Recently, during Novarica’s annual Research Council Meeting at ITC, I moderated a Special Interest Group conversation among CIOs, addressing various challenges and areas of focus in distribution.
Agents and brokers continue to play a key, but changing, role in the distribution and servicing of insurance products. Advances in technology to process unstructured data and apply AI to both the producer and customer journeys brings new opportunities for carriers to evolve on traditional methods for connecting with their distribution channels. Discussion topics for the afternoon included the following key areas:
Offering servicing capabilities for agents
Servicing is seen as an opportunity to differentiate by creating a strong customer experience. Establishing advanced self-service capabilities to consumers also provides more capacity for agent and broker resources to focus on new sales. This also goes a long way towards reducing perceived complexity and improving the carrier-agent relationship. For instance, one insurer shared that they have implemented automated text notification for billing reminders to their policyholders. By doing so, the carrier seeks to improve the customer experience and reduce the number of non-pay cancellations that their agents and employees have to touch. Ultimately, applying technology to create proactive service moments like this can help differentiate a carrier in the market.
Taking care of the fundamentals
Carriers are experiencing increasing pressure from agents and brokers to integrate with a variety of platforms, including comparative raters, appetite selection vendors, and lead management providers. While many carriers are open to integrating with these solution providers, it comes at a cost and requires IT and business leaders to prioritize their interests and resources accordingly. Most carriers have established some form of enterprise API architecture to support these integrations, however, carriers view these integrations as secondary and of lower priority to maintaining the fundamentals of their core systems.
Driving retention and sales through analytics
Several carriers are looking to improve retention by focusing on the renewal processes. One example is a carrier that is helping its time-constrained agents by leveraging predictive models to prioritize which accounts are likely to renew. These program helps distribution partners to be more efficient while still leveraging the same amount of human resources available.
For more information on trends in distribution, see our recent report on Distribution Connectivity Evolution: Overview and Prominent Players. For more about our research and advisory services for insurers, please contact us at [email protected].
Add new comment