This is the second post in a series of posts about InsurTech and Artificial Intelligence. You can read the first post of the series here.

Contents 1. InsurTech and Artificial Intelligence 2. How AI Is Addressing The Industry’s Key Challenges 3. Conclusion

InsurTech and Artificial Intelligence

In the previous post we acknowledged that the insurance industry is traditional, complex and is being disrupted by AI. Because of the complex nature of its products / services, innovation through AI is often stifled, and customers find the products / services confusing which is often a root cause of poor customer experience. However, challenges like these shouldn’t stop AI to revolutionize the entire industry sector and deliver better customer experiences.

In this article, let’s take a look at some of the key challenges in the insurance sector, and how AI can help overcome these challenges.

How AI Is Addressing The Industry’s Key Challenges

Reaching Out to Prospect Customers at the Right Time

InsurTech companies that are aspiring to use digital channels to reach out to their prospects are uncertain about the user behaviour and the right time to establish contact. The data driven intelligence when combined with innovation can help these insurance companies successfully contact people who are most likely to buy their products at that time – allowing them to spend less energy, time and money in identifying their prospects.

Quicker Claims Processing

One of the biggest challenges that is hindering the complete digital implementation in the insurance industry is its tricky and manual claims business processes. Using AI for Quick Claims Support, especially for loyal customers, companies can reduce claims processing timelines and provide next-gen support to customers. Leveraging AI in the claims processing and Chatbots implementation can help insurers offer consistent customer experience, greater transparency and effectively reduce policies’ costs.

Overcoming Ineffective Fraud Detection

Securing customers’ information is crucial to curb increased frauds and risks. AI in insurance will ease out fraud detection by ensuring accurate and reliable customer information, helping companies to improve the overall quality of their service and reduce operational costs.

Applying AI to the Current Underwriting Process

Applying AI to the underwriting process can help them seamlessly evaluate and analyze the risks of insuring people and thereby reduce business risks.

Translating Customer Behavior Data into Actionable Business Data

Digital marketing analytics provide a wealth of deep insights enabling companies to track how individual prospects and leads interact at different stages in the buyer’s journey. When marketing analytics are combined with smart data-driven technologies like behaviour analytics and Big Data, it provides a strong base of decision making. Companies with AI based effective data analytics create targeted policies that meet customers’ specific needs.

Conclusion:

Insurance companies today need to focus on using the latest technologies, such as AI-powered solutions and Automation to improve customer experience, effectively respond to the market needs, enhance decision making process and increase productivity.

Comprehensive testing services provided by TestingXperts can help insurance companies validate complex AI based systems. Tx’s approach can automate various testing processes, business processes to achieve high code coverage and find new patterns of failure. Connect with our experts and check out how Tx is helping insurers to shift from an ‘identify and improve’ model to a ‘predict and prevent’ QA model.

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The traditional insurance industry is ripe for disruption by InsurTech. Many insurance giants and innovative startups are seeing this disruption as an opportunity to step up their game in terms of product offerings and excellent customer service. In this series of posts, we will look at the key trends in InsurTech and how AI is set to disrupt the insurance industry.

Contents 1. What is InsurTech? 2. The need for InsurTech 3. Conclusion

What is InsurTech?

InsurTech refers to the use of the latest technologies that drive innovation in the insurance industry, help improve customer experience, simplify processes in the business and do more. The various areas of the insurance industry that get benefitted from InsurTech include: customer relationship management, customer onboarding, claims management, data analytics and management reporting, behaviour based insurance, insurance contracts management and provision of new services etc.

The need for InsurTech

Today, insurance companies operate in an advanced and more complex environment, where they are seeking innovative ways to deliver next-generation customer experience through their products/services and redefine the entire customer journey. These companies are developing new products/services to meet the changing needs of their customer base. They started responding to the challenges of digital disruption seen in the industry and seize every single opportunity to deliver delightful customer experiences.

According to PwC’s 20th CEO Survey of 1,379 CEOs, there is an increase from 22% to 45% responses, where insurance CEOs stated they were extremely concerned about changing customer behaviors. To keep pace, insurance CEOs recognise that customer intelligence, along with the quality of the client insights and interactions that underpin it, is their most valuable asset and surest foundation for profitability and growth.

Insurers recognized the need to adopt new customer-centric business models driven by Artificial Intelligence, to assess consumer attitude, measure change in the customer behaviour patterns, analyze their brand performance, automate business processes and identify the effectiveness of marketing expenditures across the customer journey – from initial consideration, closure, purchase to post-purchase.

Conclusion

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in InsurTech is just the beginning! As the emerging technologies are disrupting the insurance industry, there are many opportunities as well as big challenges ahead for insurers. Insurance companies need to carefully consider the areas favoured by InsurTech for their business growth.

The post INSURTECH: HOW AI IS DISRUPTING THE INDUSTRY AND IMPROVING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE first appeared on TestingXperts.

Contents 1. Digital Trends Affecting Insurance Industry 2. Importance of Software Testing In Insurance Sector 3. TestingXperts Offerings

Global insurers are hugely investing in the latest technologies to reduce costs and improve customer retention. Digital transformation has become the most disruptive factor in the industry, making it important for companies to embrace eBusiness strategies and increase their online presence to mobile and web platforms. These strategies include building digital offerings and business models, digitizing the customer experience, and enhancing in-house capabilities.

What are the benefits of insurance applications?

Helps in hassle-free claiming: 

The intro of insurance applications has improved the way of claiming. This has effectively reduced the effort of the insured individual and the workload of the insurance employees. Insurance applicants are able to upload the required documents and images as proof to claim their insurance. And, this is helping the insurance employees to track every piece of information and verify whether the claim is for an appropriate reason or not. As the information is already recorded, there will not be much scope of losing any data.

Helps the work of Sales Agents:

There is no need for the insurance teams or the agents to stay connected with the offices. With the advanced insurance applications, they are able to complete their work even while waiting for their clients or traveling. This will effectively help them to manage their potential customers and gain quick access to their salesforce automation.

Helps insurance agents to enhance their knowledge: 

The smart devices are helping many people across the globe to learn and get trained at lesser time. And, this is effectively helping the insurance agents as they are able to read conveniently depending on the area of interest even during their commute or during their free time.

Helps to create quotes: 

With the help of insurance apps, it is very easy for an insurance agent to generate instant quotes for their clients. This helps to lead the competition and generate more customer interaction.

Insurers have been facing several challenges in meeting the changing behavior of customers and their outlook in terms of products and services. However, the main challenge is to adapt the legacy IT systems and architectures to the needs of digital business models. This challenge requires new front-end architecture to simulate the customer experience of digital natives. It also demands a major overhaul of the main insurance systems to automate decision making and digitize customer journeys in basic functions such as claims handling and underwriting.

Digital Trends Affecting Insurance Industry

The key factors affecting IT architectures are the Internet of Things, big data, social media and mobile technology, cloud computing, advanced analytics and much more.

Internet of Things:

Connected physical devices allow insurers to interact with users on their respective insured products.

Big Data:

Deep insight into customer behavior can be built with the help of internal and external Big Data sets.

Social Media and Mobile Technology:

Always activated mobile devices allow context-aware tailored interaction models.

Cloud Computing:

Helps in providing unique software and highly scalable computing power.

The right blend of these digital developments can affect the entire IT landscape, leading various insurers to go beyond digital channel functionality and embark on an integrated overhaul of the IT landscape.

Importance of Software Testing In Insurance Sector

Insurance companies maintain an IT infrastructure to support all their business strategies by investing a considerable amount of money. However, after putting in so much cost and effort, they cannot ensure the robustness of their software. To avoid any glitches in the business and to realize a return on investment, software testing is crucial.

Effective testing helps in driving user adoption of business applications. However, for the insurance industry, newer technologies and complexity of the systems can pose a mighty challenge in testing efforts. In order to effectively test insurance applications, you need specialist test professionals with an efficient understanding of the insurance industry.

What are the benefits of testing insurance applications?

Increases Durability: 

With the practice of test automation, testing tasks are enhanced as every bug and test case are upgraded immediately. Also, this helps in increasing the flexibility of the application as it is processed with the latest testing protocols and the latest security measures. This effectively results in a powerful framework having a longer span and boosts profit for their enterprises.

Improves Consistency:

With a consistent automation framework, the app is tested against various pressures and different scenarios, this will assure that the functioning of the app is constant in any scenario. Also, the method of automation framework will effectively decrease the manual efforts and result in less errors.

Enhances Reusability: 

The methodology of test automation helps in increasing the productivity of the enterprise. With the feature of reusability, the framework assures in upgrading the market needs and as well minimizes the cost requirements and justifies the usage of testing tools.

What are the challenges in testing insurance software?

Challenge in Information Interfaces: 

While testing the insurance software, it is important to verify that the information is saved and made a copy to the front, middle, and back-office operations and databases. Also, it should be ensured that they are saved without any errors. Since transferring data or information via APIs is always a hurdle, it will be a challenge as standard APIs can also be implemented.

Challenge in checking the Lengthy Documents: 

Most of the software applications have a large amount of information in paper and these may be of many papers. Therefore, while planning for automated data verification testing, it is important to understand whether this is a real need for the application.

Challenge with a change in number: 

Insurance is completely about money and deals with real numbers. A small change in the digit can make a lot of difference to the result. And, every new release of software may include a lot of differences in the percent or interest of the provision fee. Hence, it becomes important to check every calculation and data. And, this may be challenging when the scenario is with multiple currencies.

Challenge to perform software update: 

When planning for a software update, regression testing is always a challenge as the workflows are split into pieces and each part may collide with each other and cause hurdles. Therefore, before planning for functional testing followed by regression testing, it is important to have a clear understanding of the business and know how each user story relates to one another.

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TestingXperts provides comprehensive testing services for health, property, and life insurers across the complete testing lifecycle. Our specialized testing services such as Performance, Test Automation, Cloud, Mobile Testing Services and our Insurance Testing Center of Excellence help in building an actionable roadmap with recommendations based on industry-best practices.

Our Test Automation framework Tx-Automate will help improve productivity, increase predictability, reduce testing cycle time, and lower costs and at the same time, an effective RoI for Test Automation can be realized across multiple devices, environments, and channels. Our Testing Center of Excellence uses a customized approach to provide testing and quality assurance services. We offer a comprehensive and scalable testing model to help you build a roadmap, overall vision, and structure for your business.

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