- 27-07-2020
- Admin
- Insurance Digital Services Data and Analytics
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Abstract
Today’s digitally-connected consumers often demand that insurers must become easier to conduct business with. As a consequence, an insurance agent’s emphasis has to change from encompassing price differentiators to also delivering a delightful experience across all channels and devices. To impress upon their customers with the unique value proposition of their products, agents need to be empowered with digital interaction tools that help them engage with customers and meet their expectations. This is reflected by the key digital trends in the insurance industry - be it with improving customer experience by utilizing capabilities like Chatbots, making smart decisions using Analytics, Machine Learning, and AI, or with personalized content and product offerings. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the digitally-enabled sales process has become even more critical for agents. Agents who depended on worksite-based selling have to adapt to the new reality of worksites being mostly closed and most employees working remote. Coforge’ Agent Experience Platform is designed with these new digital initiatives by insurance carriers in mind by leveraging the emerging technologies. The platform’s focus is on strengthening the relationship between carriers and agents. This solution makes it easier to not only generate sales but also assist the insurers in developing a long-term relationship with customers.
Agents Caught in the Throes of Change
Agents, as valuable touchpoints for the insurance companies, are the critical link between the insurers and customers. They are instrumental in tailoring the right coverage to customers based on their needs and demands. Customer groups highlight the need and value of personal interaction during the insurance product purchase process, though its degree varies based on the transaction and the insurance product complexities. Overall, insurance agents are the lynchpins that guarantee the integrity and efficiency of the insurance sales cycle.
Agents are currently quite concerned about the digital capabilities and tools that the insurance carriers provide them. Therefore, in order to incentivize agents, insurance carriers need to invest in new-age technologies to smoothen the agents’ sales journey, which would, in turn, lead to more sales.
Agent’s Journey Maps: Understanding the Pain Points
As product complexity grows and customer requirements diversify, agent responses to customers need to encompass not only the price differentiators but also a nuanced articulation of the unique value proposition of the specific products. In the final analysis, agents need to ensure that all queries and concerns are completely addressed and build a trusting and caring relationship with the customer. In this context, agent journey maps are a great way for insurers to gain deeper understanding of the requirements and the pain points of the agents. This can, in turn, help prioritize their investments in the right areas for maximum impact.
Seamless Experience Platform – Connecting Agents, Carriers, and Customers
Our Agent/Broker platform provides a seamless experience empowering the key stakeholders of the Insurance carriers to do their business effectively. Designed using Sitecore ® -based CMS platform, it provides off-the-shelf capabilities and a range of widgets to create customizable experiences. Our solution is flexible to work with other content platforms which the carriers have already invested in or are planning to. Personalized experiences connect agents with insurance carriers better and help them overcome the challenges of selling a complex product like Insurance. It also provides many features required for assessing the risk more effectively.
Leveraging our extensive and in-depth experience with agents and insurance companies, Coforge has built a unique quote-to-policy solution. The agent experience platform has evolved based on our interactions with multiple agents and understanding the issues they face while doing business with the insurance companies. We have used our design-thinking framework to get to the root of these challenges and formulated an agent journey map to understand a typical agent’s perspective. We are also able to draw on our vast repositories of in-depth expertise in the business and advanced technologies.
How to Empower Business Users?
Empowered business users are vital to the success of any solution. So, we asked ourselves, what is the best way to empower insurance carriers and their business? How can we ensure that the business assumes ownership of preparing the agents better? Our solution encapsulates many complex scenarios and the typical agent sales journey map in an easy-to-use design. This helps agents to focus more on their sales process rather than on product complexity.
Supporting Empowered Agents through their Sales Journey
Virtual Meeting Platforms: The solution enables agents to work with their prospective customers to do need analysis, walkthrough product features, and illustrations, and submit applications.
eSignature: Enabling fully digital application submission and policy delivery process.
Onboarding: The solution enables a simplified and online boarding process, which reduces paperwork and helps to attract today’s digitally perceptive agents.
Customer Insights: Through the use of advanced data analytics technology, agents are presented with insights about their prospects. This can help them provide a better-customized offering to their prospects.
Dashboard: The dashboard feature enables agents to have a better understanding of customer segmentation, geographical analysis, quote histories, conversion rates, cost of sales, and profitability rates.
Simplified Processes: Enhanced technologies for document capture and management, electronic signature, and workflow management can help agents reduce their time-to-market.
Ease of Implementation - Customize and Scale
The Agent Experience Platform enables an easy-to-use, customizable, and scalable solution for the insurers to design a portal for their agents. The loosely-coupled Sitecore®-based solution offers a rapid development environment for the IT-enablers whereas our mature agile practice helps us release decoupled features with an aggressive time-to-market.
Digital E3 – True Care for Agents and Customers
Success, these days is defined by not just digital operational excellence but the creation of emotionally empathetic experiences for customers, employees, and business partners. We enable these experiences through specific digital services using advanced digital technologies.
A comprehensive ‘Digital E3’ (Emotional Empathetic Experience) system addresses the challenges that agents face at every step of their journey. Applying ‘Digital E3’ in Insurance goes a long way in making people feel cared for and delivering digital services that evolve as industry needs shift.
Business Benefits
- Improved inquiry-to-buy ratio
- Seamless and consistent customer experience across platforms
- Improved agent retention
- Improved branding
- White-labeled portals for agent’s own customized store-front with a range of localization and customization abilities and integration with the insurers
- Ability to rapidly deploy in new territories
- Improved Time-to-market for insurers for agent portal launch and direct customer portal launch
- Optimized operational efficiency
- Ease of integration with multiple channels
- Reduced administrative costs
- Improved agent productivity
- Enhanced cross and upselling of products
- Centralized content management
- Self-Learning tools
- Commission dashboards
Digital Readiness of Agents Shifts Business into High Gear
Traditional systems built for yesterday’s economy can scarcely meet the expectations of today’s customers. Adopting new technology is vital for delivering close-knit omnichannel experiences that meet the expectations of both agents and customers. Digitally-ready agents with tools that provide them with proactive insight into customers and their risk coverage assessment transform from being hindered by administrative paperwork into an area of robust sales growth. Coforge’ agent experience platform offers a perfect solution that empowers the agents while also providing a much smoother experience to the end-customers. The solution enables you to create tailor-made digital experiences and take the lead in the omnichannel insurance revolution.
