How Insurance Firms Can Emerge From the Pandemic Stronger
Dun & Bradstreet is a Business Reporter client.
Insurance, like almost every industry, has suffered from the disruptions caused by Covid-19. But for all the irreversible changes to our lives and livelihoods, there have also been invaluable lessons learned—and insurers have an opportunity to emerge stronger from the pandemic.
By embracing, investing in and successfully implementing the right technologies, insurers can enhance operational efficiencies and reestablish their value proposition. By leveraging the capabilities of digital and data, insurers can also gain a better understanding of the needs and desires of customers.
Digital transformation of the insurance industry
Covid-19 quickly made it apparent that firms that had embraced digital technologies were better placed to navigate the pandemic’s prolonged challenges. But the onus is now on the entire industry to invest in digital technology, enhance operational efficiency and move forward as one.
For insurers, digitalization can remove significant costs and reduce time-consuming manual work. Smart contracts can also offer significant benefits to policyholders by streamlining the overall claims process, cutting down on delays and reducing uncertainty in the event of a loss.
By embracing emerging technologies such as blockchain, automation and artificial intelligence (AI), firms can also reduce unnecessary paperwork. These technologies will also play a pivotal role in preventing fraud in smart contracts, and free up staff to focus on more fulfilling and business-critical tasks.
Insurance firms take on a more advisory role
There’s now an opportunity for insurers to demonstrate their added value to customers. One important way is to take on an educational, advisory role. Among other benefits, if a claim doesn’t occur in a policy life cycle, customers can still expect to feel that they got what they paid for.
Cybersecurity insurance is one area where this is already happening, with firms advising clients on preventive measures to avoid a breach in the first place—and then, when needed, responding to incidents. Ultimately, it’s about being proactive rather than reactive, and informing behavioral change in an organization to help prevent loss.
Operating in this way means that firms can build better relationships with customers and meet their evolving needs. Advising customers also supports loss prevention rather than loss indemnity, which is beneficial because not only does it give customers more control to reduce premiums, crucially, it also helps to improve claim ratios and insurer profits.
Using both internal and external data completes the view
Data is central to the running of any successful insurance firm, from helping to better understand customers, to risk assessment and analysis of the full extent of a claim. If insurers hope to improve their value proposition to attract new customers (and retain old ones), leveraging insights from enhanced data analytics will be the key to becoming more customer-centric.
To achieve this, however, first-party data alone is not enough. Insurers, like banks, have valuable information on their customers, but most of it is their own internal data—and that’s just half of the picture. Insurers should be looking to combine this with external data sources to develop a complete view of customers.
This high-resolution view of customers can breed operational efficiencies across the value chain, from onboarding them quicker and enriching their experiences with fewer questions for them to answer, to understanding their wants and needs and knowing exactly which innovative products and services are required to meet them.
Become more data-driven and customer-centric with D&B
The insurance sector today has a unique opportunity to leverage the capabilities of digital and data to drive innovation and become more customer-centric—and increase the bottom line.
Get in touch today to learn more about how D&B’s world-leading business-decisioning data and insights can help you proactively meet customer demands, seize the digital opportunity and emerge stronger from the pandemic.
— James Harrison, Head of Insurance, U.K. & Ireland, Dun & Bradstreet
This article originally appeared on Business Reporter. Image credit: iStock-1215138291
