Rewards Seen For Insurers Going Wireless

When it comes to mobility, the most successful deployments occur when a company takes a top-down view of how different functions interact. It helps take a customer-in approach in other words, how do customers interact with your company? How can mobile technologies be used to provide customers with a better experience and make it easier to do business with you?

It makes sense to use field force automation solutions when there are mobile and field employees, but much of the industry involves office-bound workers. Some insurers might mobilize hard-wired workers to bring them closer to clients so they can boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Let's take a look at how these technologies can be deployed to build collaboration between work groups, provide mobility for field workers, and peek into the future of wireless insurance:

? Collaborative Solutions:

A wireless local area network allows more collaboration between office workers who can take their laptops to different conference rooms or around the corporate campus. They are not truly mobile, because their connectivity is bound to a wired Internet connection.

An example of a mobile collaborative solution might be to deploy a mobile enterprise-grade instant messaging solution whereby field employees collaborate in real time with colleagues.

There is an important distinction between enterprise-grade and free IM clients. Many employees use free IM clients at work to communicate and collaborate quickly with colleagues as it is not a store-and-forward medium such as e-mail, and questions can often be resolved more quickly than by making a phone call.

For all the upside of IM, there is a serious downside to using free IM clients. They generally are not endorsed for use by IT departments as they cannot control their use and the free services do not have the same security measures used by an enterprise-grade IM client.

This is especially important with the proliferation of more and more insidious computer viruses and worms that are being deployed through instant messaging clients. A true enterprise-grade IM solution not only allows the IT department to control its use but allows employees to use it at their desks, and when they leave the office the IM client "goes mobile" and can be used on their mobile phones or other wireless devices.

? Mobility Solutions:

Some insurers have successfully and profitably mobilized claims adjustors. Indeed, claims management is where mobile technologies are providing the greatest positive impact.

There are different aspects to a claims adjustor's workday that can benefit from true mobility. Your company need not mobilize every aspect of an adjustor's life to reap serious rewards.

Claims adjustors usually start the day by developing their schedule of visits, and then spend the latter half of the day on paperwork. By mobilizing its automated scheduling, routing and dispatch system, an insurer can save adjustors hours by intelligently routing service calls. As new claims are reported, the dispatch system alerts adjustors in the area to pay a visit to the client. With secure wireless Web access to corporate data and systems, paperwork is greatly reduced and in some cases eliminated.

Insurers may also extend applications such as damage estimation to the mobile workforce so that they can provide the customer with real-time figures on cost repair and submit a repair order directly to a carrier-approved body shop.

Companies can equip adjustors with handheld devices for electronic signature capture and printers so checks can be handed to customers on the spot. For these companies customer satisfaction and loyalty rates will increase, and they will be able to process more claims in less time.

More importantly, the company saves money by controlling the losses, preventing escalation of damages and ensuring a claimant in a car accident won't be coming back with new aches and pains that weren't evident at the time of the incident.

? Location-Based Services:

These show where a person or assets are located. Insurers may be able to put a Global Positioning Device in an insured's car to collect information on how a customer drives monitoring distance, speed and time of day. The data can be used to adjust a client's premium downward for those who rarely drive and upward for those who are considered a higher risk.

While surely many will think this an intrusive "Big Brother" tactic, those who have clean records and don't log many on-road miles will surely welcome the idea of paying a lot less for coverage. Insurers are likely to increase profitability through this "pay as you drive" model by increasing their customer base of verifiably safer drivers.

Evaluate which of your business processes could be transformed and optimized through the use of mobile and wireless technology. Select partners who understand the dynamics of the insurance industry and will integrate solutions to work within your IT infrastructure.

Laura Mildon Xideris is a solutions manager at Sprint Business Solutions in Overland Park, Kan.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, June 4, 2004. Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.