Matt Workman is Senior Client Partner at Persistent Systems, a trusted Digital Engineering and Enterprise Modernization partner for global market leaders across Industries. Matt was interviewed by Andrew Daniels, Founder and Managing Director at InsurTech Ohio.
Matt, as insurtech has matured, it seems like the market is getting crowded with point solutions. What are some of the issues that insurers are facing after adopting these solutions?
“Some of these new solutions have been driving the entire insurtech movement, moving the industry in the right direction and helping improve the overall customer experience. One of the issues that continues to surface is that there are solutions that do a lot of things extraordinarily well but often don't scale with the business that acquires those solutions. In turn, this has made many organizations struggle with a consistent return on investment and struggle to ensure these solutions are connected to create a more efficient organization. There are ways to solve these connectivity issues by leveraging smart, custom solutions to help drive the connectivity and the efficiency to truly make for a superior customer experience and a more effective organization.”
Can you share some examples of those who have scaled these solutions?
“We work with a number of different insurers. A top global insurer we work with has done a really good job taking a lot of different market solutions and leveraging their internal stakeholders to get underwriting, underwriting techs and their operational analysts all on the same page. They’re doing their daily activities and operating in a much more efficient manner by removing many of the redundancies, leveraging low code and hyper-automation in the process. We've also worked with their claims group. We've developed a platform that enables them to do some work with first notice-of-loss to enhance overall operational efficiency gathered during the collection of data and the processing of the data at a claim, putting it into action for payment and resolution.
Liberty State Auto, under the leadership of Mike Morocco, took an initiative to innovate intelligently, hiring a lot of smart folks and keeping positions to be able to drive that change. This has resulted in an organization that was operating with crippling annual losses years ago and turned them into an extraordinarily profitable and successful organization that will become part of Liberty Mutual in the near term. It has been exciting to see them leverage these types of technologies to be able to advance themselves.”
What is intelligent automation, and why is it an important next step in this technology adoption?
“Intelligent automation is using multiple technologies to automate and simplify traditional, complex business processes. Tools for business process management and robotic process automation were the first generation of solutions years back. Now, there's intelligent automation or what some people call hyper-automation. That combines business process management, robotic process, low code and AI (Artificial Intelligence) machine learning, creating natural language processing, optical characteristic recognition and conversational AI. Low code is of particular importance, being the fuel that enables much of the application to be developed in as little as one-tenth of the time compared to more traditional development methods. This accelerates process improvements, provides differentiation for an insurer and the ROI (Return on Investment) is quickly achieved across the entire organization when they leverage low code capabilities.
These solutions can more rapidly grow, adapt and integrate. They're, essentially, future-proof technology capabilities when you leverage low code because it's so much more nimble than utilizing traditional, point-solution focused and archaic-developed solutions. For insurers, if you are providing excellent customer experience, then you should have intelligent automation occurring across the organization. If you're not, you're well behind the eight ball. Like I mentioned prior, there are some intelligent people doing a lot of intelligent hyper automation across their organization to achieve what they have today. It’s not just the organization operating in silos and one-off efforts, believing that solely relying on one point solution will fully meet those experience needs for your customers. There are a number of different ways that low code can help the organization and all departments but also allow for data sharing and more effective work across those departments.”
Traditionally, we look at policyholders and agents/brokers in the customer experience. Are there any segments we tend to forget about?
“Due to the technology advancements in the organization and how it impacts the policy holders and agent experience, those same investments within our organization impact their employees in a positive way. Over the years, I've shadowed and discussed with many of the people within an insurance organization who do the core engine work, underwriting claims, billing, etc. You often hear the story of technology overload. They'll say things like, ‘I find it hard to navigate the five different systems I need to interact with to do my job.’ Or, ‘I need to use that one app for every few of my claims I'm working, so I often forget how to even use that technology when I actually have to visit with it.’
Point solutions are great, but they can also be a hindrance if they're not employed intelligently and not thought about in the whole ecosystem of all the things that an employee needs to have in order to do their work more efficiently. Insurance organizations have the customer front and center. However, many often forget that keeping their employees happy internally and leveraging these technologies to do that provides a more positive work experience and environment for them to ultimately impact that policyholder.”
What are some of the biggest challenges out there that still need to be solved?
“There's still a lot of work that needs to be done to continue to meet the consumer where they are in the market and the industry. One challenge I feel the industry will have to contend with is the continued commoditization of the products that are being offered by insurers today. For example, we're starting to see homeowners insurance become more commoditized, making it easier to shop, benchmark and get the lowest price with an insurer to be able to meet that need. Small commercial is a ripe area coming forth for innovation, bringing a lot of commoditization of their product offerings as well. Life insurance has been underserved and forgotten about when it comes to these innovation needs.
So, with all of this continued progression, I think it's critical for insurers to be able to remain competitive and profitably grow forward with an intelligent automation journey. This will ultimately lead them to have better experiences for internal stakeholders and improve productivity and skills of their employees. Most importantly, this will provide exceptional customer experiences for every interaction and will allow insurers to differentiate themselves in the market.”
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