The technology revolution has done much to expand the insurance industry's reach, automate most of the mundane and repetitive tasks, and give us the ability to provide products and services more quickly and with less human interface. But with all the positive impact of technology have we become too removed from the customer? And, when we speak of customer, we aren't only referring to the insurance buyer; we're referring to anyone who interacts with the insurance organization, whether internal or external. Customers include the buyers, agents, brokers, adjusters, call centers, underwriters, claims personnel and everyone and anyone communicating with an insurer's people, processes, or systems.
Has our close interaction with the users become the casualty of technology? In an industry that was built upon and grew as a result of personal relationships, it might just be time to get back to our roots to look to technology to make the user experience a priority—and the new competitive advantage. As we investigate technology's potential, we might also take a closer look at doing more than just automating the current process by using this as an opportunity to think outside the box to enhance the user experience.
However, before we can begin thinking about enhancing, we first need to come to agreement on the goal—that is, the optimal user experience. With so many users and so many diverse needs, 'optimal' is in the eye of the beholder. We can define at a high level that the user experience should take into consideration both the online and offline interactions that anyone—employee, customer, partner—will have with an insurance organization. Unfortunately, when it comes to leading by user experience example, the insurance industry is not ahead of the crowd. The best ideas for the optimal user experience may be found with online social networking sites and those companies successful in simplifying the call center experience. They seem to have cracked the code of delivering an intuitive user experience that understands the new breed and high expectations of today's users.
The insurance industry does understand that excellent service is key to attracting new customers and is important to keeping existing ones. And, the industry also has learned that the easy access to and far reach of the Internet offers an opportunity to deliver services to customers, distribution channels, and virtually anyone needing to interact. Unfortunately, this realization has also led to a race to develop and deploy portals to provide access to the industry's myriad of back-end systems. While the portal idea appears to have merit, it has more often than not served to replicate the silo problem of back-end systems at the front-end. Multiple portals translate to multiple solutions to constantly update and maintain¸ while delivering an inconsistent approach to the user experience. Add in the growing demand for mobile devices and the portal problem has just been multiplied.
Rather than continuing down the portal path and exacerbating the problem, insurers might be better served by taking a step back and stopping the tendency to react too quickly to user demands for new interfaces, capabilities, and devices. Insurers should be better off taking the time to develop a user experience strategy and evaluate what tools and technology are now available to help them deliver.
While portal development has been the early chosen track to deliver Internet functionality, it represents the first generation and is no longer the only, or necessarily the best approach. Insurers who have the expertise and processes in place for getting portal requirements to production have seen some success. However, as demand for new devices increase and needs constantly change, insurers are often finding their portal tools to be too limiting in what they can provide and how easily they can be manipulated for change.
In addition to in-house and third-party portal development, many of the insurance application solution providers have developed browser-based user interfaces for their systems in order to meet the insurer demand for internet access. Unfortunately, 'access' doesn't always translate to 'easily usable' and core system solution providers are not always user experience experts. While users might technically be able to access the system—needs change, users change, processes changes, and new devices are introduced at an increasing rate. If this trend continues, it won't be long before core system solution providers will be spending more development and support time and effort on the user interface than on building new functionality into the core system. Is this really where insurers want their core system vendors investing their time and effort?
The good news for insurers as well as their core system solution providers is that there are new presentation layer technologies for dealing with the user experience challenge—all while keeping existing back-end systems intact.
User experience platforms (UXP) enable insurers to develop, deploy, and continually manage a wide range of interfaces to a wide range of users. UXP's have been successful in the EMEA market for some time, while the North American market is just beginning to learn about UXP capabilities and gain an appreciation for a solution that focuses solely on the user experience. UXPs allow the insurer to deliver back-end functionality to all distribution channels, all users, in any language, through any browser and on any device. UXPs offer a refreshing option and a single location for managing all user interaction with all systems, devices, interface processes, security, browser technology changes and advancements, and new mobile devices. With all user interactions managed with UXPs, technology developed for just that purpose, insurers are free to focus on delivering the ideal user experience rather than managing an endless number of front-end interfaces. Core system solution providers can get back to focusing on their area of expertise in building new functionality into their core systems and in keeping their solutions on the forefront of technology innovation.
As UXP options gain traction, insurers are beginning to look at back office systems as "headless"—no longer worrying about the user interface that comes with the system or that can be delivered by a portal add-on. With headless core systems the existing user interaction component is removed and replaced with the UXP component, giving insurers more flexibility and speed in offering a broader set of functionality, to a wider range of users, most appropriate for each user type and needs, and on an array of device. Designed specifically to front-end other systems, UXPs are able to integrate well and consume the back-end data models, making the path to the ideal screen flow and data interaction a much smoother one. And, UXP technology understands that delivering the ideal user interaction is not a one-time event, but rather an iterative process, requiring constant change.
Of course, the ideal user experience requires more than good UXP technology. From the outset, insurers should be sure to involve their users in defining and refining their ideal experience. Insurers and users should be encouraged to think out of the box when it comes to interacting with their technology. Look to popular social media Websites and mobile applications that are designed to be intuitive, yet offer a complex and powerful processing environment behind the scenes. Whether the user is a customer service representative, an underwriter, an agent or even a policyholder (or prospective policyholder), insurers should strive for every interaction with their organization to be a positive one.
The ideal user experience should be viewed as a journey rather than a destination—users change, needs change technology changes. So, the user experience needs to continually change as well in order to stay the ideal.
(Wendy Aarons-Corman is president, North America edge IPK. She can be reached at wendy.corman@edgeipk.com or 860-676-7797.)
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