By Nilesh Satpute, Founder CEO, Applied Cloud Computing
A decade back when the slow transition of moving to the online world was happening, insurance was nowhere close to even starting up its digital world. Today, it’s a different world.
The primary factor for this has been Covid. The global shutdown and no work was a tipping point for many companies. This led to the investments in the digital and companies starting to rely on these services to reach the end consumer.
According to a recent Gartner survey of CIOs across 81 countries, improving the customer experience tops the list of insurance digitization initiatives in 2023, not operational excellence or revenue growth.
Most of the younger workforce which is the target for insurance players, are the millennials and GenZ. This generation which is digitally native, has to be reached through online platforms unlike yesteryears where telephoning, meeting customers would help. Even to reach out to the corporates, being digitally enabled has become a primary criteria which makes the process more efficient, seamless and transparent.
According to a TechSci Research report India Digital Insurance Platform Market is expected to reach USD 165.02 billion by 2024 at a CAGR of over 13% during 2019-2024. According to the report, the major factors contributing to the growth of the market are increasing adoption of newer technologies such as Artificial Intelligence to modernize the business operations, growing adoption of Internet of Things products and growing awareness among underwriters about channel digitalization.
Fundamentally, a digital insurance platform will allow customers to explore and compare insurance policies and help choosing the best policy for themselves seamlessly in a matter of no time.
Reaping benefits from technology
Now since companies have started focusing on technology, these are a few benefits-
Automation– With automation becoming an integral part of digital enablement, it reduces inefficiencies in the system and makes the process faster, seamless and process-driven. This also means that innovation now happens at a faster pace with the bottomline being solved.
Modernisation– Another top of the funnel benefit remains that with modernised approach, it becomes easier to reach the customers and explain the pros and cons. This inevitably leads to better conversions, more engagement, with an overall uptick in the customer acquisition and retention.
Cybersecurity– With companies focusing on cybersecurity, they can now assure customers of protection and prone to less risk in an era where online frauds are skyrocketing. With additional features like two factor authentication, face ID login, companies can fight these risks much more.
Business Intelligence– With the underlying analytics added to the operational functions, employees can now read the data much more analytically and make more informed decisions. This in turn helps them to explain to the customer as to what or which plan will suit them and how they can benefit from it. This leads to a much better customer experience and helps the business growth directly.
Artificial Intelligence– This is a vast area which can help the industry in many facets. From better customer experience through chatbots which even helps in automating claims, to reading and analyzing and in turn helping companies to draft better policies are some of it.
Cloud– With most of the applications now being on cloud, business have become more real time which saves time, gives real-time updates to make better business decisions and ultimately help the customer.
From reaching an insurance agent online in a matter of few seconds to buying a policy and then even accessing the claim online, insurance companies are now helping a customer with the entire process. While digitisation of the process has shown immense potential for the industry, the omnichannel approach which means availability of both offline and online, doubles up the benefits without any doubt. The human touch in this industry is crucial and cannot be denied.
The road ahead
The upgrading of technology to make our life easier is the only way forward. While cloud, analytics, even artificial intelligence to some extent has become a reality, more technologies are still remaining to be seen, of how it can benefit the insurance companies and their customers.
For instance, Metaverse. A fairly newer technology but many brands, companies have already started experimenting with it. Another technology which holds a lot of promise is blockchain. While Government, banks have already started working on blockchain, we need more examples to understand how it can help our industry.
Robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality are a few technologies that many insurance companies have started to focus on. Very soon, we will start seeing solutions from these technologies and the kind of problems they are able to resolve.