There’s one more step to the underwriting journey—one that too many carriers neglect.
The forgotten finish
What happens when the broker or customer accepts your proposal? From an underwriting perspective, this is often the area that has the least focus. It is flipped over to operations and underwriting is on to the next pursuit.
Yet for overall growth and retention, this is one of the most important steps. It’s hard to overstate the power of first impressions.
Too often, the handoff from underwriting to operations is an afterthought, leading to frustrated customers. Imagine if instead the customer went through a tremendous onboarding experience that made them feel confident in their purchase and made the transition easy. Retention and sales would soar.
Today’s customer journey
Imagine a customer who has just switched today providers or purchased their first insurance. They have no real experience with the carrier yet and are likely to remain uncertain until and if they have a claim or something goes wrong.
This sets up the customer up to have a negative view of their carrier. Policies are delayed or need to be re-issued because of mistakes. First bills can be wrong. Insurance cards can be delayed. It is certainly not a smooth and inviting experience that builds trust that the customer made the right decision.
A more inviting, collaborative future
The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. We can create digital collaborative experiences that integrate the customer, broker, and carrier to gather necessary information and contacts to completes policies and guides the customer through how to connect to and integrate services in a coordinated fashion.
Imagine if this was the onboarding experience instead:
Upon notification that the customer has accepted their offer, the broker gains access to an onboarding site with credentials for them and their customer. The site guides them through the different steps of onboarding where information is collected and verified; documents, posters, and forms are issued; and the customer is connected to services and ecosystem partners. Seamless support services answer questions and resolve issues as they come up.
This type of collaborative digital experience can lower costs, increase retention by increasing customers’ initial trust, and increase sales by boosting broker confidence in changing customers to the carrier.
So isn’t it time you thought about updating this last step of the underwriting process?
In this series, Michael Reilly at Accenture has explored different concepts and ideas of how underwriting can change and evolve. The best part? Nothing discussed here is science fiction or in the distant future.
These are all proven ideas and solutions being used in different parts of the industry today. Many carriers are doing pieces of this vision now.
The key to unlocking the future of underwriting is to have boldness and imagination to move beyond incremental improvements and changes and towards data-driven experiences for brokers, customers, and underwriters that can dramatically improve performance.
Source: PR Newswire
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