“Inaccurate and outdated information can lead to miscommunications with policyholders, delayed or denied claims processing, misrepresentation of risk, and even compliance issues, which can snowball into operational inefficiencies, extra administrative costs, regulatory violations and customer dissatisfaction,” Brown says. “Staying on top of your data should truly be a priority.”

Keeping it clean
With clean data, insurers can streamline claims processing, more accurately assess and price risk, better customize offerings to customers, and more easily identify opportunities to cross- and upsell — all benefits that help keep customers happy and grow the business. So, how can insurers get started on purging the dirty data lurking in their databases?

“The bottom line is that you want to create a plan that helps maintain accurate, consistent and up-to-date data throughout the policyholder life cycle,” says Brown. “Initially, that involves establishing clear data governance policies.”

Brown suggests outlining the roles and responsibilities of the data management team across the organization. After that, it’s all about performing regular data audits to identify and correct errors, duplicates and inconsistencies, and monitoring “leakage points” to fix the cleanliness of the data coming in from different ingestion points. The following five-step data hygiene plan will help keep insurers on track:

Implement tools that automatically add valid address information. Using auto-complete when signing up new policyholders ensures insurance professionals select the correct address and populate it into the required fields. This not only requires fewer keystrokes, it also reduces errors introduced by manual data entry, and ensures only valid addresses are entered into the system.

Scrub marketing and policyholder databases twice a year. As mentioned earlier, moving residences is a reality for many Americans each year. To help keep up with the information churn, insurers can run their information through a data-cleaning program twice yearly. They can also can tap into the USPS as a resource. It maintains a National Change of Address database that can help insurers keep updated records so that they don’t waste time and money on undeliverable mail.

Update missing address, phone and email data. Completing records for policyholders — that is, entering missing pieces of information like email addresses or phone numbers — enriches your records and helps insurers reach their policyholders through their preferred communication channel.

Dedupe your policyholder database. Sending duplicate communications to the same policyholder is the best way to show them that you don’t really know them. Eliminate unnecessary communications and also gain insight into your policyholders by merging duplicate information. This can also help insurers stay abreast of policyholder preferences that may have been marked for one duplicate record but not the other.

Hunt for new prospects that are similar to your best policyholders. One way to find new prospects is to understand (accurate) details about your best policyholders, and apply that information to design targeted new-business campaigns.

Brown points to the work he and Melissa have done to help insurers conquer the dirty data challenge: from designing a data hygiene plans to executing all five steps outlined here. He notes that clean data will end up helping insurers’ business, and opens other opportunities.
“Fundamentally you need an accurate address and location,” says Brown. “And then the opportunities are endless as far as how you can enrich that to benefit business decisions and risk assessment.”