The mission of insurance companies is to safeguard businesses and consumers from unpredictable events and losses. Whether the calamities involve life, health, property, or auto, an associated insurance policy is available to help compensate for that loss. However, the shift to a digital-first world has permanently transformed global insurance companies’ operations. IT teams in these insurance organizations may face challenges ensuring business continuity during digital transformations and maintaining seamless connections between insurers, agents, support teams, and customers.
Insurance policyholders want streamlined experiences and quick solutions, like instant quotes, efficient claims handling, and ongoing customer support. Insurance companies are leveraging data analytics and other technologies to address these needs and offer customers personalized and optimized digital services. Most insurers aim for an enhanced customer experience, which means they need to deliver high-quality application performance. Increasing visibility into their network will enable continuous monitoring of customer-facing applications.
Several insurance companies are migrating to the Cloud to match the pace of evolving customer and business needs. According to Capgemini’s Research Institute’s World Cloud Report on Financial Services, 91% of banks and insurance companies have started their migration to the cloud. Still, many are failing to reap the full benefits. More than 50% of the companies surveyed have migrated only a tiny fraction of their business applications to the cloud. As these companies continue this transition, they will benefit from visibility before, during, and after migrations to enhance customer experience, streamline internal processes, and business operations. It is important to understand how these advanced technologies are revolutionizing the insurance industry and how they may improve employee and/or customer expectations.
Analyzing data for personalized services
The insurance sector is already being revolutionized by strategically leveraging data analytics, where deep insights into customer behavior, preferences, and risk profiles are extracted. By tapping into different data sources, like IoT devices, social media, and mobile, insurance companies can deliver highly personalized services to customers. By taking this approach, insurers can ensure consistency across digital and physical touchpoints, essential in delivering a seamless and integrated customer experience. A great example of this smart data usage is the usage-based insurance (UBI) applications. Considering the car insurance, the UBI application can analyze data leveraging speed, distance traveled, and location parameters to automatically and precisely alter and fine-tune insurance policies. This methodology ensures a more accurate and personalized risk assessment, where pricing can be offered that correctly indicates customers’ driving behavior. Drivers who value safety may receive more favorable rates than the riskier ones, enhancing their loyalty and promoting safer driving behaviors.
Additionally, this capability to integrate and analyze various kinds of data allows insurance companies to respond to customers’ expectations instantly. This was evident during the global pandemic, where changes in customers’ travel patterns enabled insurance companies to adjust their service offerings. By leveraging these data insights, insurance companies were redesigning appropriate, cost-effective policies, demonstrating the industry’s ability to respond to evolving times.
The powerful partnership between AI and cloud
According to a McKinsey report, integrating AI and the rapid growth of IoT-connected devices are transforming customer experience in the insurance sector. This year, these devices could reach a trillion, generating massive data that will enable greater personalization and real-time pricing adjustments. McKinsey also highlights the role of deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which classify and identify images, in underwriting and claims management, reducing decision times to a few seconds.
In the meantime, migration to the cloud and adopting modern microservices architectures are also revolutionizing insurance applications and infrastructure, significantly enhancing system flexibility and scalability. These modifications and cloud services such as serverless computing strengthen the precision of predictive models and improve customer satisfaction, which are crucial in a market driven by customization and responsiveness.
However, challenges such as network latency can affect the accuracy and speed of services, inhibiting the customer experience and potentially causing delays in adjusting insurance rates.
To address this challenge effectively, insurance companies must have comprehensive end-to-end visibility into their network to detect traffic bottlenecks and bandwidth issues, ensuring minimal network latency and maximum service assurance.
Network visibility is key to digital insurance success
Insurance companies can still face challenges with application performance and service disruptions despite implementing robust strategies and advanced technologies. Insurers should have clarity on the availability of applications, their performance, and how quickly IT teams can resolve issues. Awareness of application performance is key to delivering a seamless and secure employee and customer experience. To improve awareness, insurance companies need comprehensive visibility into their network to monitor the traffic and applications at the packet level in real time, enabling IT teams to research and resolve performance issues while proactively mitigating potential security risks.
Network visibility serves key functions such as traffic monitoring, validating the proper functioning of network services, device and user tracking, and locating the source of issues. It also detects anomalies, including potential network failures or malicious activity. Moreover, network visibility data is critical for post-incident analysis and provides insights into the scope and impact of tactics used in an attack. It provides essential information for developing measures to prevent future attacks and maintain compliance.
Along with monitoring, continuous testing of services from various global locations helps deliver consistent availability and performance of the network and applications, thereby protecting the company’s reputation, productivity, and revenue. Data from network traffic analysis helps stay ahead of issues that might otherwise impact seamless operations and real-time decision-making, which is important for critical processes like claims processing or live risk assessment.
In the competitive insurance landscape, success hinges on integrating solutions that enhance internal operations, improve network and application performance, while enriching customer experience.
By- Sanjay Radia, Chief Solutions Architect at NETSCOUT
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