What You Need to Know
- Insurtech is great for connecting insurers with customers.
- You're a person, too.
- Better tech can lead to better communication, which can build trust.
The insurance’s industry’s intense focus on improving the customer experience, which has accelerated over the last five to ten years, has been remarkable. Thanks to the efforts of carriers and their technology partners to reimagine the way they interact with customers, leveraging developments in cloud, APIs and microservices, the experience of purchasing insurance, making a claim or simply getting answers to basic questions has undergone a massive transformation.
There’s still a lot of work to be done, of course, as legacy technology is unwound and we continue the transition to what we like to call “modern coretech,” but the progress the industry has made in providing a better experience for customers is undeniable.
Less attention has been paid to what modern core technology can do for another critical constituency: the insurance agent. As the industry has transitioned from a traditional model that tended to be highly transactional and product-focused to one that is more customer-centric, the focus on the agent experience has taken a back seat.
That’s unfortunate, because despite the strides the industry has made in making products simpler and easier to understand, customers still need the critical advice and guidance that only an agent can provide, especially when it comes to complicated life insurance or annuity offerings.
Happily, one of the side effects of carriers transitioning from legacy technology to modern, cloud-based coretech is the opportunity it gives them to simultaneously transform both the customer experience and the agent experience. Here are five ways modern coretech is changing the way agents work.
1. A Consistent Experience
In the era of legacy technology, there was no easy way to create a common experience for agents and insurance buyers. Systems were commonly built from scratch, resulting in gaps and inconsistencies between what the customer was seeing and information that the agent could access. By enabling persona-based applications that leverage and connect to a common, consistent set of data, it is now possible to provide agents the same smooth digital experience that customers enjoy, but tailored to their specific needs and including the most critical data they need to run their practice.