An insurer’s choice of insurance management system can make or break their business. These systems not only serve as a primary point of contact for policyholders, but they’re also the foundation of your back-office processes. How well your chosen system functions has an impact on service levels and a direct effect on the trust policyholders place in you.
Below are some signs your current system might need to be replaced.
Everyone Dislikes Your Current Insurance Management System
IT heads and others in the C-suite seldom find problems with systems that they themselves endorsed in the first place. All too often, internal reports of a system being too slow or cumbersome get waved off or ignored entirely.
But while it’s one thing if a few employees dislike the system, it’s another thing entirely when almost everyone who uses it complains about how it works. This is especially serious when policyholders need to access your system to check on their claims and contributions.
Regardless of whether a policyholder purchased their insurance plan from an agent or received it as part of their workplace benefits, your online insurance management system will be their most usual point of contact with your business. This means that your policyholders’ experience with your system has a direct impact on how they feel about your service.
If you find that there are never-ending complaints about your system, it’s worth looking into an upgrade.
Your Current System Has Known Security Issues
Insurance management systems are prime targets for hackers as they often hold or process a lot of sensitive information. Unfortunately, all insurance systems are at risk. Given enough time, hackers and other criminal elements will figure out ways to compromise any system.
If your current system is several years old or has known security holes and other exploits, it’s extremely important that you consider upgrading it immediately. Even security breaches that don’t result in stolen data can be serious, as they could undermine faith in your business, which will ultimately make a negative impact on your bottom-line.
Your System Has Low Utilization
If you spent thousands of dollars to have a system in place, you probably want people to be using it. Low system utilization can be the result of several things, from a lack of faith in the new software to the existence of older, easier-to-use parallel systems. Whatever the case may be, an insurance management system that no one is using is one that you still need to pay upkeep and hosting for.
If it’s been several months or years since you rolled out your insurance management system, then the lack of buy-in could be a sign of some deeper issues. While these utilization issues could be resolved internally with more training and organizational restructuring, you cannot use these solutions to make policyholders use your system.
In these cases, the most straightforward solution, apart from removing parallel legacy systems, would be to change or update the management system so that it features smoother, more intuitive functionality. Doing so will ensure that more policyholders will use your system regularly, which in turn, will make it a worthwhile investment.
You’re Spending Hours Each Week Doing Reports
Time that you or your employees spend being bogged down doing reports is time that you could not use to grow the business. Many older insurance management systems, while reliable, aren’t always the easiest to use when it comes to reports generation for claims, billing, underwriting, policy processing, and other everyday insurance activities.
If you’re lucky, your older software could generate a spreadsheet file that you would then have to manually sort into a workable report. If you’re unlucky, you might have to end up copying the entries from the current system one by one into a separate sheet, a process that’s prone to human error. Either way, you’ll be wasting possibly hundreds of hours each year on reports generation alone.
If your current insurance management system features poor automation features, then going with one that saves you hours each week is an obvious choice.
The Current System Has Limited Customer Remarketing Functionality
Reporting isn’t the only thing your system should automate. Once a policyholder is in your system, you are presented with many golden opportunities to reach out to them with offers that they might find useful. While you could manually extract their contact details for remarketing, this could be a tedious and potentially error-prone process.
Your insurance management system should ideally have functions that make it easy to upsell or retarget existing customers in their channels of choice. If your system still doesn’t make it easy to do this, an upgrade to one that does may very well drive your revenues to the next level.
Update Your Insurance Management System Today
If any of the items above apply to your business, a systems update will be beneficial. Not only will an update allow you to deliver better service, but it may also very well prove key to maximizing your business’s potential income.
