For the most part, my family has stopped asking me about the articles I'm working on. Apparently they're just not interested in hearing me talk about the latest trends in insurance technology. So, I was surprised to see my son excited to learn that I was working on an article about portals.

"Portals are really powerful," he said. "They give you a lot of control and take you where you want to go really fast."

With a little questioning on my part, I realized we were speaking about two different things. You see, my son is a bit of a Minecraft junkie. In the dig-and-build world of Minecraft, portals are gateways that give players instant access to new areas of the game that offer additional capabilities and resources.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the Minecraft portal is a perfect analogy for what a modern insurance portal should be.

First-generation portals offered by insurers limited the way in which users could access information and functionality to a single, proprietary interface. "The early portal experiences were monolithic applications that just happened to run on a web browser," says Scott Good, senior director of customer innovations at E&S carrier Scottsdale Insurance.

As business users have become untethered from desktops, and as the world of personal connectivity has evolved to anywhere, any time, and any device, portals need to be much more than a single interface. Modern insurance portals need to be a gateway that gives control to users—agents, policyholders, and other stakeholders—and take them where they want to go, really fast.

Portal Power

A recent "Portal Insight" report from Strategy Meets Action (SMA) detailed how insurance portals must evolve beyond a rigid, limited, tactical application for submission, data capture, and inquiry.

"Insurers should not look at just a single function, such as building a quoting capability on a portal," says SMA founder Deb Smallwood. "Carriers should first understand their business strategy for channel management, including both sales and service. They need to take a step back before they build a portal and determine how they are going to deal with and support prospects, customers, and agents," she adds.

That demands business-IT alignment and planning skills, which have traditionally been difficult to come by. "Creating an enterprise portal strategy requires the business and IT to come together and create a roadmap, not just for the business to say, 'IT, build us a portal,'" Smallwood says. "However, the reality is that more than a few insurance companies are just starting to connect their business strategy to their IT strategy."

Scottsdale's portal strategy begins with surveying its customers. "What Scottsdale and a lot of our competitors have traditionally done is deliver portal applications that require customers to log onto a company-branded experience to rate, quote, and issue products," Good says. "But what we heard from our customers was that growth and efficiency in agency operations required utilizing their own management systems to get the same experience across multiple carriers."

That led Scottsdale to embark on a mission of creating, in Good's words, a "non-portal portal"—providing portal capabilities and connectivity through web services, but eschewing the creation of a Scottsdale-specific user interface.

"Our products are delivered and sold through wholesalers who also represent other carriers. So, we embarked on a mission to enhance our portal experience, but also to focus on the non-portal portal—building out the APIs so that agent technology can seamlessly integrate with our back end and access our products without logging onto a (Scottsdale-)branded experience," he explains.

Guardian's portal strategy for its group insurance business focuses on the needs of its four key user constituencies: brokers, plan sponsors or their agents, members covered by Guardian insurance, and provider networks. With 1.3 million users across those groups, the goal of every update, change, and enhancement to the seven-year-old portal is to avoid disrupting those groups while enhancing the user experience.

"We're not trying to change the roles of various constituents or force them to do business a certain way. We're trying to enable the roles that they have," says John Furlong, vice president and CIO of Group Insurance at Guardian. To that end, the functionality of the portal is customized to the unique role of the particular user accessing it.

"Some capabilities are limited to certain roles, while other functions delivered via the portal are designed to be multi-role functions," Furlong says. "We spend a lot of time in strategy sessions and with our users trying to envision how each of their roles work to be sure we are delivering functionality that is appropriate for those roles."

Doing business through a select set of agency partners, Amerisure's primary goal behind its SureConnect portal is supporting that group. "The SureConnect portal is a natural extension of our ongoing relationship with our partners. It allows us to extend our service delivery thorough e-commerce," says Shawn O'Rourke, Amerisure vice president and CIO.

However, as the company has developed its enterprise portal strategy, Amerisure has begun rolling out ways for policyholders to interact with the company, being careful to involve agents.

"We put a high value on the personal relationships we have with our agents and that they have with their clients—our policyholders. We provide online information and capabilities to policyholders that complement what our agents do, and we show agents how that helps with retention," explains Bernie Smith, agency programs manager.

Portal Keys

An enterprise portal strategy should keep in mind four key characteristics of insurance e-commerce that shape the expectations of agents and policyholders. First, communication and distribution in today's insurance transaction is no longer limited to a linear process, where customers contact the agent, who in turn contacts the insurer.

"Some insurers are still managing their channels in silos, with data that is exchanged between customers, agents, and the company in isolated environments," Smallwood says. She points out that communications today are multifaceted, nonlinear, and unpredictable, where people communicate through various types of devices and often reach out to many people at once.

"There is a need for the portal to support nonlinear communication and enable collaboration," Smallwood says. "The collaboration could be as basic as a status update: 'We received your submission and it's in underwriting.' It could be providing communication in some way other than email—using a vehicle like text or chat. It might be alerting users in real time that they didn't input all the information needed or that there is an underwriting question around what they have entered. It could be providing a shared collaboration environment to make it easier to do things like writing proposals on very large risks."

The Guardian Anytime portal provides nonlinear capability across several functions and lines of benefit insurance. For instance, enrollment can be done through the traditional process, with Guardian staff entering it into the company's backend administration systems. Members, third-party agents, and policyholders can use Guardian Anytime, which integrates with those systems. And, Guardian is currently introducing web services that allow TPAs to use their own management systems to process enrollment and update the information seamlessly in Guardian's portal.

"Different insurance relationships will come up where people will want to combine things cross-carrier and cross-plan," says Furlong. "We want to be sure the service experience is continuous."

The second expectation that needs to be met by a modern insurance portal is that access can happen anytime, anywhere, and using any medium users select.

"Where insurers are challenged is creating a seamless experience across the web, mobile device, tablet, or phone," Smallwood says. She also points out that the portal must support a wide variety of communication modes that include email, mail, paper, voice, texting, chat, and face-to-face.

Insurers are trying to determine the best way to provide those multi-platform capabilities. "Some are building mobile apps themselves. Some are looking to their policy administration vendors to pick up the ball," says Smallwood. "They're all trying to find ways to avoid having multiple applications replicating the same functionality on different platforms."

Guardian is doing its own mobile development. "If I could buy it, I would," Furlong says. "We're pushing our [portal] experiences out to the mobile world—phone, tablet, and so on."

Guardian's first capability, launched in late 2012, allowed members to find a network provider and leveraged the GPS location capabilities of mobile devices. In March 2013, the company introduced electronic ID cards.

"We've had online ID cards for a while, but pushing those to mobile allows the device to be used like a wallet," says Furlong.

Scottsdale has worked over the past three years to extend its existing portal, in place since 2007, to deliver multi-platform capabilities that align with the company's enterprise portal strategy.

"Our portal has been consistently ranked as extraordinarily easy to use. Users could rate and issue the full policy, do endorsements and cancellations, even out of sequence—the full lifecycle. But, it was launched with the idea of a single user experience based on a web browser access. Today, we are working to take that very traditional portal experience and move it to a more robust service experience," Good says.

Scottsdale is currently working to build web services exposing functionality that can ultimately be accessed by mobile devices. "We're putting our effort into the infrastructure of using web services to allow our trading partners to develop mobile services that are customized to what they want, rather than our view," says Good.

Portal Connectivity

The third reality an enterprise portal strategy must reflect its users' expectation that portals provide or complement direct connectivity to agency management systems, comparative raters, and other e-commerce platforms.

"Although the industry is still in the early stages of integration, many companies now have platforms that can quickly and easily plug into new comparative raters, agency management systems, and so on, with the interfaces and integration to the back end rating and administration systems already in place," Smallwood says.

"Agents want to manage their destiny," Good says. "If they are putting data into a carrier system that they can't easily pull into their management system, they can't easily use that information to see how their agency is performing. Agents have told us we need to help them get that data back into their own systems, which means they are saying they want the agency management system to be the heart and soul of their agency."

"About 95 percent of ours agents use an agency management system," O'Rourke says. "We provide content in the portal that agents can take back into their management system, and we have an ongoing dialog with our agents about further integration." All of SureConnect's capabilities are also delivered through Amerisure's internal portal for employees as well as select capabilities on its public website.

SureConnect's 2009 launch was the result of an agile development initiative in lieu of the Amerisure's traditional waterfall approach. "That [agile] approach allowed a lot of creativity and speed-to-market," Smith says. "We couldn't afford a long, drawn out development process—we risked falling behind the industry if we did."

The portal initially provided access to claims information, and Amerisure has continued to add functionality over time. "We're at a point where we have represented on SureConnect much of the business functionality of an insurance company—claims, loss control information, billing documents—most of what we do is represented there one way or another," O'Rourke says.

Amerisure reports that all of its agents use SureConnect to some degree, along with a "significant" number of policyholders. "Policyholders typically access claims information, loss control training, or other educational collateral," Smith says. "The number of policyholders on the system is growing and continues to grow at a rapid rate, and SureConnect is becoming a part of the sales process for many agencies, either in retaining existing accounts or securing new business opportunities."

Through conversations with its agents, Scottsdale recognized the need to support agent technology.

"They were asking for more and more tweaks to the user interface of the existing portal, and we got to the point where we realized we couldn't make a single interface fit for everyone. There was a need to expose service capabilities they could connect to," Good explains.

The first service Scottsdale delivered was what Good characterizes as a "simplistic" approach to rating. That was closely followed by sample application sets that agents could configure, modify, and embed into their own system. The company is currently deploying a claims administration solution that will allow Scottsdale to provide claim information to the portal via web service APIs.

"We haven't slayed all the capabilities, and there are certain areas we may never get to because there just isn't a demand to provide it via a web service, such as agency P&L reporting and similar reporting functionality," Good says. "We are allowing our agents to lead the effort, identifying the most repetitive tasks we can target for efficiency gains, rather than functions that simply aren't used that often."

Portal connectivity requires standards, which are more mature in standard P&C than in other lines.

"Industry standards have been slow to evolve, so we have to work with multiple counterparties to make sure things are acceptable," says Furlong. "For instance, we developed our web services after consultations with multiple TPAs. We start with industry standards where we can, and look to reach consensus with partners where we can't."

"We've seen a rapid movement in the [nonstandard lines] space of carriers offering up APIs," Good says. "We've taken a leadership role, working with ACORD to deliver up web service standards to make messages consistent across carriers, and working with a lot of vendors who are building out capabilities to pull in rates and information from multiple carriers."

Continued Capability

Lastly, the portal experience must provide more than information. "Inquiry is a bare minimum for self-service—being able to look at policy information, print it, get an ID card," Smallwood says. "Insurers really need to find a way to deliver capabilities that extend beyond that and serve multiple purposes for multiple audiences."

"When it comes to the transaction of quoting and selling a policy, we've been there for a while," Good says. "However, we found it wasn't enough just to deliver rates."

Instead, agents wanted information on the underlying process that went into to the quote. "They wanted to know what underwriting information was being considered, what classifications are restricted or prohibited, and other rules around the risk they weren't aware of," Good says.

At the beginning of this year, Scottsdale launched an enhancement that provided agents additional detail on rate calculation. "We deliver cross references to classification information, state and territory codes, underwriting rules, and so on," Good says. "We don't just deliver the pure rates, we deliver a full catalog that can be delivered via web services."

That type of drill-down is the basis for effective collaboration. "We're starting to see the next generation of portals deliver more sophisticated collaboration capabilities between insurers and portal users," Smallwood says. "The portal should provide the ability to share information between agents and insurers in real-time and provide customers a personalized experience that reflects their full relationship with a company."

Guardian has focused on providing more power to individual members over plan management. "From the beginning, the portal was both informational and transactional, but we have moved more and more into transactional capabilities," says Furlong.

The first major milestone was providing online enrollment capability for plan sponsors and TPAs. That capability was later provided to members as well.

Recently added functionality includes the aforementioned mobile phone capabilities, additional billing capabilities for plan sponsors to update online billing information related to self-administered plans, and adding more worksite benefit products. The latest functionality to be introduced was the ability to request changes online.

"We're also continuing to work on the user experience so that it's more complete," Furlong says. "We already provide a lot of information to users, but we haven't taken 100 percent of the information we have and put it into a single 'file cabinet' that is an electronic record of everything a member has ever done with us. We'd like to get to that point."

Guardian measures the impact of the portal in many different ways: pure usage statistics; how many transactions or enrollments are initiated via the portal, how many service requests are completed; and others. One of the biggest areas of impact has been automating several eligibility transactions for straight-through processing, which has increased the percentage of those transactions going through the portal in real time from 50 to 70 percent.

Portal Progression

Smallwood believes that portals will continue to be an area of investment for insurers.

"As both agents and policyholders expect faster and faster response times and more complete information, insurers are going to be pressured to expand their portal capabilities" she says.

"We continue to invest every year in additional portal capabilities, and I don't see that investment decreasing," Furlong says. "It's part of the way we do business and the way we reach out to our clients, and we will continue to enhance all those roles as we go forward."

"Market leaders are getting good at providing capabilities based on an enterprise strategy, and others are getting there," Smallwood adds. "Their capabilities will all grow along with the increasing sophistication of portals in the marketplace."

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Agents Seek Portals to Meet Demands of the Market

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