In recent years, the insurance industry has witnessed major overhauls courtesy of rapid digital transformation. If anything, COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of digitalization even further. However, insurance operations still seem to be caught up in the shadow of the digital revolution. The legacy and fragmented IT landscape and time-consuming paper-based processes still hold back many insurers from fully leveraging their digital assets. The result? Higher expense ratios and stagnant growth.
No doubt, bringing innovations to the insurance industry can speed up the claims process and reduce the expenses associated with acquiring, servicing, advertising, etc. In fact, according to a study conducted by Infosys, adopting digital initiatives can help insurers to save up to 10% to 25% of sales expenses and operational costs.
That’s precisely where ServiceNow Financial Service Operations (FSO) comes into the picture. FSO helps insurance carriers streamline their business processes and reduce expenses, enabling them to meet their customers’ expectations of fast, efficient, and streamlined claims processing.
ServiceNow FSO is a cloud-based system designed to transform the business workflow and help carriers to deliver a personalized customer experience.
Here is everything you need to know about ServiceNow Financial Service Operations for insurance carriers.
Advanced Analytics
McKinsey asserts that data-driven insurance organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire more customers. This certainly bodes well for the insurance sector, where advanced analytics can revolutionize how carriers anticipate and respond to their customers’ needs.
Consider this; ServiceNow FSO allows the carriers to monitor performance and KPIs in real-time across policy servicing, claims, underwriting, etc., with one platform. This means that the carriers can understand how their business is performing in a granular and pixelated manner, allowing them to make swift and deliberate decisions in order to secure value-based customer relationships.
This results in a more profitable insurance business, where more leads are generated, frauds are proactively prevented, and claims are processed faster.
Robust Automation
Automation in insurance helps streamline all the insurance processes like renewals, marketing, and sales. Along those lines, ServiceNow FSO helps carriers automate their business models with the help of robust automation capabilities.
More profoundly, FSO weaves in the capabilities of machine learning to route issues and leverage predictive analytics to put solid ideal recommendations for solutions. Further, automated processes result in easy identification of knowledge gaps, facilitation of guided decisions, and reduction of human errors. All in all, insurance carriers are better positioned to constantly improve their performance and attain the desired outcomes while optimizing resource usage.
Omnichannel Engagement
Omnichannel engagement is the need of the hour in the insurance business. With customers expecting a seamless and friction less customer experience across all touchpoints, it is critical that insurers deliver consistent, personalized, and responsive engagement.
To that end, FSO allows the carriers to integrate the telephony system and offer support via SMS and social media platforms, reducing the need for in-office visits. In fact, FSO helps seamlessly manage policy changes and powers the distribution network to leverage real-time self-service options. All of this contributes to reduced call center volume, faster response times, better distribution partner experience, better customer experience, and lower costs.
Agent Workspace
FSO offers a unified agent workspace, empowering agents, brokers, and employees to multitask, collaborate, and share information with ease. They can access everything they need to achieve efficient and high-quality experiences, providing the carrier with a competitive edge.
The intuitive layout and AI-powered recommendations further help them make instant customer decisions. In short, FSO empowers the agents by giving them access to complex tools and rich information with a minimal learning curve, reducing training expenses and increasing agent productivity.
Surveys & Dashboards Service Mapping
ServiceNow FSO empowers insurance carriers to create surveys that will help them measure customer experience and expectations. They offer actionable feedback, facilitate comprehensive assessment of service gaps, and help identify the right opportunities to improve business performance.
In addition to that, FSO comes with comprehensive dashboards, which allow the carriers to monitor an array of KPI indicators in real-time. Such capabilities help them to spot bottlenecks and make smart decisions vis-à-vis market expansion, digital transformation, etc.
Service Mapping
Besides, FSO offers a service mapping feature that maps workflows to relevant IT systems that support them. If there is any unexpected outage or unplanned maintenance, the authorized people are notified about the same. This helps the carriers to map critical workflows and establish a plan B accordingly, thus, reducing the risk of damage to customers’ claims.
Interdepartmental Communication
Since the insurance companies have to conduct a detailed analysis before recommending an insurance policy to the customers, communicating with the other departments and gathering relevant information is essential.
ServiceNow FSO makes collaboration between different departments easy by connecting the otherwise siloed back offices with “a single system of action.” Collaboration is further enhanced with low-code application development capabilities that bring in business stakeholders and citizen developers into the mix.
Effective Virtual Service Operations
According to a study by PwC, 41% of the policyholders who face difficulties with their insurers are highly likely to switch providers.
Indeed, not having a proactive and helpful insurance process in place can increase customer churn and contribute to the rise in expense ratio. However, with the help of ServiceNow FSO, insurers can enhance the user experience using chatbots, reducing the need to manage the customers manually.
Conclusion
In the post-COVID era, it’s essential for insurance carriers to focus on judiciously investing in technology and people. More importantly, they must ensure that their investments are aimed at improving the customer experience and enabling better decision-making. To that end, ServiceNow FSO provides them with a secure and trusted platform to power their insurance business.
Connect with us to know how you can become more innovative, flexible, and agile—and permit innovation to help “future-proof” your insurance business.