Insurance carriers have continued to focus on diversifying channel strategies to reach and engage with customers in the last few years. Mobility is increasingly becoming an intrinsic part of most carriers’ channel strategy, especially as customers now benchmark consumer expectations across industry verticals such as retail and banking.
Exhibit 1: Mobile Apps Are Becoming Increasingly Important to Carriers
Source: Entering the Age of Insurance Policy Administration As-a-Service, HfS Research, 2017, n = 50 U.S. P&C decision makers
Our recent survey of 50 P&C insurance executives in North America in Q2-Q3 2017 shows that mobile apps are becoming more pervasive in the industry (see Exhibit 1). Nearly 72% say that enterprise mobility is critical or increasingly important when compared to various digital technologies, and another 26% say that it is an emerging priority.
With increasing investments, we see the industry slowly start to become mature around enterprise mobility, with a few bright spots across customer and workforce enablement.
These are the major trends we see:
- Native apps – with a purpose: It has been challenging for carriers to create purposeful features and capabilities that justify customers downloading native apps. Customers have limited interactions with their insurance provider, and the typical ones can be achieved by accessing responsive-design sites or full sites. As a result, carriers have started packing in more experiential, tangential features and purposes rolled into their native apps, for example creating digital lockers for storing important documents (such as the Metlife Infinity App), digital inventories for property (such as Liberty Mutual’s Home Gallery App), tracking driving behavior and telematics (such as Allstate’s GoodRide), tracking biometrics, etc. These experiments will have to eventually give way to more structured use of mobile capabilities, pushing the right need to the right technology rather than simply wanting to create a use for a new channel.
- Apps focused on claims: We see a lot of traction on native apps specifically for claims to assist with accident guidance and reporting the first notice of loss. An example of this is the consumer app ClaimDi, and the Allstate Mobile app, which centers on its “QuickFoto Claim” capability. The preference of native apps vs. web apps is due to the need for accessing device functions such as the camera for the customer to capture photo and video evidence to self-report. Along with this initial interaction, the app is then starting to be used for document and information exchange between customers, claims adjusters, and in some cases, third-party intermediaries in the claims lifecycle. There are also other image and video capturing tools that can help on the underwriting and adjuster tasks by documenting property and survey data, enabling remote inspection and integrating drone image data that is accessible by mobile. Zurich’s Risk Grading What If app is an example of similar investments in risk management, providing risk managers, property managers, and safety officers to assess the impact of risk mitigation strategies on the business.
- Web portals to push self-service for agents and customers: This is arguably the biggest area of activity and investment we see, pushing self-service for both agents and customers as well as internal staff. Features for these web portals include the ability for different users to enroll in new products, view the most current data available on policies, request changes, access available electronic forms, documents, or information, and make inquiries on status. We see most leading portals designed using responsive-design that can be optimized across devices and screens. Whether or not carriers have antiquated or modern web portals in place, we are seeing mobility become a big part of carrier interactions. At the most basic level, these include automated SMS/email notifications on pending status in existing workflows, reminders for payments, and other transactions.
- Mobility to drive sales and marketing: Carriers are razor-focused on driving top-line growth and keeping up with competition in a challenging market environment. As a result, any investments that better enable agents and brokers to get their jobs done are top priority. Creating better interfaces and providing better insights through sales and marketing apps is thus on the rise. Examples of features includes bringing product information to an agent’s fingertips while out in the field, the ability to compare and contrast plans alongside customers to choose the best fit, and most importantly, insights into where to find the most profitable and likely-to-purchase categories of customers (or individual customers as the case may be). This is where different sources of data, including social feeds, can be helpful to segment and target at an individual level.
- Re-imagining insurance with a mobile-first strategy. Carriers like Lemonade are centering their entire strategy around mobile-first experiences and processes. The intention is to make the whole insurance process touchless by leveraging different digital technologies in an integrated manner. Lemonade is doing this through the use of virtual agents in their mobile apps. Another insurtech, Cover, is getting customers comparative quotes by simply taking pictures of their property.
In responding to these trends, carriers have an opportunity to take stock of the policyholder and agent data they maintain and collect on an ongoing basis. When thinking about mobile and web services, are there opportunities to productize your data? Is building a native app really the holy grail, or can you enable other web services, e.g., connecting your data into other third-party existing apps? When thinking about web services particularly, are there any already existing APIs or web services related to your segment, such as weather data or other semi-relevant data you could pull in to create new features or sources of value to customers, agents, and other staff?
Bottom Line: Contextualize mobility initiatives in the overall push toward digitization and customer-centricity in insurance
Overall, the insurance industry has yet to mature its development and use of web technologies, which is a core starting point for digital customer and workforce experiences – think of persistent challenges with e-sig, e-apps, underwriting, and their underlying antiquated data platforms. Mobile is a newer channel and its complexities and platforms are almost distracting from fundamental shifts that carriers have to make toward digitization as a whole. While web portals for agents and customers are rapidly growing, carriers need to facilitate mobile access (e.g., responsive-design site) and interaction (e.g., text notifications) for these platforms to respond to the digital marketplace. HfS stresses that carriers have to make progress on all fronts, with the most critical challenge being presenting an integrated front (and middle and back) regardless of the channel. The end goal of this integration is what we at HfS call “OneOffice”, which refocuses organizational efforts around the end customer, enabled by digital technologies that can connect with customers in their channels of choice. This is why initiatives in 2018 that are increasingly focused on topline growth and customer experience will start to build in mobility as an enabler.
