AICorner OfficeExpert Opinion

How Technology Is Enabling Tectonic Shifts in the Insurance Sector

insurance

Evolving customer demands, new-age technologies, and data-driven processes are the key business drivers in today’s changing times. While change can be good, it has presented multiple challenges for the insurance industry, including commoditization of product offerings, inadequate user experience, poor quality of analytical data, channel overload, and legacy system-induced technical burden. New-age technologies can help insurers ace these challenges.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of most in-demand technologies by insurers:

  • Predictive analytics can help insurers collect various customer data that can help understand, assess, and predict customer behavior. It can also be used for pricing and risk calculation, identifying risk of fraud, and anticipating industry trends.
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with automated processes, can enable insurers to deploy solutions and deliver a swift and personalized customer experience. Insurers can decrease the claims turnaround cycle and make the entire underwriting process more efficient.
  • Machine learning can be used to automate the claim processing where documents can be analyzed through pre-programmed algorithms. It can check for authenticity and identify fraudulent claims.
  • Lowcode capabilities reduce enterprise application development time considerably. Web-based drag-and-drop features and reusable application components of low code platforms help speed up the application designing process. This ensures that insurers can bring their new product offerings faster to market and incorporate changes at the shortest notice to deliver value to the business.

Digitally Transforming The  Insurance Landscape: A Deep-dive into Claims Processing

Claims processing is a critical aspect of the insurance business and is inherently complex. Accurate processing can thwart off fraudulent claims, saving millions. And insurers also need to do it faster to ensure customers are satisfied.

Insurance leaders need to take strategic technology investment decisions to optimize the claims process. Rather than digitalizing insurance workflows in fragments, insurers should prioritize automating and deploying end-to-end digitization of customers’ claims journey to achieve higher efficiency and transparency in the claim settlement process. This will allow the insurer and the insured to digitalize various aspects of the process, including the claim initiation, first notice of loss, loss assessment, settlement of claims, and automate the claim management through AI. Automating the end-to-end journey will help in establishing a transparent environment.

Insurers can employ AI-assisted intelligent case management that enables the system to automatically identify the next suitable step for the case, thereby reducing manual hand-offs. In the insurance industry, advanced analytics and claims predictive modeling can use the internal corporate data and external data sources to identify fraudulent claims, increasing transparency. The models can also recognize policyholders who are most likely to submit fraudulent claims even before it is submitted, an action that is valuable in underwriting.

For Every Digital Transformation Initiative,Customer-centricity is the Key 

Challenges come with opportunities, and insurance carriers have started to realize this. The modern customer holds the dominating position, directly influencing the insurer’s decisions, and therefore, it is vital for the industry to find new methods to become more adaptive and agile.

Personalized and omni-channel engagement acts as a critical enabler in driving customer loyalty and longevity. Insurers must design a customerfirst culture and be able to deliver services based on their evolving demands. The real value lies in mapping the customer journey and drawing insights using predictive analytics. These insights can be leveraged to fine-tune processes to increase customer engagement and improve decision-making.

Key Takeaways

With the help of technologies such as automation, predictive analytics, machine learning, and low code capabilities, insurance organizations can improve their flexibility, increase efficiency, decrease costs, and deliver exceptional customer support. Insurance organizations that can incorporate the right technology will be able to operate more efficiently, increase transparency,build meaningful customer relationships, and will be the insurance leaders of today and tomorrow.

(The author, Shantanu Tewari is Head of Insurance Practice at Newgen Software and the views expressed in this article are his own)

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