What the transformed insurer of the future looks like

The world is changing fast, and insurance companies must accelerate digital transformation if they’re to keep up. Most insurers that I work with, from disruptive players to household names, have their journeys to widescale digitisation and automation long underway. But now’s the time to kick things up a notch. You need to capitalise on your momentum for change and meet growing customer demand for a personalised, meaningful partnership that goes beyond just the primary engagement.

Meeting evolving customer needs

Customers and distributors are pushing the need for accelerated transformation. Influenced by the likes of Netflix and Amazon, they now expect the same ease and convenience they experience with these services in any engagement—whether that’s reporting downtime, withdrawing money from a bank, or checking on an insurance claim.

Recently I joined a Raconteur roundtable, sponsored by ServiceNow, and held with industry experts from leading insurance companies. It quickly became apparent that end-to-end customer processes in insurance are ripe for transformation and optimisation. Every interaction, at any stage, can be touchless, automated, and empathetic.

At the same time, insurance is a complex product. Companies serve a massively diverse audience that’s divided into different customer segments, each with different needs. It seems almost absurd to try translating this complexity into ease for the customer when we’re still dealing with legacy infrastructure that dates back decades—not to mention a sprawling IT estate that makes it difficult to get work done.

Building trust into every interaction

Moving to the cloud is key in laying the groundwork for future automation and optimisation, providing the flexibility, efficiency, and agility that’s required for companies to shift and pivot with market changes. But the cloud comes with a whole new set of challenges that bring data use, privacy, and security into the spotlight.

It’s impossible to be customer-led without making use of data. In other words, to meet customers’ evolving needs, first you need to know what they want. As an industry, insurance has always been highly regulated. Instead of viewing data regulations as boxes to tick, see them as an opportunity to build trusting relationships with customers and to develop strong data governance practices that prove your ethical use of data.

At the Raconteur roundtable, a prevailing view was that building a data-led culture is a standout challenge. This isn’t about just developing transparent practices for collecting, storing, and processing data. To truly leverage data as an asset, it’s about ensuring stakeholders know the value of using data, getting the entire company behind your data strategy, and helping the right people find the right information at the right time.

Orchestrating a personalised journey

Since customer experience is comprised of much more than just the primary engagement, companies must look to tie together the front-, middle-, and back-office, to deliver across the entire value chain. Building an orchestration layer makes it easy for anyone involved in the customer journey to check the status of a query or incident, ensuring a seamless experience at every touchpoint, with this ease trickling down to the customer.

AI and automation will be key players in the drive to deliver value-added, personalised customer journeys. Deploying the right set of digital tools can help you process different data sources, while still ensuring a level of simplicity across the customer journey. But as pointed out at the Raconteur roundtable, just make sure you aren’t too quick to invest in solutions without the resources to ensure they fit seamlessly into the wider ecosystem.

What’s so exciting about insurance today is that we’re only at the start of our transformation journey. The possibilities seem endless, and with a single platform uniting your entire enterprise, you’ll unlock the visibility and agility to make continuous improvements as the world itself continues to change.

Find out how ServiceNow can accelerate digital transformation and improve experiences in your organisation by visiting servicenow.com/transform-insurance.

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