences aren’t just about the pre-bind activities; they can and absolutely should occur during the moment of truth in delivering on the promise of insurance.
Closing the gap between insurers and consumers is the essence of insurance humanization. It’s also about helping consumers realize the full value of their policies.
Having the right technology stack in place — one that connects insurers to their customers more directly and authentically to build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships — is critical to achieving humanized experiences. Continuous updates in SaaS core systems will make it easier for insurers to enhance their operations, organization and ways of working — creating more humanized experiences and earning them the right to serve their customers for life.
How upgrades can block innovation
A trend in the insurance industry is that core systems have continued to evolve from legacy mainframes and hosted on-prem to “evergreen” SaaS. Evergreen means the systems are always up-to-date and flexible solutions that can adapt to your business’s ever-changing requirements.
The initial SaaS core systems have provided a marked improvement over the prior generation of those on-prem systems. With the technology upgrades, insurers have improved their operational efficiency as upgrade projects have improved over time. While these initial SaaS core systems have delivered new features, insurers have had to wait a long time for them, and this approach has not always been optimal for enabling insurers to design humanized experiences.
The good news is that SaaS core systems continue to evolve and are becoming even more evergreen than before! How is that?
The paradigm is shifting from faster upgrades to no more upgrades, whereby insurers benefit from continuous updates, including new features, resolved issues, and security patches. Think of this as an ongoing delivery of features that promote software performance while ensuring flexible adoption and flagging for insurers so they maintain complete control over their technology systems.
The value behind continuous updates for core insurance systems
In addition to being able to exchange timely and costly upgrade projects that put other priorities on pause in exchange for taking automated updates, a major benefit is that insurers receive enhancements more frequently. In the past, insurers may have been tempted to customize their core systems independently rather than relying on the technology ecosystem and new capabilities. Product roadmaps are much more fluid in a continuous update cycle, and capabilities can be implemented much sooner.
Continuous updates are dynamic; dynamic means value is delivered continuously over time, resulting in insurers getting more quality features faster, with less work effort, ensuring that they can use new features and have a more resilient, scalable, performant, and secure system.
Bringing technology back to humanized experiences
To sum it all up, by increasing the speed of delivery and reducing the work, continuous updates will provide insurers with more value and enable them to innovate faster when reimagining humanized experiences. Whether it’s creating safer roads or getting the injured worker back to the office more quickly, having technology that is constantly evolving and improving frees up insurers to focus on configuring only as needed rather than trying to customize systems because they lack capabilities.
Nick Lien is vice president of Product at Duck Creek Technologies. Any opinions expressed here are the author’s own.
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