Insurance App Ideas to Automate Workflows and Improve Customer Service
Insurance companies have to address a variety of challenges in their daily routine, for example, automate manual tasks, ensure data accuracy, increase customer retention and engagement rates. Striving to remain competitive and meet market demand, organizations are digitizing their services and business processes. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this transformation, forcing institutions to create or upgrade software systems, as well as boost online presence.
To help you find out how it is possible to resolve existing issues and streamline operations, software experts at Surf have described insurance app ideas to get inspiration. At Surf, we have solid experience in delivering custom software to industries such as fintech and banking. But first, let’s have a brief look at how coronavirus has influenced the insurance sector.
How did COVID-19 affect the insurance sector?
The COVID-19 crisis significantly disrupted the industry, affecting various lines of business that use insurance coverage. These areas involve business interruption, event cancellation/postponement, travel, health, cyber liability, and trade credit insurance. Due to the pandemic, organizations had to review a growing number of insurance cases and make a lot more payments to customers.
As a result, many companies lost millions of dollars. For instance, Jefferies analysts estimate that the coronavirus insurance coverage for the Olympic Games in Tokyo is $2 billion for the delay. The number of claims and inquiries also experienced a significant surge, encouraging institutions to employ innovative solutions, such as artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, to automate the handling process.
However, many insurance firms were slow to digitize their services and business operations. This includes, but is not limited to, insurance mobile app development, transition to the cloud, and migration to a new technology stack. The primary reasons for the slow adoption of technological advancements are paper-based workflows and legacy systems.
According to the survey conducted by Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services, 48% of insurance executives stated that coronavirus demonstrated how unprepared their company was to stem difficulties caused by an economic crisis. Additionally, analysts at Deloitte revealed that 95% of respondents have already accelerated or are looking to accelerate digital transformation.
With insurance mobile apps, web solutions, chatbots, and such, institutions manage to save costs, improve customer service, increase data accuracy, and reduce operational risks, which is especially important during disruptions like the coronavirus pandemic.
Insurance app ideas to address business challenges
1. A mobile app to purchase insurance policy
An insurance mobile app that allows users to purchase policies and packages online is among the most common types of software in the industry. With such a solution, consumers will be able to view policy details, compare prices, and find the most beneficial offers according to their requirements. Additionally, it is reasonable to enable customers to receive virtual consultations from insurance agents.
For the purpose of improving client satisfaction and increasing efficiency, an organization can incorporate an AI-based chatbot that will analyze the information provided by users and suggest personalized advice or plan. Other valuable insurance mobile app features that can be delivered include inquiry submission, file sharing, and push notifications.
2. A claim management application
Claim processing is a time-consuming task that generally takes a few days to collect and check data from numerous sources. Here are some examples of data sources:
- Vehicle insurance — Photos demonstrating car damage, video records of an accident, telematics data, police reports.
- Health insurance — Clinical records, doctor reports, adherence to medication rate, medical certificates, wearable data.
- Travel insurance — Information about a flight delay, photos showcasing damaged baggage, agreement with a travel agency.
However, at some point, an insurance firm may not have enough resources to review a growing number of claims. In addition, human errors may prolong this process to several weeks, resulting in decreased customer satisfaction, injury to company reputation, and lost revenues.
With the view of addressing these challenges, an organization can build a claim management system that will aggregate all claims coming from different sources (for example, via an insurance mobile app, phone calls, emails, in-person visits) for further review by assigned specialists.
Employing such a web solution, an institution will be able to create tasks, track claim status, and make insurance payments to customers online. It is worth noting that if you aim to launch a smartphone application for customers or have already had one, it is reasonable to add a claim submission feature.
To automate manual claim reviews and minimize response times, you can also use robotic process automation (RPA) technology. Thanks to RPA software, it is possible to streamline operations like data search, review, and vetting while preventing human errors that can arise from mismatched financial data or mistyping.
This way, when a user submits a claim, an RPA software robot extracts the information—key message, client details, other—from it and enters it into an insurance web application. After validating this data and verifying that it is complete, an RPA bot marks the claim as approved for payment. If there are some issues, the claim is sent to an insurance agent for consideration.
Therefore, RPA software allows for increasing employee productivity and customer engagement. What’s more, RPA has a direct impact on return on investment (ROI).
3. A software system for insurance underwriting
Underwriting is a complex process requiring thoughtful analysis of data gathered from various sources to identify and mitigate risks associated with a certain insurance policy. For instance, when assessing health risks, an underwriter has to collect and consider information such as wealth data, mortality changes, and clinical records.
Additionally, a specialist generally has to view the history of customer requests and claims, as well as recommendations provided before. This labor-intensive process may consume a few weeks. In order to automate it, a firm can build an insurance software system utilizing big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive models.
Speaking of true-life examples, Ping An Life Insurance Company of China employs an advanced risk model on its underwriting platform to speed up routine tasks. With the insurance underwriting system, the organization was able to serve more than 18 million policyholders in 2019 and approve 96% of insurance policies. As a result, the company reduced the average turnaround time from 3.8 days of manual underwriting to just 10 minutes.
4. A customer relationship management (CRM) system
A CRM system is another type of software solution that can help an insurance firm increase efficiency, optimize business processes, and boost customer engagement. Using a CRM application, you will be able to keep data (such as personal information, contacts, communication history, notes made by insurance agents) in one place, this way preventing duplication and ensuring information accuracy.
With CRM software, an insurance company can track the history of communication with each potential or existing client, from the first interaction to the end of service delivery. Furthermore, a CRM platform can allow institutions to create a customer profile and segment the audience, identifying the lifetime value for every group. Employing a CRM system, it is possible to schedule activities, set up reminders (for example, to send an email), and manage leads.
If an organization operates in the car insurance industry, it can build a CRM native (iOS, Android) or cross-platform app that will enable customers to share car accident information—photos, videos, other details—with specialists to receive instructions online. Additionally, insurance agents will be able to estimate vehicle damage remotely, this way significantly saving time for both parties.
As insurance firms may have different business goals, trusted providers of insurance mobile app development services offer assistance in defining the functionality necessary to meet project requirements.
5. A document management system
Building a document management system is one of the main insurance app ideas you should pay attention to. Insurance firms have to keep a variety of files and records while being able to find the necessary document as fast as possible.
Providing data accuracy and a single version of the truth are other challenges that have to be resolved. However, this is quite difficult when having hundreds of disconnected Google spreadsheets and Microsoft Word documents.
When documentation is not maintained properly, inquiries and claims are processed with delays, which leads to many negative reviews and increased customer churn. The situation is worse when an organization has paper-based workflows. In this case, specialists have to spend a lot more time preparing, searching, and scanning documents while the number of human errors is likely to significantly surge.
With a document management application, it is possible to address these issues. By centralizing data and enabling real-time updates, an institution will achieve information accuracy and relevance. A web solution can also allow users to simultaneously collaborate with the same files, share data, and assign access permissions.
As a consequence, you will be able to streamline request processing, reduce response times, and minimize errors, this way improving client satisfaction and saving costs. Since an electronic document management system stores sensitive data, ensuring security has to be a top priority. For this purpose, a custom software development company can help you implement insurance app features like data encryption and multi-factor authentication.
6. An employee training application
Insurance firms generally have their own specifics associated with operations such as claim processing, insurance plan calculation, document management. Furthermore, delivering services in a highly competitive market, organizations have to quickly adapt to changing environments, especially during disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, institutions have to reskill employees and improve the qualification of specialists, as well as be able to onboard candidates in a rapid manner.
In this regard, e-learning is witnessing rapid growth in not only insurance but across many other sectors, too. Business Wire reports that the global corporate online education market can account for more than $38 billion by 2024 and $50 billion in 2026.
As long as digital education takes 40% to 60% less specialist time in comparison with traditional education, a lot of organizations are transferring to this model now. According to the American Society for Training and Development, the use of online training programs leads to 218% higher profit per employee.
By creating an e-learning application, an insurance firm can provide training with text, audio, and video content. Using such a platform, a company can monitor student progress and identify the best learners while increasing their engagement. Thanks to gamification and personalization, it is possible to significantly improve the education process. If you decide to put this insurance app idea into life, you should hire a trustworthy IT partner.
Final worlds
There are a lot of insurance app ideas to address various business challenges, from automating manual repetitive tasks to increasing employee productivity. By digitizing services and implementing innovative technologies, an organization can gain a competitive advantage, prevent human errors, and reduce costs.
If you have some questions or aim to create an insurance software solution, feel free to contact our team. We will soon get back to you and provide the required assistance, from business analysis and user interface design to testing, deployment, and maintenance.
Depending on your project needs and goals, our company could help you with insurance app development. We will conduct market research, prioritize features, and choose a technology stack accordingly. With the view of delivering superior quality, our software engineers can build insurance software with high performance, security, and compliance with the necessary regulations.
