The insurance industry is a people business, plain and simple. While price and coverage limits can’t be discounted, policyholders are secured and retained based on the strength of their relationships with the insurance companies they do business with. It is no coincidence that insurers weight policyholder retention and satisfaction equally with top-line growth when evaluating their operating achievements. These long-term relationships are an essential component of a profitable growth strategy and a driver of an insurer’s continued business success.

Insurers compete aggressively on the strength of their service experience, often highlighting customer service awards or service features prominently. As competition for policyholder wallet share intensifies, an insurer’s service experience must go beyond promises to match or exceed the policyholder’s service expectations. The same holds true for a policyholder’s distribution channel of choice. Whether they go direct or use an agent or a broker, consumers of insurance products rely on valued advisors to direct them toward a strong insurer that offers maximum coverage limits at the best prices possible. Policyholders and their intermediaries select carriers based on the simplicity or completeness of the carrier’s overall service experience. Insurers with customer service scaled to match can improve the efficiency of the process of servicing these channel relationships while simultaneously encouraging policyholder or intermediary loyalty.

While a comprehensive service experience is a “must have,” many insurers are unable to effectively service the needs of their customers. Outdated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, manual workarounds and legacy system — driven environments inhibit their ability to deliver a consistent and comprehensive service experience. Add uncontrollable business processes, a lack of customer intelligence and an inability to adapt to change, and a cost-effective delivery model seems out of an insurer’s reach. The trick for most insurers is to balance a responsive experience that delights with a price tag that doesn’t bankrupt the organization. A service experience really pays dividends when it starts to pay for itself by improving key service metrics while reducing operating costs and improving operational efficiency.

Pegasystems’ Pega BPM technology is ideally suited for insurers looking to build, maintain and improve their customer relationship management capabilities. Our leading technology provides an intelligent approach to customer service, optimizing the business processes that support policyholder and intermediary interactions. A BPM-enabled service experience equips insurers with the agility they need to adapt customer service so they can respond quickly to changes in their business or market conditions. And our intent-led approach to customer interactions enables an intelligent and cost-effective approach to managing the service needs of policyholders and intermediaries.