Insurance Customer Experience: 7 Best Practices for Underwriting Success

Many insurance companies still grapple with disconnected data and cumbersome processes, making it difficult to provide a seamless and efficient customer experience. This might look like toggling between numerous legacy systems and wrangling data from umpteen different sources to provide customers with a quote.

Clients today demand personalized experiences with a human connection, and many insurance companies are struggling to keep up with this expectation. Providing a personalized experience means tailoring insurance products and pricing to meet the specific needs and requirements of individual clients, and understanding where human interaction is preferred.

Complex digital platform interfaces, disparate data sources, multiple versions of spreadsheets, and working with data across multiple systems can all overwhelm already thin underwriting resources. These things also add friction to the analysis and pricing processes, making it harder for insurers' to quickly evaluate risks, make critical insurance decisions, and offer competitive pricing.

Automated underwriting makes it easier for prospective customers to make use of digital capabilities to review the status of their application and submission at their convenience, delivering the kind of control and transparency that today's consumers expect. Transparency is essential to winning policyholder trust and growing lifetime customer value. The best systems automatically keep policyholders posted at every stage of the underwriting process, from application to quote to onboarding, while prompting brokers and managers for action and instantly transmitting information to policyholders based on their customer preferences. 

Industry experts argue that it's time to reimagine the rules of underwriting as part of a modern technology and platform strategy that integrates the policyholder perspective into the entire customer journey map. 

And this approach has caught on across the industry from life to property and casualty insurers who are looking to gain a competitive advantage. Improving the customer journey is crucial for all lines of insurance, because it can help build trust, increase customer satisfaction, and drive growth and profitability. So, let's take a look at seven best practices that are key differentiators for improving the customer journey in commercial insurance.

The first step in improving the customer journey in insurance is to get a deep understanding of your customers. This includes learning customer behaviors and understanding their needs, expectations, and pain points. That also includes learning what channels they prefer to use for customer interactions. For example, 48% of customers prefer opening a new account on their computer, while 34% prefer using a mobile app, according to an Accenture survey of the insurance market. In a recent Publicis Sapient survey, 34% of policyholders cited the hassle of filling out forms and providing personal information among their biggest pain points, while 15% reported switching insurers for a better digital experience, with online services like self-service portals.

Streamlining processes includes simplifying the application and underwriting processes as well as reducing wait times for policy issuance. By streamlining underwriting processes, insurance companies can provide a more efficient and convenient experience to grow their loyal customer base.

Technology plays an increasingly important role in the commercial insurance industry to improve the customer journey. For example, leading insurers are betting on data fabric, a unified data management approach, to solve their data silo problems. Data fabric can help insurance teams access and analyze data from numerous, disparate sources, ranging from policy administration systems to digital claims processing systems to CRM systems. Insurers are also modernizing legacy operations with the help of platforms for process automation that can digitize and automate manual underwriting processes. Finally, insurance leaders in competitive markets are finding their sweet spot with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies to stay on top of growing expectations for personalized service and convenient, data-driven digital solutions.

Personalizing the customer experience is crucial for building trust and loyalty with clients and boosting customer engagement. This includes tailoring insurance products and pricing to meet the specific needs and requirements of individual customers as well as providing tailored support and resources.

Clients today expect information at their fingertips. That means giving customers real-time information about insurance policies, claims, and billing as well as access to educational resources and support—often through digital channels.

Fostering communication and collaboration with agents and other staff is a key component of improving the customer journey. Insurance companies should strive to build strong relationships with their clients and encourage open and ongoing communication. This includes providing transparent and regular updates about the status of policies as well as offering opportunities for clients to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Finally, it's important for insurance companies to continuously evaluate and improve the customer journey. This includes regularly soliciting feedback from clients as well as monitoring key metrics, such as customer satisfaction, to identify areas for improvement. Insurance companies that continuously evaluate and improve the customer journey will be well positioned to provide a positive customer experience and build strong relationships with their clients.

By focusing on these best practices, insurance companies can deliver a positive customer experience and boost customer acquisition and retention. But there's one more secret weapon of customer experience winners: straight-through processing.

Straight-through processing (STP) is an automation strategy that allows insurance companies to eliminate some manual tasks and speed up the insurance underwriting process from end to end. In recent years, the strategy has caught on with commercial insurers as a way to improve the customer experience and offer faster service. Here's how:

One of the main benefits of STP is that it allows insurance companies to increase speed, consistency, and efficiency in the underwriting process. Automating some labor-intensive manual tasks, such as data entry and risk assessments, results in faster turnaround times and reduces the time it takes to issue a policy from days or even weeks to just a few minutes.

STP can also help improve accuracy in the underwriting process. By automating manual tasks and relying on data and algorithms to make risk assessments, STP can eliminate the risk of human errors like typos and miscalculations and help insurance companies make better informed decisions. 

Insurance companies struggle to stay compliant with ever-evolving regulations and industry standards. By automating the underwriting process, STP ensures that all policies are issued in accordance with regulations and reduces the risk of policy cancellations due to noncompliance.

By automating the underwriting process, STP provides a more convenient and efficient experience for customers, allowing them to receive policies more quickly. That helps companies meet high customer expectations and makes them less likely to switch to a competitor.