The future shown to us in old movies was unrecognizable to people of the time. Flying cars dotted the sky, robot maids cleaned up houses, and space travel was as easy as getting on a bus. Rapid advances in technology, the continuing talent shortage and rising customer expectations for experiences of all types have disrupted the insurance industry over the last several years, challenging carriers to evolve their service strategies and business processes accordingly
That future never came to pass, but that doesn’t mean technology hasn’t evolved in exciting new ways. As a modern insurance agency, it can take time to understand precisely where to begin, which is why we have compiled some of the coolest new technology trends for your agency (see How Rapid Advances in Technology Reshaping the Insurance Industry?).
Many ways insurance agency automation can help improve administrative efficiency. Freeing up you and your agents for valuable face time with your clients.
Even in a largely digital world, many insurance clients still prefer in-person visits to their agent. Although as your insurance agency grows and more and more tasks become reliant on technology, there are many ways insurance agency automation can help improve administrative efficiency. Freeing up you and your agents for valuable face time with your clients.
Social Media Data
Social media was and still is an excellent tool for your marketing team, but with the advancements in social media connectivity, agencies can use these platforms in entirely new ways. Customers share mountains of their data daily, and integrating that into your customer profiles has become a common tactic to better understand your policyholders.
Mining data from social platforms has become a valuable tool for insurance agencies. Insurers can connect social media to their platforms, investigate fraud by comparing data from social activity to claims, and improve risk assessment to give better rates to customers (see Artificial Intelligence, Digitization & Agent Experience – 3 trends reshaping the insurance).
Good sales professionals have always been able to set themself apart with excellent interpersonal skills, but sometimes humans are not always best suited to human interactions.
A salesperson may be juggling more than dozen leads at a time, to be able to manage end-to-end client relationships to perfection we can really have an AI backup with all your needs and customer information. This will help to maintain your relationship with your client to its utmost. The end-to-end customer experience is the immersive customer journey from thoughts to actual reality.
Utilize LinkedIn
As a professional in the insurance industry, you know how important it is to have an effective strategy on social media. LinkedIn is a robust platform that can help your agency reach a larger audience and generate more leads. But what are the best ways to use LinkedIn?
Getting leads is one of the main goals for any business, and LinkedIn offers an excellent opportunity to do just that.
You can post relevant content related to your services, products, or other industry topics to attract potential customers and engage them with your agency.
Additionally, many advertising options on LinkedIn are available, allowing you to get even more targeted with your lead generation efforts. LinkedIn also makes it incredibly easy to do outreach of a more personal nature. Joining linkedIn groups where potential clients are or doing direct outreach through data scraping are all powerful tools for your agency.
Utilize Facebook
With over 2 bn active users and counting, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. It’s an excellent place for businesses to engage with customers and build relationships.
The first step is ensuring your posts are tailored to your target audience. This means understanding what type of content would appeal to them, such as informative videos or blog posts about recent policy changes or funny memes that will give them a chuckle. Whatever you decide, make sure it’s relevant and interesting enough that they’ll keep coming back for more.
Once you’ve created your post, it’s time to get it out there. Hashtags are a great way to do this because they allow people who don’t follow your page yet to discover your content.
Remember that hashtags should be relevant and specific; too many can be confusing and off-putting. Using too few could leave potential customers missing out on your product offerings.
Social media isn’t just about pushing out content; it also provides an excellent opportunity to interact with your customers one-on-one. Responding promptly and courteously when someone leaves a comment on one of your posts shows them that their opinion matters, which can go a long way toward building trust between you and your customers.
You can create polls or surveys to understand your customer’s needs and wants, which can help inform future decisions about policies or services offered by the agency.
Facebook Ads are another great way to promote special deals or discounts available at your agency. They also require less spending than traditional TV or radio advertising methods. Unlike other forms of advertising, they can easily target specific audiences based on location, age, gender, etc., which helps ensure maximum reach with minimal effort! Facebook has many tools to subdivide your audiences to reach full effectiveness.
Agency Ecosystems
Let’s face it; there are a lot of different processes your agency needs to run its day-to-day operations, from payroll to inter-department communications to sales tracking. All of these different systems don’t always play well together. And can end up making your agency worse as a whole. Luckily, with new technology, this is less of a concern.
One example is Customer Relationship Managers, which keep track of your customer profiles, allow you to send emails, create workflows, schedule social posts, and much more from one place.
Another is AI streamlining of claims processes, and a third is robotic process automation, which facilitates everything from underwriting to onboarding policyholders.
Implementing AI programs
Like every insurance agency knows, gaining consumer trust is one of the biggest challenges in the insurance industry.
Successfully implementing AI programs into your business plan has an immediate impact on the quality and efficiency of the work done in your office. Increasing consumers’ trust and boosting operational efficiency.
Automation can speed up service delivery by up to 80% and save you thousands of work hours each year. We know that Insurance agencies with automation typically see an increase in overall productivity and profitability. Agencies can find easier ways to streamline claims processing, rapid document digitization, faster and more efficient underwriting, and so many more benefits. All from the push of a button.
Chatbots
It used to be that a significant time sink in any organization was the cost of customer service. Organizations needed whole teams dedicated to helping customers through problems with their products. And a lousy customer service team could mean the end for your agency.
Fortunately, in the modern era, we have developed workarounds in the form of chatbots. Chatbots have been proven to save time and resources by automatically interacting with your customers instead of your staff.
Cutting back on the staffing needed and saving your agency money. Chatbots have been so helpful that it is estimated that soon they will be responsible for up to 95% of customer interactions.
We all know we want special treatment, and effective personal communication can boost relationships with clients and improve team productivity.
Transitioning your agency to an AI communication program would give you a variety of internal and external communication options such as email, chat, and video conferencing. Allowing you to connect with your clients and fellow team members in the most effective way possible. You can categorize your clients as prospects, new clients, long-term policyholders, and more.
Effective CRM and Lead Acquisition
One of the biggest obstacles to effective CRM use is maintaining up-to-date information on leads and customers. Data-driven decision-making is key to the success of any insurance agency.
Insurance agency AI management should offer real-time reporting so that you can track your progress and identify areas for improvement. Get quantitative reports so that you can generate the specific data that you need.
Your agency may generate a few leads from your website, but we all know clients still fall through the cracks. These incomplete applications mean your staff must spend time following up with clients, seeking online quotes to obtain missing information, and suggesting appropriate coverages.
Instead of requiring valuable human time for these tasks, all the work can be done with a good online Customer Relationship Manager (CRM).
CRMs integrate into your website to create a workflow that makes it easy to organize leads and follow up with clients. At COVU we facilitate this for you, if your agency gets a high volume of inquiries, we can drastically improve your efficiency by scoring leads, assigning an agent to an account, and setting notifications for follow-up. New lead acquisition is one of the biggest benefits of insurance agency automation.
Utilize Internet of Things
Our world is more connected than ever before. The internet of things, or IoT, is the blanket term for the interconnected web of smart devices we interact with daily. While it may seem strange to give companies access to some of the data, insurance companies and customers can benefit from sharing (see How IoT, ML, AI and Blockchain Technology are Changing Insurance?).
Customers can opt to provide personal data like heart rate from their smartwatches or buying habits in exchange for lower rates. And the IoT can automate and tabulate the data collection.
The Internet of Things in Insurance is seeing rapid growth in its industry. With projections showing it will reach 42.7 billion in market cap by the end of 2022.
A key driver of this development is the Internet of Things (IoT), the growing network of connected devices ranging from consumer wearables to industrial control systems. This report looks at how insurers can translate these IoT applications and corresponding data into risk prevention and mitigation services.
IoT-enabled services of the insurance industry also support the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in several respects: fostering innovation and building resilient infrastructure, promoting good health and well-being, supporting sustainable cities, and fighting poverty by offering affordable insurance coverage and enhancing financial wellness.
Over the past few years, IoT has become one of the most important technologies of the 21st century.
Now that we can connect everyday objects—kitchen appliances, cars, thermostats, baby monitors—to the internet via embedded devices, seamless communication is possible between people, processes, and things.
Prevention services are not new in the insurance industry; for years, insurers have provided individual consumers with loss prevention advice and risk engineering teams advise businesses in commercial lines. Ways to prevent risk, however, are changing.
Insurance Telematics
Just like we have smart devices for our homes, there are also ones for our cars. Like wearable smartwatches, telemetrics are monitoring apparatuses for automobiles. Companies like progressive have products like Snapshot that measure inputs like speed, location, accidents, and more.
All of these are processed with analytics and help determine policy premiums. This new technology encourages better driving habits, lowers costs for insurers and consumers, and changes to a proactive form of protection (see 7 New Potential and Opportunity of Telematics in Car Insurance).
Usage-based insurance with telematics is gaining popularity, many motor insurers are beginning to offer it as an option to customers.
Over the past decade, insurers have transitioned from discussion and experimentation to market introduction of insurance telematics. We’d like to introduce you to telematics and give you some vocabulary to help you stay abreast of the growing trend.
The enabling technologies stem from telecommunication advances that have reduced the cost of connecting associated but remote endpoints: everything from smartphones to temperature sensors. The word telematics implies a bidirectional exchange between endpoints for sensing or measuring feedback or control (see How will Technology Impact Insurance? 16 New Technology Trend Evolution).
Furthermore, the new generation of young people is used to pay for usage, like data contracts for phones or car sharing. But what does this change mean, how do telematics and usage-based products reshape the traditional motor insurance industry and how can insurers use it for their benefits?
As technology evolves and the cost of implementation becomes more accessible, insurers and fleet operators are increasingly adopting UBI insurance.
The future is here, so agencies must take advantage of new technologies and evolve with the times. We may not have flying cars, but using the tools mentioned in this article and more, we can send your agency to new heights.
AI and Machine Learning in Insurance tools can help insurers to spot unusual patterns that a human might miss. For example, by comparing new claims to the existing data, AI in the insurance sector can help detect claims that are unusually high and probably fake. With AI in claims fraud detection, the algorithms provide an accurate claim score and reason code for each claim made, which can help determine if the request is suspicious and requires further investigation.
We have also seen an efficiency improvement in monitoring employee and customer behavior to look for patterns indicating large-scale fraud (see How Technology Can Help to Tackle Insurance Fraud?).. Customers making odd claims are potential red flags that AI can highlight for further investigation, and we always want that second eye to help us on what we can mistakenly pass by.
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AUTHOR: Ethan Ertl – Project Manager at COVU
