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March 31, 2016 at 11:06 AM
Insurance agents and brokers are experiencing a major shift in what their customers and clients have come to expect.
By 2017, “digital natives” will dominate the workplace, which has huge implications for agents and brokers looking to engage with customers and grow their businesses. As the millennial generation matures and enters into its peak buying power, digital and more-automated ways of doing business will become a fundamental part of day-to-day workflows.
From the rise of mobile users and cloud-based technology to social media interaction, a Deloitte study on 2016 tech trends for insurance agents explains that insurance agents are finally realizing the need to be more nimble, efficient and accessible in order to serve today’s customer.
To add to this, there is a challenging regulatory environment that continues to grow among the insurance sector. A recent Deloitte report outlines that such regulations are no longer one between state and federal entities, but a hybrid of U.S. and state government regulation of insurance entities to ensure efficiency and adherence to state and federal standard procedures.
As a result, insurance agents not only feel pressured to digitize their workflow, but also must streamline business processes to make the cost of doing business more efficient and in-line with these regulations.
These complexities are challenging the fundamental ways agents and brokers have done business in the past. According to a Harvard Review report, insurance agents who embraced the digital practice reported a 65 percent cost reduction and a 90 percent reduction in turnaround time on key insurance processes.
Insurance organizations that are flexible, agile and can offer advanced technology to create the kind of business processes that today’s clients demand are the ones that pose a threat to the traditional, perhaps even larger insurance organizations.
The first step to staying ahead of these challenges in 2016 starts with deploying the right kind of technology among document management workflows and other daily business processes. In the end, the easier it is to onboard a customer and make agents more available to prospects and clients, the more insurance entities can grow their clientele, reduce operational inefficiencies and grow revenue.
While 63 percent of insurance businesses report that they are ready to move towards more digital practices, only 23 percent of these business are actually ready, reports a joint Forrester and Accenture study. To accelerate this process and ensure successful transition to digital workflows, there are three key areas we can expect insurers to embrace as they seek to create more automated, user-friendly processes.
1. Embracing a cloud-based and on-premise infrastructure
Just two years ago, 84 percent of companies were operating in the cloud and more than half of these companies reported that the cloud reduced the amount of work from IT teams, says PC World. Still, IT teams in the insurance sector struggled with what information is allowed by regulators to be stored via cloud vs. on-premise. To add to this, the proliferation of legacy technology is challenging the cloud-based-only approach. Many insurance entities are running off of 40-year old administration technology designed to manage the claims process, says a recent TrustMarque report. This kind of technology is hindering innovation, but insurance agents are far from instantaneously replacing such mainframe technology.
