Digitalization has changed the attitude of individuals to insurance. An evolution that has not escaped the notice of the most savvy insurers, who invest in the latest technologies to adapt to customers who already regularly use multi-channel and multi-device applications to monitor their homes, communicate with their children, find their car or get health stats. But insurance is (and always has been) a business about managing risk. However, these risks are not only evaluated in your policies. They also depend on the availability of services that clients use to contact their advisors.
The priority of any policyholder is permanent and immediate access, in all circumstances, to an agent and/or a claims adjuster if needed, regardless of the method of contact offered. If this service deteriorates or becomes unavailable, insurers risk losing customers (or discouraging potential customers). That’s why technology in this industry places so much emphasis on network and application performance management today.
New technology stacks and insurance service offerings
Technology inspires and enables the current evolution of the insurance industry. We find the same prediction, year after year, on the Internet: large insurers plan to phase out their legacy systems and accelerate the adoption of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and telematics, AI and AI-enabled chatbots (like ChatGPT, for example), insurance predictive analytics tools, etc.
As these new technologies are adopted, they increase the number of channels through which insurers interact with their customers and the complexity of the associated IT infrastructures. Most of the time, to check the processing status of a claim file, it is necessary to make several calls to the contact center, but also to send many e-mails, SMS, etc. Ideally, customers should never be affected by back-end disruptions.
But insurance company IT teams already need to be constantly responsive to a myriad of network tools, applications, and unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) tools for voice, video and messaging both in datacenters and on next-generation platforms (cloud and virtual machines). What is likely to happen if the generalization of digitalisation, with the increased complexity it implies, makes insurers lose sight of certain key aspects of their relationship with their customers?
Poor performance erodes policyholder satisfaction
Modern IT environments contain a wide range of essential services whose functioning depends on a hybrid combination of operations taking place on-premises or in the cloud.
Network administrators are expected to maintain the performance of different service areas to ensure customer satisfaction. However, these have been accustomed, after the rise of technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic, to benefit from immediate solutions. They no longer have any tolerance for technologies that do not work reliably and may be tempted to switch to competitors if their perception of service quality is affected by latencies, disconnections and other random disturbances.
Many IT teams spend most of their time fixing contact center UC&C experiences due to their proximity to customers. Indeed, there is nothing more frustrating than poor call quality with a representative or, worse, dropped calls for no reason. Preventing such situations can be difficult, even if imperative, when IT teams lack the resources to accurately track down the root cause of disruptions and resolve them quickly.
Insurance company network IT teams can rely on tools to quickly identify the root causes of potential performance degradations and resolve issues affecting digital services regardless of organizational charts and technologies involved More than ever, they can and should have complete and scalable visibility into the performance of insurance applications that provide a better customer experience across digital, voice, call center or agency platforms to better manage their services.
The insurance business consists above all in managing risks. Based on this observation, when offering new digital services and in order to stay at the forefront of the latest technological trends, advisors must therefore consider the advantages of a performance management solution from the point of view of their customers, under risk of exposing themselves to unnecessary risks and in order to strengthen and sustain their customer satisfaction.