Editor’s note: this is the eighth in our Solving For Tomorrow series, in which we offer our thoughts on the state of the insurance industry, the challenges carriers face now, and the opportunities they must take advantage of to remain competitive in an ever-changing future. Stay tuned in the coming months, as this will be a regularly published series. We hope you enjoy and learn, and we’re always happy to receive your questions and feedback. In case you missed it, you can read our last installment here.
In our last installment, we discussed implications for how carriers need to respond to forces shaping the P&C insurance industry, with a focus on services. In this installment, we delve into how carriers need to rethink their approaches to data.
Data
Mining for insight
Today’s reality:
There has been a proliferation of data created, driven by the increasingly omnichannel way in which customers interact with businesses. Most carriers have not been able to build processes and teams to fully capture, standardize and analyze that data. Without these internal processes and capabilities in place, it is difficult for teams to make use of the data in a meaningful way.
Tomorrow’s imperative:
Finding the needle of insight in the data haystack should become second nature as systems are automated to collect, sanitize, and share out relevant information. When it does, human energy can be focused on solving larger strategic questions around building a smarter business, a more profitable product set, and a more useful set of services.
Single view of the customer
Today’s reality:
Data is scattered in various formats and levels of fidelity across the organization. Analysis tends to be reactive and tactically-focused, rather than future-facing. Market research (e.g. segmentation) tends to be at too high a level to be mapped back to existing databases of behavioral data. There is no true insights-backed and agreed-upon view of customer behaviors and needs.
Tomorrow’s imperative:
Carriers need a robust and centralized view of how they are interacting with key policyholder groups. This single view of what’s important needs to be widely shared across silos so differing groups know what they are collectively working toward and how each group contributes to the overall experience. It should provide a roadmap that directs all product, sales and service initiatives. By extension, this single source of truth holds everyone in the organization accountable to a more customer-centric way of collaborating and problem solving.
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
At the end of the day, we hope this work sheds some light on the dynamics and imperatives of our P&C world. While the sheer magnitude of the shifts we’ve described may seem daunting, we find energy and hope in the opportunities created by change. There has never been a more exciting time to be in our line of work – as the industry materially redefines and reshapes itself.
In this new world order, speed is competitive advantage and IT is an enabler of innovation. But getting there requires the right technology partner to move designs for the future from possibility to reality. Duck Creek’s role in this extraordinary time is to help carriers bridge the gap between ambition and feasibility. To learn more, subscribe to our blog for more insights or contact us.
