Blog: Getting over the back office blockade to maximise the omnichannel opportunity

At the end of 2019 we joined a heated debate around the major challenges faced by the insurance sector as a result of digital transformation, when we gathered with other industry experts for a roundtable hosted by Post. Since then, the global health crisis caused by Covid-19 has radically been overhauling our habits and ways of interacting with each other and with businesses, putting an even greater focus on the digital-preparedness of the insurance sector.

Compared to other customer-facing industries, the insurance sector has been a little slower to respond to the increasing customer demand for a friendly, engaging multichannel and responsive user experience.

Customer expectations are changing, because people are being influenced by freely available digital tools; accessing data easily and immediately through tools such as ‘Google-like’ searches for example.

These searches are critical to enabling faster access to information for the client; but data should also be provided seamlessly to staff in the form of dashboards or ‘cockpits’ that enable more efficient and effective management of customer profiles and ‘next best’ actions by agents or brokers in an insurance environment.

In addition to intelligible and integrated data, real-time availability of that information also plays a critical role because in an omnichannel world the window of opportunity soon shuts if the right message is not delivered via the right channel at the right time.

Nowadays, insurers are expected to provide services and sell their products through different channels without putting too much pressure on their legacy systems or risk compromising operational efficiency. In particular, as the existing crisis is driving all customer contact towards digital, the volumes of queries systems will face is likely to be unprecedented. Therefore, as underlined during the roundtable discussion, there is a growing need for the insurance sector to adapt to the changing requirements of an omnichannel interaction without completely overhauling back end systems. 

One solution is data hubs which can be specifically designed to meet the needs of insurers, without the need to revert to expensive mainframe solutions to overcome their back-end constraints.

More specifically data integration hubs are an architecture that enables this outcome as APIs extract data from a data lake rather than calling it up from legacy systems directly. This type of solution enables insurers to integrate new technologies with legacy systems while reducing the burden on back-end systems and increasing the efficiency of operations and API performance.

For more information check out this whitepaper on Insurance Hound.

 

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