Often, insurance operations are bogged down with manual, repetitive tasks that are costly and time-consuming. While tapping into automation with ERP may seem like the ideal solution, legacy systems are often complex and ill-suited to accommodate the growing needs of modern insurance operations.
Let’s assume the legacy systems align with the company’s long-standing business and information requirements, the ailments that plague insurance operations span much further than simple budgeting and forecasting.
For one, there’s data proliferation that needs consistent handling, especially in the face of changing customer requirements. Customer service and agent experience are equally paramount and equally challenging to address through the existing systems.
From a systems perspective, business processes are uneven and convoluted. The legacy systems are ill-suited to support operations’ rapidly evolving business requirements and drive higher customer satisfaction.
ServiceNow Financial Services Operations (FSO) addresses these concerns by digitizing the core processes and unlocking productivity through powerful automation. This article elaborates on the four ways FSO helps build efficient insurance operations.
Putting the Customer First with Self-Service Options
An insurer needs to spend five times more to acquire a customer than to retain one. And yet most companies don’t tap into the power of retention — the primary reason being the lack of efficient case management systems. Besides, the process of managing and creating records is usually cumbersome and fraught with errors.
ServiceNow FSO helps advance the notion of retention by offering full-scale self-servicing options through conversational guidance supported by virtual agents.
Virtual agents are capable of providing personalized experiences because admins can configure them to cater to custom chat experiences based on touchpoints. As such, they’re capable of sharing tutorials, expanding on “how to(s),” gathering essential issue-specific data, and even performing diagnostics.
Most importantly, these NLU- and AI-powered chatbots can advance conversations by tapping into the real-world language employed by customers, thus, making the conversation more accurate, productive, and personalized.
Since customers demand fast answers, FSO’s virtual agents can deliver instant responses, thus reducing admin wait times and contributing to the self-service philosophy. Moreover, these virtual agents facilitate:
- Productivity – because they can update records and provide back-out instructions
- Accuracy – because they’re capable of diagnostics
- Seamless conversations – because they’re adept at assimilating and acting upon customers’ comments while providing personalized insights.
Empowering the Agents with Smoother Workflows
We’re in an era where a “distributed workforce” is in vogue, and understandably so. The pandemic has triggered massive transitions and entailed insurance companies of all sizes to redefine the way they engage and interact with agents.
Of course, this evolution comes with its fair share of challenges. The workforce will often be working remotely, have access to mobile devices, and need to connect with service providers through a number of channels (chat, email, phone).
In that light, ensuring smooth workflows and an even smoother onboarding experience for new agents and brokers is paramount, not to mention meeting the customer’s needs.
FSO leverages the power of the NOW platform to automate the onboarding experience and reduce the manual resource-intensive onboarding steps by 70%. For instance, whenever a new agent joins in, the coordinators, hiring managers, and other concerned people are updated, and the entire onboarding process is visualized using unified, intuitive dashboards.
In fact, the onboarding capabilities of FSO transcend the traditional onboarding approach and make onboarding a faster, smoother, resource-efficient process.
As far as the workflow is concerned, optimized layouts, integrated tools, and real-time updates enable the agents to go through their processes without any hassle. Of course, they can access critical information through a number of channels. The result is improved agility, faster service delivery, and reduced costs for insurance operations.
This explains how ServiceNow reports 88% satisfaction in employee onboarding experience and 100% success in onboarding via virtual channels.
Streamlining the Business Operations
Interdepartmental fragmentation plagues the insurance industry in terms of legacy services, delivery platforms, and data integration. And therefore, today’s top insurance companies are going through monumental shifts in technology that vary from business process automation to content and data management.
To help with this transformation, FSO advances the digitization notion and unifies the workflows by integrating the legacy systems across the departments, including the demand and supply areas.
This ensures that the back, middle, and front offices are working in unison with end-to-end automation and governance. The benefits include:
- Aligned departments with unified, centralized data
- Provisions of 24/7 access to critical information
- Instant alerts and updates on complex, high-impact cases
Most importantly, unification benefits insurance operations on multiple fronts. For instance, financial institutions can accelerate the resolution of claims, identify the root causes of losses, track expenditure trends, and create more efficient and effective service delivery.
Overall, the streamlining of business operations is a testament to the core value proposition of the FSO suite — enabling insurers to accelerate their digital transformation and capitalize on new business opportunities.
Ensuring Robust Security and Compliance
Insurance operations are closely-knitted with technology, regulations, and compliance. As such, insurers need to ensure robust security to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA).
FSO puts into practice a number of security capabilities that protect data at rest and in transit. From managing policy and ensuring compliance to consolidating the risk assessment and keeping the operational resilience intact, FSO secures information and empowers insurance operations to mitigate risks and address compliance issues.
The integration of risk management practices that aim at securing data, generating reports, identifying risks, and sharing information with the appropriate stakeholders is the key. FSO provides a holistic approach to automated risk management that allows insurers to comply with privacy regulations in the most efficient manner. This translates to improved policyholder experience, cost reduction, and improved customer service.
Integrated risk management furthers the flexibility of the ServiceNow FSO suite by enabling the companies to determine their security and compliance thresholds in an exact manner.
To Sum Up
ServiceNow’s FSO enables insurers to leverage a standardized, comprehensive, and automated platform to deliver superior customer service. It provides real-time information via integrated dashboards and consolidated workflows and further helps to streamline business operations and ensure compliance.
One of the more tangible benefits of FSO is the ease with which agents and brokers can onboard to their new companies. It also facilitates the entire live, step-by-step process, enabling insurance companies to truly leverage the power of conversational agents.
Curious to learn more about the FSO platform and the capabilities it has to offer? Get in touch with us today!
