COVID 19 forced millions of Americans to work from their homes. Though some organizations were quick to embrace the change because they were used to the arrangement, many others had to find solutions fast to enable business continuity from their homes.  

A study by Deloitte on the impact of COVID 19 on the insurance sector details the implications COVID 19 has had on the pre-dominantly traditional industry. The report delves deep into themes like operational resilience, service operations and technology, the workforce, the intermediaries like agents and brokers, as well as third-party service and offshore service providers.  

In their analysis of how service operations and delivery have been affected, they detail how the manual nature of certain processes and the use of on-premise or legacy infrastructure have impacted the ability of insurers to respond efficiently to the crisis.  

What were the challenges insurers faced? 

The insurer’s challenges were not limited to overly manual processes alone, there were also the lack of integrated offerings, slower turnaround times owing to process deficiencies, tackling intermediaries, cybersecurity infrastructure and regulatory compliances to manage confidential customer information, system workarounds to tackle legacy infrastructure.  

Apart from the service operations, there also were challenges the workforce and the intermediaries like the agents and brokers had to tackle.  

How has the insurance industry responded to the change? 

With the workforce suddenly shifting to the unfamiliar territory of remote working, it’s been nothing less of a culture shock. They’ve had to put in place new protocols for working and wellness plans. Some roles have also been reassigned to support important activities such as contact centers. Certain other roles have been aligned to specific rules by regulatory supervisory authorities. Where on-site work is required, split work sites or staff rotation protocols have been initiated.  

Indications are that insurers who had already invested in upgrading their digital capabilities to support their work activities are in a better position in responding to communications, servicing, and new business activities. Though intermediary renewals will not be challenging, new business activities may be affected owing to the closedown restrictions.  

What are the actions insurers have had to take? 

If there’s one thing this crisis has done right for businesses, it is accelerating their rate of digital adoption. The crisis has led to rapid ideation, quick testing, and the production of existing agile and automation initiatives. There’s an increased focus on digitization, cloud, and automation to minimize dependency on staff and build resilient frameworks. Some agencies have even pivoted to conversational AI for triaging voice and digital queries to improve agents’ capabilities. Insurers are responding to IT and data issues by triggering contingency plans and workarounds. They are also accelerating their cloud migration plans to minimize risk to meet the current challenges.  

Several insurers have implemented immediate working plans and protocols; and focus is now on connectedness and socialization. There’s also an increased focus on ensuring operational resilience. Insurers are also including the intermediaries in their crisis response and planning of immediate next steps. By providing additional tools and support to intermediaries, insurers have to try to facilitate uninterrupted support to the client base. 

There’s also an increased focus to make available data to all users to ensure operations are going on as normal. Data is the cornerstone around which any enterprise operates and the insurance industry needs to focus on making it easily available to their agents in a regulated manner.   

How can insurance agencies make data available to remote agents? 

For agencies that have already adopted digital practices, digitizing their portals, customer service, data management, and more, the process should be considerably simple. But for those are yet to go down that path, which involves legacy migration, cloud adoption, digitized portals and more, they need to consider the safest way to transition to digital fast and enable data access.

Pre-canned solutions are thought of as the easiest option for most businesses, but without a thorough data analysis and data management process, it would not be able to deliver expected results. Nuvento’s deep expertise in insurance business data management and business intelligence gives us the edge to quickly developing solutions to simplify and align your data coming in from multiple channels. Our experts are well-versed in building and optimizing data warehouse solutions for the insurance industry. We offer DWH and integration, self-service BI capabilities, data visualization, and enterprise reporting offerings to power up the insurance agency’s business intelligence capabilities and create a foundation for its data management. Our expertise in DWH and ETL has enabled us to deliver valuable solutions to enterprises and users in very short time frames.  

Cloud is an integral enabler for remote working and for agents to be productive in their jobs, data that’s relevant to them must be available to them on the channels and devices they use. Nuvento’s cloud experts help insurance enterprises rapidly deploy cloud solutions, and we ensure our frameworks follow regulatory and security compliances. We have frameworks exclusively built for the insurance vertical to speed up their digital transformation journey and help users remotely access information they need to deliver value to their customers. For agents, Nuvento’s Insurance Agent Portal is a powerful system powered by the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform. It enables ease of access to organizational data and superior automation features. It provides agents with a 360-Degree Workforce Management Platform by integrating with legacy systems using an API-based approach.  

The Nuvento Agent Portal improves agents’ productivity by:  

• Improving visibility to the client’s claim processing status  
• Receiving real-time status updates on their clients’ claims  
• Reducing their admin cost to track claims for their clients  
• Receiving notifications that update the status of the clients’ claims  
• Viewing claim details and information of the policyholders’ claims  
• Being as informed as their policyholders on claims statuses and resolution progress 

Nuvento’s has been an enabler of digital transformation for several multi-line insurance businesses and continues to support its operations. We understand the best practices and unique nuances of this industry, and it gives our solutions an edge in helping businesses solve the challenge at hand. Our frameworks are built to easily transition from legacy to digital and progress digital adoption within the agency.  

To know more about how our unique frameworks speed-up digital adoption and in your insurance agency, get in touch with us.