Digital Underwriting: 5 Ways It Improves Your Customer Experience

When you consider digital underwriting solutions, how important is customer experience? Is it even something you look at? If not, it should be.

According to a recent McKinsey survey, organizations that perform well in customer experience outpace their competitors in every facet of business. That includes revenue growth and employee satisfaction. Talk about a well-rounded benefit.

The ideal digital underwriting solution gives your team the tools they need to tackle the challenges of disparate data while improving the customer journey and experience. 

In this post, we’ll discuss what digital underwriting is, the benefits over manual underwriting, and how your underwriting team can use it. You’ll learn about five ways the right digital underwriting workbench improves customer satisfaction and user experience, and we’ll dive into some aspects of these advanced technologies.

Digital underwriting provides end-to-end connectivity to automate key processes and integrate data for a more intuitive experience for customers and insurance professionals alike.

Let’s look at a real-world example of this digital transformation:

Aegon set out to decrease the time it took for policy applicants to receive an answer––guaranteeing a decision within a few minutes.

That’s a difficult goal to reach with manual processes in place. But, by redesigning their underwriting workflow using a digital underwriting platform, Aegon went from a 7% STP rate to over 60%.

These transformational technologies also increased the number of applications processed per week––from 20 to 500––improving operational efficiency without adding to underwriting staff's workload.

The best technology for insurers gives your team a unified view with advanced analytics for deeper insights and collaboration tools that streamline communication. And, of course, you’ll want to make sure it’s customizable or has the capacity to solve your organization’s unique challenges.

An internal assessment of which business outcomes you want to improve can help you determine where your process bottlenecks are. Once you’ve identified inefficiencies, you can develop the right intelligent workflows and benchmarks to meet your ultimate organizational goals.

With goals in place, your digital underwriting solution provides automation to help you reach them, such as RPA, intelligent document processing (IDP), and artificial intelligence (AI).

Customers today look for providers that offer convenience like easy digital experiences. They want immediate answers and transparency. For underwriting staff, that proves challenging.

Many firms still use complex processes that involve a patchwork of manual tasks in legacy systems that make it difficult to get access to client data or integrate information. Underwriters often move between various systems, making it harder and more time consuming to access insights that will help them make informed decisions.

We often think of these constraints in terms of the headaches they cause for companies (which are not small). But if the entire underwriting process is a poor experience, that also means passing problems on the customer, such as:

• Generic communication. Customers expect personalized service with insurance products, quotes, and digital journeys to meet their lifestyle and needs.

• Poor response time. An antiquated insurance underwriting process can mean a long wait time for customers looking for quotes and answers to their questions.

• Lack of transparency. Policyholders want to be able to use digital technologies to review their information, keep track of applications, and have access to all their documentation.

Digital underwriting solutions give you the tools to put in place best practices for insurance customer experience.

Implementing a digital underwriting workbench helps to increase productivity and boost efficiency within your organization. It also gives you access to the right insights to understand the policyholder’s pain points and perspective.

Here are 5 ways digital underwriting can help you improve customer experience:

• Personalized care. Providing tailored support and services builds loyalty and trust. When it's easy to access customer information, you can offer them personalized suggestions for the products they need, when they need them. 

• Access to information. Digital solutions connect the dots. For your customers, this means access to the real-time data and information they need. And with digital products that modern customers expect, they can access it themselves.

• Improved communication. A connected solution helps foster open dialog, provide the customer with regular updates, and gives you the opportunity to listen to their concerns with digital communication tools.

• Simplified processes. Did you know 34% of policyholders say filling out forms is one of their biggest pain points? Minimize friction by streamlining the application process and cutting through frustrations for a more satisfactory experience.

Increased speed. There’s little that customers appreciate more than fast, efficient service. Use the power of digital underwriting to reduce turnaround times for policy issuance from multiple days to a few short minutes.

Today’s insurance organizations often use automated solutions to improve the process for customers, underwriters, and the company’s bottom line. But automation does not take the place of underwriters––the tools help streamline manual tasks and increase efficiency to support insurance professionals.

In 2021, 40% of life insurers reported some degree of automation in their underwriting process. And at least 80% of personal lines of coverage have some automated underwriting.

Just looking at this post, you can see some of the benefits digital underwriting solutions deliver to improve the process from end-to-end. The future of underwriting promises greater access to data for faster and more accurate insights and a better overall customer experience.

In the webinar, Navigating the Future of Insurance, we took a deep dive into connected platforms, digital solutions, and how to meet the demands of a changing insurance industry.