Insurers’ Digital Readiness Needs Improvement
A relatively recent survey of CIOs and IT architects at leading, global insurance companies by The Boston Consulting Group painted a somewhat disappointing picture of insurers’ overall digital readiness and their consequent ability to facilitate relevant customer engagement.
Only 36% of insurers use a central customer-data repository or CRM application to engage with clients, and only 64% have mobile apps. Such shortcomings limit insurers’ ability to gain a full view of client needs and to provide omni-channel interactions. The average age of core insurance systems in the companies we interviewed and benchmarked was 13 years.
Insurers need a comprehensive digital suite to keep up with their competitors and evolve for the future. Today’s savvy consumers expect a digital experience like the one they enjoy from Amazon or Google. Far too many millennials (also known as “Generation Y”) are either under-insured or uninsured. Convincing young adults with financial debts (in many cases) to purchase insurance is difficult enough, but it becomes nearly impossible if insurance providers don’t fully cater to these “digital natives” – users of digital technology as toddlers – by speaking their language and offering flexible and innovative products (both digital and traditional).
Meanwhile, insurance (particularly life insurance) has one of the lowest levels of relevant “touch”
with customers across verticals in the financial services industries. Insurers often contact their customers only if a payment has been missed and these communications are mostly paper-based. Insurers frequently don’t know about their customers’ major life events and miss opportunities to cross- or up-sell. This is a lost opportunity, because it is far more expensive to add a new customer than to retain one.
This low level of contact prevents insurers from obtaining a 360-degree view of their customers. But even with such a view, many carriers wouldn’t be able to fully utilize it because they are lacking a quality business intelligence solution to effectively analyze the information they collect.
The imperatives and business benefits of an innovative digital suite are clear, but why is it important for such a suite to be fully pre-integrated?
To learn the answer to that question, and much more, please download our white paper, A Pre-Integrated Suite is Key for Establishing a Digital Business.
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Alex Zukerman Alex Zukerman joined Sapiens in April 2020 as Chief Marketing Officer & Chief of Corporate Strategy, with responsibility for Sapiens’ global Marketing department and formulating Sapiens’ overall product and business strategies. Alex possesses a long history with Sapiens, starting in 2001, including as VP, Corporate Stategy for more than eight years. Prior to returning to Sapiens in 2020, Alex worked at Novidea as the Chief Revenue Officer. Alex holds an LLB from Tel Aviv University and possesses extensive insurance, financial services, sales, business development and product management experience.