Data Systems in US Insurance Companies Are Like Politics

The Parties Hate Each Other, They Don't Communicate, and the Conflict is Killing Your Productivity

Thought Leader:

Chase Jones

Chase is a skilled, hands-on leader with a history of facing challenges head-on while collaborating with team members to accomplish ambitious objectives.

Thought Leader:

Michael Polanco

Michael is skilled in Microsoft Excel, Customer Service, Teamwork, Leadership, and Public Speaking, which lends him to being a strong sales professional with an acute concentration on digital management.

Not only are siloed data systems a frustrating, entangled nightmare for your insurance staff, but they’re inconveniencing and aggravating your customers too.

The lack of integrated systems within companies in the insurance industry results in convoluted business processes. This means customers are sent from pillar to post when interacting with their insurance carriers and agents because all their insurance data sits in separate systems. These non-integrated data sources are creating an unorganized mosaic of systems that are forced to fit together but do not.

At the stage that customers need to make an insurance claim, they are already annoyed and inconvenienced after their loss, and it does not help that companies still use outdated and disconnected systems to solve customer problems timeously. When it comes to policy and claims management, it is challenging to build seamless processes because insurance carriers and agents do not have all the data they need in one place.

A lack of insight into each customer’s insurance data also leads to poor customer experiences as representatives are ill equipped to personalize their interactions with each of them. This leaves customers feeling like just another number.

Running an organization that has multiple solutions that do not talk to each other and fight for dominance is a liability. Companies within the insurance industry that choose to maintain haphazard and disjointed data systems are bound to face complex integration challenges.

Data remains trapped in silos and can’t be brought together to form a cohesive data strategy.

Companies in the insurance industry are losing around 12% of customers annually. In other words, companies cannot have a human relationship with their customers because there is no comprehension of who each customer is holistically. Non-integrated systems are not nimble or simple, and they leave staff and customers feeling powerless.

Customers do not remain loyal due to the price or even the quality of the product. It is all about their experience, and brands that cannot keep up and keep them happy will lose out.

Without a clear perspective of all the data insurance carriers and agents are working with, it is tough to extract insights that allow for a productive strategy. The fragmentation of customer data can result in not enough data, or, even worse, too much data all over the place that cannot be used.

CRM doesn’t seamlessly sync with policy management solution

Even when a company’s CRM and policy management systems are connected, it does not mean employees can get insights from their data.

The way systems share information oftentimes creates errors and duplicates in the data, resulting in companies having a less than 360-degree view of the areas of their business that make a true impact on bottom line such as retention.

Policy data remains locked in archaic legacy solutions

Sharing data between legacy systems and modern solutions in the insurance space can be considerably challenging because legacy technology was not set up that way. Times are changing now and 70% of businesses are developing digital transformation strategies to keep up with the pace of innovation and technological transformation.

Insurance carriers and agents are realizing that data needs to go on a journey and having policy data locked in an archaic legacy solution creates an environment that restricts data and hinders transformation.

To move data between legacy tech and modern solutions, IT teams have to manually upload data from a policy management system to a CRM, which is time consuming and laborious. This outdated method of accessing and transferring data trapped in legacy systems is not effective at catching and fixing errors which can cause numerous downstream problems that affect revenue.

Unlocking new possibilities through integration

Companies in the insurance industry still stuck using archaic legacy solutions are falling behind the competition, and without integrated data systems, insurers are unknowingly blindfolding themselves and creating a barrier between the company and their customers.

The old adage of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” does not apply here.

If companies are using a set of tools today that prevents the flow of that information from system to system, they might want to rethink that approach. Insurance solutions are made to share information today and when combined with the right Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) like Synatic, insurance carriers and agents can empower them to make the most of their data.