The global market is undergoing rapid evolution, leading a significant shift in customer expectations and experiences. As a result, there is a pressing need for agility and adaptation across all industries. However, the impact of this disruptive change is particularly pronounced within the insurance industry, where advanced technologies and a surge of InsurTech startups are challenging traditional insurers. Delivering innovative and personalized experiences and meeting the ever-changing demands of modern customers has now become more critical than ever. Fortunately, there is a solution that can help insurance companies tackle these challenges and transform their business for the better: the Liferay Digital Experience Platform.
This game-changing platform provides a comprehensive solution for insurance companies to stay ahead of the curve by enabling them to deliver personalized customer experiences, streamline operations, optimize workflows, and meet regulatory requirements.
The Most Common Insurance Industry Challenges Today
The insurance industry has long been recognized for its complex and evolving landscape, and there are a number of challenges that are currently at the forefront of insurers’ minds.
Slow adoption of modern business processes for agents, employees, and customers
Due to their reluctance to adapt and innovate, the traditional insurers are now left vulnerable to more agile and adaptive competitors. Despite the availability of more advanced and efficient systems, many insurers continue to use the same legacy systems, resulting in a lack of integration between different systems and inefficiencies in processing claims. This, in turn, leads to a lack of interoperability between different departments and an inability to provide the level of service that customers expect.
Risks associated with advanced technologies and processes
As insurers adopt digital solutions to streamline their operations and improve the customer experience, they are also exposing themselves to potential risks that come with new technologies, including cybersecurity threats and data privacy concerns. In recent times, the industry has observed a rise in security incidents. In 2020, the world’s largest insurance broker, Marsh, was hit by a cyberattack that exposed sensitive information about its clients, highlighting the need for insurance companies to take cybersecurity seriously.
Overwhelming amount of legacy systems and non-integrated technologies
Many insurers continue to use outdated and complex systems that lack compatibility with newer systems. With a lack of integration between different systems, insurance companies face inefficiencies in data management, claims processing, and customer service. This challenge has a cascading effect on the overall performance of the insurance company, including decreased productivity, poor customer experience, and slower time to market. One instance of this challenge is the difficulty in integrating legacy systems with modern cloud-based solutions.
Industry disruption from large insurers and InsurTech startups
The insurance industry is facing disruption from both large insurers and InsurTech startups, making it challenging for traditional insurance companies to maintain their market share. Large insurers are looking to expand their offerings and acquire smaller players to strengthen their position, while InsurTech startups are leveraging advanced technologies to offer innovative products and services. As a result, traditional insurers are struggling to keep up with the competition and provide the personalized and innovative services that modern customers demand.
Liferay DXP enables insurers with different digital solutions
With a wide range of Digital solutions, Liferay DXP helps insurers to transform their business. From personalized communication to automated underwriting and claims processing, the platform enables insurers to stay competitive in the industry and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
1. Various digital solutions under one roof
Whether it’s seamless communication, damage reporting, or claims processing, insurers must keep pace with the changing demands of their customers. Liferay Digital Experience Platform enhances the customer experience throughout the entire customer journey.
- Self-Service customer portal: Streamline operations, reduce overhead, and improve customer experience with a self-service portal. Increase loyalty and retention with a centralized platform for policy management, invoicing, service requests, and transactions.
- Broker portal: Empower your brokers with the tools to create personalized offerings, share and collect data, and increase their operational efficiency. Thus, help brokers to sell more and earn higher commissions, keeping them motivated to outperform.
- Employee portal: Simplify access to employee data, tools, and resources. This helps maximize efficiency, collaboration and communication, leading to improved team performance, productivity, and higher success rates.
- Integration platform: Bridge the gap between legacy systems, new technologies, and data sources with advanced integrated platforms. Stay agile and ready for digital transformation to improve efficiency, accuracy, and scalability.
2. Take customer-centric approach
Insurers gain a competitive edge by providing end-to-end digital Insurance solutions that cater to the needs of not only customers but also brokers and employees. Liferay’s end-to-end digital solutions streamline the customer journey and keep up with customer expectations, making sure that insurers are always a step ahead.
- Digital-first customers: Deliver seamless digital experiences that policyholders demand. Utilize the pre-built features to create and personalize your insurance portal solution.
- Omnichannel experiences: Provide customers with consistent and connected digital experiences. Streamline engagement along the customer journey, from initial contact to multi-channel support and automation.
- Employee productivity: Leverage Liferay DXP’s digital workspace capabilities to let teams collaborate smoother and faster, leading to employee engagement and satisfaction. With this powerful platform, your employees will have the resources they need to make your customers happy.
- Tools for brokers: Improve agent efficacy with intuitive digital experiences. Offer comprehensive customization options to ensure the broker portal meets the unique needs of each customer.
- Gain a competitive edge: Adapt to the changing landscape and drive future innovations. With OpenAPI compatibility, invest in a platform that is able to respond to fluctuations and continue to push forward in the ever-evolving global market.
- Integrate legacy IT systems: Leverage current and future InsurTech solutions, ensuring that your business is always ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation, even when you choose to stick to legacy systems.
7 Exceptional business benefits of Liferay DXP for insurance companies
Liferay DXP being an open-source and flexible platform allows you to launch your digital transformation journey without disruption to your existing operations. From modernizing your personalized solutions to providing an enterprise-level experience, the powerful platform enables you to create a seamless customer journey. Here’s how Liferay DXP helps you to increase your productivity and improve customer engagement.
1. Personalized and intuitive digital experiences
To run a successful insurance business, you need strong customer and agent relationships. Liferay DXP provides a superior and more convenient experience for customers, with self-service capabilities, paperless statements, and lower call center resources. Agents benefit from engaging portals, granular user roles, collaboration tools, and a complete digital asset management system. Build strong customer and agent relationships with advanced features like personalized dashboards, powerful form builders, and robust data.
2. Integrating existing and new technologies
Liferay DXP solves the concerns of digital transformation and disruption of existing operations. The solution is compatible to integrate with your existing legacy systems and critical applications, ensuring your day-to-day operations remain unaffected. Liferay DXP’s development workplace, OSGi and development standards are safe and seamless digital transformations.
3. Ready for future innovations
The insurance industry is in a state of constant flux with the continuous advancements in InsurTech, IoT, and telematics. But Liferay solution keeps adapting to stay relevant in the competitive market, allowing you to take advantage of its evolving technology. With a powerful back-end architecture, Liferay DXP provides an array of flexible APIs to meet your custom requirements.
4. Seamless customer experience across all touchpoints
By providing a single platform for managing customer interactions, Liferay DXP enables you to deliver consistent and relevant content to customers across all touchpoints. This improves customer experience by ensuring that customers can easily access the information they need, whenever and wherever they want. Additionally, optimize your customer engagement by leveraging data analytics and insights to tailor content and experiences based on customer behavior and preferences
5. Streamlined communication channels between insurers and customers
With Liferay DXP, insurers can create a central repository of customer data, allowing you to quickly and efficiently respond to customer queries and concerns. It also integrates with a variety of third-party tools and applications for you to leverage its existing technology advancements, streamlining your workflows and automating processes.
6. Smart, personalized recommendations with relevant customer insights
Having a centralized platform makes it easier to manage, access, and analyze customer data. The platform allows you to make more personalized interactions with customers, as you can better understand customer preferences and behaviors using real-time insights. With a complete view of customer data, deliver customer experiences and ultimately, increased customer loyalty and revenue.
7. Customer-centric approach for increased sales and customer retention
Liferay DXP’s analytics capabilities provide businesses with valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling them to optimize their sales and marketing efforts for better results. Leverage its robust features such as content management, customer data management, and marketing automation to engage your customers in a meaningful way and build lasting relationships.
Common insurance use cases with real-life examples showcasing the success of Liferay DXP
Liferay DXP offers scalable and flexible features to modernize your operations. Furthermore, it can improve business performance and enrich user experiences for customers, agents, and employees.
1. Customer Self-service Portal
Online self-service is a crucial factor for 38% of policyholders when selecting an insurance provider. Apart from attracting digital-first customers, they also benefit in:
- Reducing customer service expenses
- Improving agents and employee support
- Personalized features for clients
- Superior customer experiences
For instance, CopperPoint Mutual Insurance leveraged Liferay solutions to build a customer portal for their agents, employees, and customers. It is equipped with self-serve registration, personalized content, and an updated architecture, enabling quick and easy function building and publishing.
2. Agent Portal
An agent portal simplifies communication and processes for field agents, empowering them to work more efficiently. This results in:
- Faster quote generation
- Increased policy sales
- Real-time communication with colleagues, partners, and agents
- Better customer service
- Improved renewal rates
For instance, upgrading the agent quoting system enabled West Bend Mutual Insurance Company to provide faster quotes, increased efficiency, and enhanced ease of use for agents. This resulted in reduced wait times for customers, more online quotes, increased new policy sales, and overall growth for the company.
3. Collaborative Intranet for Digital Workplace
For better customer service and streamlined communication, your employees need an intranet solution. Build a unified digital workplace, consolidated with important documents and data to manage insurance claims and underwriting with forms and workflows, resulting into:
- A customer-centric workplace
- Excellent customer service
- Increased sales and profitability
For instance, Maiden Global Servicing Company transformed its outdated intranet to a responsive web experience using Liferay. The solution enabled the company to better support regional and specialty insurers’ reinsurance and capital needs, enabling permissions for the site and role-specific content and building a single location for employee support.
4. Omnichannel Experiences
Keep your business afloat by delivering personalized and connected digital customer experiences across all your touchpoints, which leads to:
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Improved sales and business operations efficiency
- Cross-channel customer insights
- Consistent brand experiences
For instance, Britam, a financial solutions provider in Africa, built a new Partner Service Portal, empowering brokers and agents to manage insurance purchases, easily quote clients, access business applications and information, and increase sales growth and profitability for both parties.
5. Modernize Business Processes
Bridge the gap between old and new technologies to empower insurance firms and revolutionize their digital business practices. Integrating all technological resources into a contemporary, cohesive system can:
- Unite segmented systems and data
- Expand the benefits of existing legacy systems
- Streamline business processes by digitizing them
For instance, MIF needed to transform its member portal to enhance security, performance, and scalability. With Liferay, MIF integrated existing business applications and web services, digitized business processes, improved productivity, and implemented a scalable portal.
Other lesser known use cases include:
6. Underwriter Portal:
The Underwriter Portal unifies data sets and functions from multiple systems to create an exceptional user experience for insurance underwriting teams. This innovative tool streamlines operations, enhancing operational efficiency and customer outcomes.
7. Policyholder Mobile App:
Get the same self-service support on mobile phones and tablets as the policyholder portal, enabling insurers to meet their policyholders’ needs anytime and anywhere.
8. Provider Portal:
A portal for health insurers to facilitate self-service functionality for medical and dental providers with capabilities such as member and benefits verification, claims processing, billing, and pre-authorizations, among others.
9. Employer Portal (or Group Portal):
It provides employer groups with self-service functionality for tasks such as online enrollment, contract maintenance, benefit inquiries, reports, premium payments, and more, helping insurers to streamline operations and enhance customer satisfaction.
10. Customer Service Department Portal (or Call Center Portal):
By aggregating various tools and information into a single portal, this platform provides insurers with access to a knowledge base, a performance dashboard, and customer service functionality.
11. Claims Portal:
A tool to streamline the claims management process by providing the claims and customer service teams with a unified view and empowering insurers with enhanced operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
12. Websites:
Create a single, unified website, or separate websites for different audiences, such as prospects, members, providers, employers, and brokers.
To sum it up, the insurance industry is facing unprecedented challenges due to emerging InsurTech startups and evolving customer expectations. To stay competitive, insurance companies need to adopt modern business processes and advanced technologies, which is where Liferay DXP comes in. The platform offers a range of digital solutions that can help insurers overcome their challenges and drive exceptional business benefits, including improved customer experience, increased efficiency, and higher sales and retention rates.
