Find out how insurers can use apps to break down silos, unify operations, and build continuous customer journeys—all without writing a single line of code.
In recent years, insurance companies have embraced digital transformation to more effectively engage and retain consumers. Some have partnered with insurtech disruptors to expand their offerings, while others have invested in building new enterprise solutions to digitize individual parts of the customer journey. However, for many companies, these efforts often fall short of delivering their expected value and, worse, lead to business silos, which negatively impact organizations as a whole.
We spoke to Adriana Royal, Client Manager for Client Solutions & Partnerships at Unqork, to learn more about why silos form in the insurance industry and explore how no-code can help unify operations.
How Do Silos Form in the Insurance Industry?
In Adriana’s experience, the insurance industry is inherently segmented. “Insurance companies are structured around the specific parts of the customer value chain that they’re serving, and there are specific teams set-up to touch each specific vertical,” she explains. When you have separate departments, processes, and solutions for pricing, underwriting, customer service, and various other verticals, it’s very easy for teams to focus only on their own operations and neglect how these fit into the broader customer experience of policyholders, agents, brokers, and employees.
“Insurance companies are structured around the specific parts of the customer value chain that they’re serving, and there are specific teams set-up to touch each specific vertical” — Adriana Royal, Client Manager for Client Solutions & Partnerships
These transformation efforts can provide benefits in a particular business area, but may inadvertently exacerbate existing silos if not done correctly. Modern insurance companies must operate in the digital realm, but to do so successfully requires taking the entire end-to-end experience into perspective. Without this understanding, design and software decisions may end up negatively impacting your offerings in unexpected ways.
Today’s insurance customers expect seamless, personalized omnichannel experiences. For example, modern customers enjoy the accessibility of online self-service channels, however they still want to have the ability to engage with support when needed, with a human agent who has access to all their relevant information and can help them find a resolution quickly. Requiring stuck customers to call a separate support line, re-authorize information, and explain their problem falls short of modern customer expectations.
Breaking Down Silos and Unifying Customer Journeys
To deliver this superior customer experience and break down silos, insurance companies must think about what the end-to-end journey looks like for their customers. From Adriana’s perspective, it’s best to think about it in terms of layers.
“The top layer is delineated by a ‘line of interaction’ which consists of all the direct interactions that your customers have with your company.” These interactions could be online through a customer portal, they could be in person as the customer interacts with their agent, or they could be by phone when a customer calls to file a claim. At each of these points, the customer has specific tasks they want to accomplish, and delivering a superior experience requires defining a plan for success.
Want to see insurance innovation in progress? Watch our recent webinar with our technology partner, Human API.
The second layer is delineated by “a line of visibility” between customer-facing employees and technology and backstage employees and technology who provide supporting functions such as policy administration in the case of technology or billing in the case of employees. Both layers are supported by processes and rules that are specific to each insurance company and they determine how anything should be done.
If we think about it this way, we can see why digitizing select aspects of the customer journey without considering downstream implications—or the internal layers—can do more harm than good. The key to breaking down any silos caused by disjointed digitization efforts is to define the future state blueprint for how these experiences should best be delivered at each step and reflect that in how technology is implemented.
Repairing the Disconnect With No-Code
Regardless of how a carrier defines this future state experience based on what they think will resonate most with their target customers, no-code can help. With traditional code-based solutions (including low-code-based ones), it’s incredibly resource-intensive to implement and maintain technology solutions that meet this future state design that is unique to each carrier. All code essentially becomes “legacy” as soon as it’s in production, which in turn drives up maintenance costs, risk, and complexity. Any subsequent changes the business might want to make based on customers’ feedback end up being unfeasible due to the amount of work required of highly experienced technical staff.
No-code allows engineers to more productively use their skill sets, delivers greater transparency, and foster better collaboration between the business and IT teams during the development process. As such, applications are well-rounded and can be perfectly aligned with both technology needs and market expectations, plus they have a lower total cost of ownership.
When insurance companies use a platform like Unqork to deliver technology solutions, they empower Unqork to take care of code on the backend while benefiting from regular platform security updates, new functionality, and automation in their QA process. In other words, Unqork does the heavy lifting so insurance companies can focus on business needs, freeing up their IT teams to truly innovate by taking advantage of our intuitive drag-and-drop components, easily configurable APIs, and more.
Want to learn more about how no-code can be used at your organization? Schedule a personalized demonstration with one of our in-house experts. Also, sign up for the Unqork newsletter to keep up-to-date on the latest in the world of no-code.
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