Jan 2021 | Risk Analytics

Unconnected technology in the insurance industry

In this article we explore the challenges currently faced by insurers and where you need to begin in order to see improvements and quick wins when it comes to your customer journey.

The challenge of unconnected and legacy technologies

Being able to see everything that you know about your customers, all at the same time, is vital if you want to give them a frictionless experience. And yet 63% of organisations admit that they lack a single customer view.

One key part of this problem is technology. Today’s insurers are often challenged with needing to perform multiple tasks from finding customers and performing affordability checks through to identity verification and claims. However, systems that are not fully integrated, are unable to recognise and authenticate customers without cross referencing information manually or requesting the same information twice.

This could result in a poor experience such as having to ask people to provide the same personal information at different times during several customer service interactions. Only integrated systems can help you achieve a single, trusted view of your customers to remove these points of friction.

The data problem

With unconnected and legacy technologies, many insurers also find they hold conflicting, insufficient or inaccurate data about their customers across the business. For example, you may have a customer’s name in a different format on their application compared to documents provided by their incumbent. Or you may hold two sets of data for a single customer who purchased one product under their maiden name, and another using their married name.

Moreover, certain legacy technologies may not even capture customers’ email addresses, mobile numbers or other data points that were uncommon when the systems were deployed decades ago. This makes it very challenging to identify and authenticate customers quickly, and it can even prevent genuine customers from being able to transact with you.

Where to begin

Re-designing your customer journey may well be on your radar, but where do you start and what quick wins are available now to see instant improvement? Starting with good quality data is vital; if you can’t trust your information, how can you use it for strategic business decisions?

By first addressing data quality issues that arise from unconnected and legacy technologies you’ll address the crucial data inaccuracy challenge. This will help not only improve your data quality, but will also support regulatory efforts and improve cost efficiencies.

Today’s currency is speed, scale and accuracy. It goes without saying there is more data accessible today than ever before. There is also the requisite technological and analytical power to better understand the data; as well as test the art of the possible from within it.

Using a data management system will allow you to identify your data issues quickly and securely so you can prepare the data for the target system. Assessing root causes, improving cleansing and standardisation is your first step to addressing the challenges that arise from unconnected and legacy technologies.

Once you’ve done this you need to ensure you can maintain the quality of data. Having a single customer view with enriched data sets and monitoring and reporting of data quality can be ways in which you can control this throughout your organisation.

Should you be faced with mergers or acquisitions in the future you can use a sophisticated data management system to load, profile and identify data gaps and issues to minimise conversion time and costs. This should also help ensure you’re not faced with the same challenge that initial unconnected and legacy technologies presented you with initially.

How we can help

Experian’s comprehensive data management portfolio focuses on robust capabilities that are quick to implement and easy to use.  We encourage data collaboration across the business and our solutions can easily transition between technical and non-technical users. The highly trusted data foundation that our Aperture Data Studio platform creates can be leveraged for even fasting quoting and quoting with higher degrees of accuracy. It enables everyday users to quickly and easily develop sophisticated workflows that incorporates machine learning algorithms for automatic data tagging and enriches the data using globally-curated data sets from Experian. This ensures data quality and helps govern adherence to data standards.

Want to try out Aperture Data Studio for free? Our Aperture free trial gives you single-user access to our intelligent self- service data quality and enrichment platform for two weeks. Use the platform to see how it can help you manage all types of data projects with confidence, enabling you to quickly and easily profile, analyse, cleanse and transform data.

Use Data Studio to develop sophisticated workflows that incorporate machine learning algorithms for automatic data tagging and enrich your data using Experian’s wide range of globally-curated data sets.

Once you have started the free trial, you will have access to the Experian Data Quality Community, where you will receive support throughout your trial and be able to share ideas and insights with your peers. Sign up for free here.

If you would like to find out more, or speak to one of our data management insurance specialists please contact us.