How to find a customer-centric approach in insurance

This article was originally published in the Spring 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox. 

It’s no secret that we are living in a momentous period in mankind’s history. Technology, yet again, is shifting our world thanks to various applications of new technology including the internet of things, big data and artificial intelligence. 

The insurance industry, which is at the core of corporate and private economic activity, is heavily affected by technology advancements and must deal with radical new business models, new opportunities arising from completely new business sectors, the internal capitalisation of new technologies and, most importantly, the new norms in customer behaviour. Customers no longer buy through traditional channels, or without consulting social media or other online sources. The customer relationship is under continuous evaluation due to the data stream that every one of us is exposed to daily. It is no wonder that many recent research studies suggest that customers nowadays are more willing to switch insurance carriers. This puts exceptional customer service at the top of an insurers’ priority list.  

In the midst of the storm, insurance carriers find themselves poorly prepared. The majority of insurance companies today rely on siloed legacy systems to carry out their overall operations. Fragmented and duplicate data, error prone manual processes and the inability to consolidate information and processes to upscale their customer service capabilities are all results of legacy systems thriving in insurance organisations. 

In a bid to adapt to the new customer journey, a lot of companies have launched multi-million pound projects aiming to consolidate data from various legacy systems to a new customer repository that would support their customer-centric activities. This is a substantial investment that probably would not yield the expected results. This is because a consolidated customer repository segregated from all of the transactional data that illustrates a customer’s historic behaviour cannot really support a customer­centric approach. 

Optimising back-end core insurance systems is the only starting point that can enable insurance companies to be extrovert and competitive in this new era. Navins is an affordable, end-to-end core insurance software platform based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. By replacing various legacy systems with one state of the art insurance solution, with flexible deployment options on-premises or as a service, Navins enables insurance organisations to support a meaningful customer strategy that leads to success.  

Dionisis Poulis is business development director at Diastasys