Improving the Insured Journey: Learnings of ACE 2016

Noah Casser on June 28, 2016

The SPLICE sales team was back on the road last week - for the 20th annual America’s Claims Event (ACE) in Minneapolis - where we took away some great insights.

My first, and favorite session, was a product workshop, called Customer Experience – The New Battleground for Insurance Claims, presented by Capgemini.

The session was structured as an interactive discussion rather than a presentation. The room was split into 4 groups and each group was asked to note, and discuss, the biggest challenges they face around their claims experience.

The top three challenges, across the board, all centered on communications and data management. They were:

  • Maintaining accurate contact information, channel preference, and customer data relating to where they stand in the claims journey.
  • Being able to provide all that data across the enterprise to every employee/contractor that may come in contact with the insured (agent, adjuster, contact center agent, etc.)
  • Gathering consistent and actionable feedback from the insured during the claims process in order to improve the process going forward.

There is clearly a great need for insurance technologies that simplify and streamline data management, and allow claims staff to have a clear and accurate picture of where their customers are in their claims journey - at all times.  Fortunately there is no shortage of companies that are working very hard to meet these needs.

When it comes to core-systems for insurance, there has never been more choice.  Having gone to two insurance shows this month (IASA and ACE), I was blown away by the number of vendors that are offering admin systems for insurance carriers. From Guidewire and Duck Creek to EIS, Xuber, ISCS and our friends at Majesco, there are a myriad options for insurers to choose from when they decide to move from their legacy systems to the core-systems of the future.

With all these agile SaaS solutions on the market, it seems like moving your insurance company into the future with shiny new core technology would be a snap.  All you have to do is format your data – move it up to the cloud, do some staff training and you’re off the races, right?  Not so much. 

The difficulties of moving on from legacy systems was driven home by Main Street America Group’s Michael Lancashire and QBE North America’s Dan Moore in their session: Shedding Legacy Programs Acceptances.  Moore and Lancashire outlined the difficulties of migrating workflows into a new system as well as managing the change inside the organization. The most eye-opening point brought up in the session was that a number of insurance pros in the room, including the presenters, indicated that (in the past) they had gone through the time investment and expense of upgrading a core system only to get to the end, and realize little to no improvements in efficiency or cost-savings.

How can that happen?

Moore pointed out that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of simply trying to get a new system to do the same things that the legacy system does without having a plan to improve processes and workflows to align with the advantages provided by the new technology.  He stated that when QBE brings on a new system currently, they strive to implement the tech with as much “out of the box” as possible, working to avoid trying to customize the system to operate similarly to the legacy system.  This made a lot of sense to me – why move from a legacy system if you are not going to also improve how that system is used?

When implementing any new software or solution, it’s very important to look at the journey (whether it’s your customers’ journey or your employee’s) and make changes that will improve that journey.

If you were at IASA or ACE, I’d love to hear about your experience – comments are welcome! For the re-cap of our experience at IASA, click here.