Life Insurers Achieve Financial Success with Automated Sales & Distribution

In the Life Insurance industry, it's no surprise that customer service is at the heart of every business operation and objective. It's pretty important, because as a customer, you're ultimately paying for...your life! However, when transforming their business, most life insurance companies tend to overlook the opportunity to increase sales and drive distribution, even though eachfacilitates growth from new and existing portfolios.

Evan McDonnell, Vice President of Solutions at Appian, recently shared his thoughts with Insurance & Technology on how life insurers should integrate solutions that look across all parts of sales and distribution, understand the processes inherent in each, and simplify the agent, producer or third party's job of selling products.

Sales and distribution is a cornerstone of financial success for life insurance companies, yet insurers' traditional means of managing these channels have fallen behind the times and threaten to render some organizations obsolete. "A typical problem is having specialist work teams in separate locations use different and specialty IT systems," Evan says. "These siloed systems often do not communicate well with each other, leading to layers of manual work-arounds and ad hoc fixes that involve many different specialists."

According to Evan, there are four main processing activities in which insurance sales and distribution is supported by:

ï Agent lifecycle management

ï Sales needs, leads and product tips

ï E-Platform for new business applications

ï Retention, renewal and conversion activities

Adopting an automated process solution for insurance engagements, agents find it easier to gain knowledge for issues not being delivered to clients, as well as manage individual cases from the desktop or preferred mobile devices. "Real time portfolio views and on-demand access to sales opportunities can greatly improve the insurers' financial performance," Evan explains. "Opting for manual, paper-based and disconnected processes are expensive and time-consuming."

This modernized work method is ideal for life insurance recruiting efforts. Program-wide automation within a singular work platform for recruiting and on-boarding efforts can streamline and simplify processes, such as easily attracting talent from simple e-applications downloaded directly by job seekers. Clear and enforced rules for application data entry can help to avoid mistakes made by applicants when filling out forms, and third-party data can be easily obtained for analysis of candidate credentials.

Be sure to read the rest of Evan's commentary as well as Appian's Insurance Solutions to see how incorporating modern BPM can facilitate growth for insurers across multiple industries!

Mike Ingrisano