Blog: Delivering a personal, timely and multichannel experience without putting core operations at risk

Customers expectation for a seamless, highly personalised and integrated experience is on the rise, and with the restrictions on movement due to the Covid-19 related global health crisis, much of the interaction that this experience rests on (if not all) is forcibly migrating to digital channels.

But this level of personalisation rests on the achievement of a 360° customer view that, in turn, can only be achieved if the business is collecting data across all touchpoints. Digital touchpoints especially, are providing a wealth of information that is just waiting to be interpreted and harnessed.

Yet the pace of development and of change in the past decade has been unprecedented, leaving many financial services businesses struggling with the complex task of integrating data from these various touchpoints (apps, emails, websites, instant messaging systems, etc.) with their legacy systems.

As a result, older legacy back-end systems (where a lot of customer data is stored together with policy, accounts and client information) are straining to respond to increasing queries and higher data volumes at peak times. Indeed increasing demands from front-end applications risk slowing core line-of-business activities down or worse yet, crashing them.

This cumbersome issue is one that places new competitors, whose infrastructure is modern and easily integrated with the latest technology, at an advantage. Many new entrants are digital-native or digital-only and make self-service and personalisation their key selling point to customers.

To combat this incumbent insurers should explore new ways that technology can help them provide this type of personal, timely and multichannel experience without putting their core operations at risk. Digital integration hubs are one such example of an architecture that can provide an answer to this conundrum. Giving them a 360° customer view with access to near real-time data while ensuring that middleware solutions do not put an excessive burden on legacy back-end systems.

DIHs do this by enabling APIs to read data extracted from a ‘data pool’ which is continually updated in near-real time by the legacy systems, rather than by calling data up from legacy systems directly. This helps reduce complexity of the API service layers and to decouple them from system of record data and line-of-business environments.

Importantly, these solutions also enable historical as well as new and real-time data to be consolidated into a single repository with 24/7 availability of near real-time data that APIs interact with – instead of the back-end – providing a truly complete view of the customer for insurers, their brokers or other intermediaries.

To find out more about how to tackle these issues download the full whitepaper here at Insurance Hound.

 

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