Digital is a major force for disruption in the Insurance Industry and Insurers have now new tools to increase the quality of customer interactions and strengthen customer relationships, in order to achive a greater operational efficiency and to ensure a better customer experience.
In this scenario, the Insurers are pursuing new and different ways of delivering value, which involves emerging business models, processes, information sources and technologies.
The digital transformation is changing the insurance business and most CIOs both from life and P&C insurers are committed to support the digital transformation of their enterprises.
In Italy, for example, according to the Assintel report 2014 (“Assintel: Associazione Nazionale Imprese ICT”),[pullquote position=”right”] the Insurers’ IT innovations priorities in 2015 will be driven by the needs of customizing the insurance products to offer innovative and engaging services with an omni-channel approach. [/pullquote]Thus, the top spending priorities of Insurers’ investments in 2014 and 2015 focus on the multichannel development (58% of the investments), on Big Data (60%) and on digitization of the information (61%).
Insurers are actively embracing mobile technologies, cloud computing, analytics and other digital and innovative technologies in order to be prepared for the ongoing changes and to be able to leverage data in real time to improve operations, to move from paper to electronic communications, to set up and strengthen the digital channels, while promoting efficiency and effectiveness of the sales force.
At the same time, also the customers are facing the digital evolution. Today customers manage an increasing number of devices in a complex environment. Their expectation is that every device will be integrated with the others and offer the same services.
Today customers have the need to become “personal architects” to manage the interoperability across a growing number of devices and applications and, at the same time, the Insurers have to avoid to target single device, that are unintegrated and could cause troubles in terms of unsynchronized data, inconsistent user experience and lack of application availability across platforms.
This is the reason why [pullquote position=”right”]one of the most important aspect for the insurance business is to deliver a positive user experience that satisfies the needs of both the traditional clients and the digital natives, giving exactly the same user experience on the different channels.[/pullquote]
In fact, if it is right that everyone is the “architect” of its personal devices, but we cannot forget that not everyone thinks like an architect and for this reason the usage of different devices needs to be shaped on the customers’ needs and expectations.
The insurance digitalization implies the shift of the fundamental business model to support electronic channels, content and transactions, while keeping to support the traditional business practices that cannot be ignored.
The moment to act is now and Insurers should upgrade their business to a new “digital” world, with a customer-centric approach that can add value and differentiate theirself from the competitors.