‘Whatfix is driving digital transformation in P&C insurance industry’

Bengaluru: The Covid-19 pandemic has prematurely forced the property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry to hasten its digitalization efforts. With the help of a digital adoption platform (DAP), digital adoption across a newly remote workforce can happen even more effectively. In an interaction, Vara Kumar, CPTO & Co-founder, Whatfix, shared several useful insights on the matter. Exceprts:
Q: What are the ways in which digital adoption platforms drive efficiencies in the P&C insurance industry?
A: In this digitally driven world, digitalization is no longer an option, it is a core requirement for every industry. A Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) acts as a catalyst to make digital adoption happen more efficiently and effectively, across the remote workforce. DAPs provide learning and support in the flow of work of P&C employees, agents and policy holders by providing step-by-step guidance, contextual nudges and contextual help right inside the application they use. Companies in the P&C insurance industry have an edge if they double down on digital differentiation to increase operations efficiency and customer experience. Here are four key ways in which Digital Adoption Platforms can drive efficiencies in the P&C Insurance industry.
a. DAPs help in solving high employee turnover rates – With DAPs, you can streamline onboarding by making your program and process more organized and engaging. You can create near-real life simulations on live applications to train employees. Also create walk-throughs and self-help menu for important processes and link those walk-throughs to specific entries in your onboarding task list instead of creating multiple video tutorials that consume more time and require more effort. With an effective onboarding process, you can increase retention by 80% and productivity by 70%.
b. DAPs act as a catalyst for employee productivity – DAPs provide an opportunity for employees to increase productivity in semi-automated or AI-generated forms, access to contextual self-help, and in-application announcements. Through on-demand content and training, a DAP can drastically increase employee productivity and reduce the margin of error.
c. DAPs enable the customer experience – With the help of DAPs, collecting enough data from customers to create personalized policies, provide personalized services, and provide an on-demand digital tool to customers has become much easier than ever before. DAPs also allow tracking customer behavior, successful and unsuccessful search queries, total walk-throughs accessed, and various other metrics. By learning more about customers, you can improve the customer experience and give them better solutions to their specific needs.
d. DAPs are a time savior for customer support – DAPs encourage users to turn to self-help solutions to problems get answers without any human intervention. It aggregates all sorts of tool-specific help content and makes it very easy for customers and the support team to find the required information. A DAP can also track user behavior so that you can recognise what are the most interacted features by your team and customers.
Q: How Whatfix-DAP can drive digital transformation in the P&C insurance industry?
A: Digital transformation in P&C is not just about the applications, which of course are at the center of transformation), but it is also about the processes designed for those applications and most importantly how easily and how well the users are able to use the applications and follow those processes. When using a DAP solution, the transformation and training teams need to create, curate, deploy and maintain the learning and support content. Whatfix provides the most advanced, easy to use toolset for content creation and management At Whatfix we have gone a few steps further and have created a vertical focused on P&C. We understood the most valuable use cases from our P&C customers, hired P&C experts, and have developed P&C-specific solutions. We recently launched the SmartClaims solution that helps claim handlers get proficient, faster and improve claims handling accuracy during the first notice of loss, and helps P&C carriers with SOX and PII compliance. Our customers are appreciating the out-of-the-box P&C-specific value that we are providing with this approach. We have also partnered and developed technical integrations with two of the most popular P&C core applications—Guidewire and DuckCreek.
Q: What are the benefits of digital technologies transforming the P&C industry?
A: Many P&C carriers are now in the midst of major digital transformation with the intent of modernizing their core systems, from claims to policy management to billing and even external systems like Agents Portals or Policyholders Portal. There are numerous benefits of these transformations including improving operational efficiency, ensuring that the carrier is able to keep up with evolving customer expectations, and also staying competitive and relevant in the digital era. These technologies further streamline core P&C processes thereby reducing Claims cycle times, increasing accuracy, and reducing Claims expenses.
One of Whatfix’s customers, a major player in workers’ compensation, started its digital transformation journey to a core P&C system last year. They decided to overhaul all their core systems such as claims, billing, policy, agents, and customer portal to a modern platform in order to achieve improvements in their key KPIs. As a part of this Transformation project, they decided to leverage Whatfix in order to ensure that the benefits like optimized claims handling, faster rollout of new products, improved customer satisfaction are delivered to its true potential.
Q: What are the challenges that P&C insurance companies face in the new normal?
A: The P&C insurance industry has been undergoing a massive digital transformation, both on the operations and the customer experience side. The technology upgrades have led to new application deployments. P&C carriers have different departments handling different parts of the insurance lifecycle. This means that employees and agents need to be proficient in the respective digital processes and workflows they handle for policy sale, policy processing, claims handling and billing. In the new normal, employees need to be trained and supported remotely. Newly onboarded employees need to be trained on the applications they have to use and the processes they need to follow. Any updates to compliance legislation, processes, or application workflows need to be intimated in real-time to all the employees. Also, the P&C processes are not simple, requiring the agents to often seek support. If the onboarding and real-time support is not done well, it impacts customer satisfaction and exposes the providers to risks. It takes a long for policy processing and claims handling, thereby increasing the chances of error during the processes that can lead to compliance issues.