The Digital Insurer: Digital Differentiation
Digital technologies are enabling insurers to implement a differentiating business strategy – and prepare agents to support tomorrow’s customers.
Everywhere you look, mobile devices are empowering people with anytime, anywhere connectivity that allows them to access, share and discuss information. Consumers expect the businesses they deal with to be just as connected, but for insurers, enabling digital work styles is about much more than keeping up with the latest technologies. They need to choose the right platforms and devices that will support a differentiating business strategy, within the organization and beyond.
“All insurers have accessible mobile devices and ways to connect with clients and manage their business,” says David Chalmers, global black-belt for enterprise devices and mobility at Microsoft. “But staying ahead of the competition is not simply about providing anytime, anywhere working. Insurers need to think about the business principles they’re focusing on to differentiate themselves from the competition, and how the technologies and devices they put in the hands of their agents can support those strategic goals.”
Within that strategic picture, choosing the right technology is hugely important. “When we talk about digital devices such as tablets, smartphones and two-in-one devices like the incredible Surface Pro 4, the key question is how they can maximize productivity,” says Chalmers. “With these devices, insurers are enabling an agent who would normally go into the field with a few different devices such as a camera, a notepad, a smartphone and a rugged laptop, to collect all the information they need, take photos and notes and upload that information to the web using one or two devices. That’s why finding the right digital device to enable them to manage their business priorities is key.”
In particular, insurers face the unique challenge of ensuring that their choices work for independent agents as well as direct employees. “Decisions that the insurer makes, such as where to invest, where to build custom applications and so on, are very impactful downstream because the insurer’s partners and independent agents also need to interact with this ecosystem,” says Chalmers. “Insurers need to deliver the same robust environment to those contractors as they do to their office workers. They need to make clear the company’s business process, the applications it consumes, how to connect to its networks, which operating systems it supports and so on, and then to extend that beyond their own employees to make sure independent contractors such as claims adjusters and field agents have the ability to work in that enabled, any-device environment. Those independent contractors are free agents who work for several different companies, so insurers need to provide them with the easiest path to success.
“Microsoft is a trusted partner with an incredible portfolio of services to help the insurance industry,” says Chalmers. “For example, being able to put client data into an Azure cloud so it can be accessed securely anytime, anywhere, is hugely important. Independent contractors can be authenticated onto that framework to access client data and you can put the best productivity tools on the planet from Microsoft – with Office365, Dynamics, Skype for Business, Power BI and more – into their hands.”
Microsoft’s ongoing focus on enterprise-level security and manageability is enabling insurers to secure their digital assets with unprecedented simplicity across all use cases. “Microsoft is the leader in this space,” says Chalmers. “We enable device level, application-level and file-level management and security, as well as multi-factor authentication so insurers can have 100 per cent confidence that the data that is being consumed, edited and shared within their entire supply chain will not be compromised, whatever new industry regulations and security parameters and protocols arise. Most importantly, Microsoft is not only the best platform to keep pace with today’s challenges of data security, mobile productivity and increasing client demands, but we are the strongest partner when it comes to helping clients build frameworks that can exceed the future expectations of their customers.”
“Having to worry about separate management for different devices brings more complexity and more cost, and these have been key issues for insurers” explains Skand Mittal, worldwide industry lead, Mobility and Devices. “For example, many organizations have to rely on third-party software for multifactor authentication, which also impacts the end user experience because it introduces additional steps in the authentication process. But most insurers already have Windows technology, so they can manage their new Windows devices as they would their old ones. With Windows 10, multifactor authentication is core to the operating system. All the insurer needs to do is enable it depending on the type of authentication they want to deploy, whether that’s facial recognition, biometrics or a pin code sent through a mobile phone. We also include key capabilities like automatic encryption at the file level, without the user having to do anything – so if the user loses a USB stick, for example, they know that all the information on it is secure. We’re bringing PC-like management to mobile device management (MDM) software and we’re opening Windows so third parties who own MDM software can manage their mobile devices from the cloud with much more granularity than before. That will be key not only for the end user experience, but also from an enterprise capability, security and management point of view.”
“It’s much easier to make compliance part of a digital solution than it is with a paper solution,” says Hasan Imam, director of customer success and solutions at DocuSign. “Paper process breaks compliance: as soon as a piece of paper is printed out it’s very difficult to enforce how a person uses it and what processes they follow. DocuSign has built-in workflow capabilities and when you combine that with a leading customer relationship management system like Microsoft Dynamics CRM and policy administration solutions like Accenture Duck Creek, you can create an end-to-end process that makes compliance easier and a lot more enforceable.”
Providing secure access to information for mobile workers can eliminate the time lags associated with information that can only be accessed from the office desktop, empowering agents to sell more, work more efficiently and deliver better service to their clients. “With the Microsoft platform, agents can now manage everything in real time, right in front of the client,” says Chalmers. “Insurance companies can now grant both agents, and independent contractors, access to corporate and customer data in Azure, through a very secure dual factor authentication process. Now everyone has access to marketing brochures, policy information, claim adjustments are more. Combine secure access with real time data, then add devices and apps that they’re familiar with, and the competitive differentiators within the market start to emerge. For the insurance companies, this means all clients are getting a very high level of professional quality service, whether they have a direct agent or an independent contractor assisting them.”
Enabling those levels of service and engagement is key, as every agent, whether captive or independent, is a representative of the insurer’s brand. “When an agent visits a customer with a tablet, and can access all the information and functionalities they need on the spot, they can focus on engaging with that customer and concluding their business,” says Mittal. “Many customers can’t take time out to visit their insurance provider, or to arrange multiple appointments with their agent. If they can arrange their insurance at a meeting in their own office or another location, they get a much better experience as well as enriched engagement.”
Digital processes are enabling the engagement and speed of execution these agents need to close their business more quickly and efficiently. “Agents want to be able to quickly bind a policy agreement, making sure the agreement includes all the trading documents that are required,” says Imam. “To do that, it’s critical for them to be able to send proposals and countersigned documents. In-person, online and offline digital signing capabilities, such as those provided by DocuSign, enable agents to do business digitally wherever they are, even if they have no internet access – the solution will sync with the cloud to finalize the process.”
At the claims adjusters’ end of the business, having everything on a dashboard with claims queued according to priority can streamline processes and enable fast claims resolution. “It’s important for claims adjusters to process claims as quickly as possible and to keep the insured up to date,” says Imam. “Using one device to take photos and notes, upload reports, update the insured and approve aspects of the claim such as repair estimates, accelerates that process.”
Familiarity with the devices and platforms being used is as important for the customer as it is for the agent, since both sides need to use the technology. “In an industry like insurance, which involves sensitive information, familiarity helps users to feel more secure,” says Imam. “For insurers, using a technology like DocuSign that is already familiar to 50 million people gives them confidence that their own people are more likely to adopt it.”
Bringing together familiar platforms such as Dynamics CRM, Office 365, communication and line-of-business applications, and delivering those applications on mobile devices, has the potential to change the way agents and adjusters work – and this is what Windows 10 has been designed to do. “Using Windows 10 Universal Apps to develop applications means that insurers can preconfigure one app to adjust itself according to the size of the screen and the type of device being used,” says Mittal. “So users can consume it in a consistent way across different devices without any incremental development effort from the organization.”
“Insurers no longer need to develop an app several times for different devices,” says Chalmers. “With Windows 10 they have a development framework that enables them to build applications on the Microsoft platform, that can be leveraged ‘across screens’, meaning the application can be used on a Surface Pro 4 or a Lumia smartphone (not to mention other Microsoft OS devices). That’s making a real difference – an agent visiting a client can access everything they need and do business using their phone, tablet or two-in-one device because with Windows 10, every device can now be using the same application – a quick learning curve for the field and agents, and the productivity and efficiency goes way up.”
This is not just about making new apps available – it’s about pulling together everything agents need to make them more productive. Ease of integration is key here, bringing together information from the traditional silos that exist in insurance to enable new applications that empower insurance workers. “Both Microsoft and DocuSign are open, Software-as-aService platforms,” explains Imam. “That gives us flexibility compared to the old school, on-premise software model where it’s difficult to make it work with newer applications.”
“Many insurers have legacy applications that are built on Windows and they can be made available in different form factors without the need to rewrite or rip and replace the application infrastructure,” says Mittal. “Windows tablets have the ability to run those existing line-of-business apps along with modern apps that are more touch-enabled, built for an adaptive user interface. In addition, a Windows tablet with a detachable keyboard can be both your desktop and mobile device. Devices like Surface are completely changing the way workforces connect – Surface Hub, for example, has collaboration software built in to enable a next-generation conference room where people can work together on a big screen and take notes, connect with colleagues and put together portfolios and marketing materials, wherever they are.
“These tools bring huge efficiency for the organization because they don’t have to procure capital-intensive multiple devices for different scenarios. And it means that employees and contractors don’t have to rely on multiple devices for different use cases. Connected to back-end systems, with access to all their applications from one device, they can engage with customers or catch up with emails and administration tasks wherever they are. That enables a significant boost to productivity.”
Enabling a digital work style that supports the organization’s strategy is critically important to insurers today, and increasingly so as they look to the future. Today’s technologies have the capacity to support a collaborative workforce well into the future – but more importantly, insurers need to make sure they can support tomorrow’s customers. “In enabling digital work styles, insurers need to have an eye on the customer,” concludes Chalmers. “It’s the customer who is increasingly more educated, more situated with technology and whose expectations of service continue to increase because of that technology. We’ve seen ten times more technological advancement in the past ten years than we did over the previous 50. Customers want to engage on the level they’re accustomed to, enabled by the technologies they want to use, and insurers need to empower their workers to keep pace with that.
“The millennials who are in high school right now operate in a vastly different environment from what the current insurance company client base looks like, and in the next ten years these millennials are going to be the potential customers that insurers are going to want to land their services with. Thus, insurance companies need to make sure their collaborative workforce is ready to support that next generation of clients, and Microsoft and its partners worldwide are here to help them achieve that.”
