3 Ways Insurers Can Grow Their Business

By Nisha Pattan, Product Marketing Director, DocuSign

At InsureTech Connect this year, the message was clear: Insurance customers expect the process for buying a policy and submitting a claim to be fast and easy. Yet insurers are still doing business as they did thirty years ago.

When Glenn Shapiro, president of personal lines at Allstate started in insurance in the 1980s, a claims adjuster could process 4-5 claims per day. Today, despite online databases and new technical tools, adjusters can still process only 5-7 claims per day because a majority of the claims process is still manual and paper based. Assessing the damage, identifying the replacement parts, and submitting a payment should all be possible over an insurance app and should take just minutes. “Over 60% of banking customers use their bank’s apps, but in insurance that number is a dismal 13%.” says Shapiro.

“Most people buy life insurance out of some sort of commitment or obligation. Combine that with the fact that it is incredibly complicated to buy. This is hardly a winning formula in the modern digital economy” said Brooks Tingle, president and chief executive officer, John Hancock Insurance.”If we don’t change and change radically, our business is going to become irrelevant to today’s consumer.“ (source: Ambest)

Insurance carriers realize that long term business growth will come from selling more, managing risks better and reducing costs to operate.

Paperwork, manual data collection and poor agreement management can slow down business. Agreements are at the heart of insurance, from selling policies to settling claims. By digitizing key agreement processes in each of these areas, carriers can improve the speed at which they can take new products to market as well as deliver better customer experiences. No matter where you are on your digital transformation journey, these three strategies will put you are a faster path to growth.

Selling more

Policy sales and management should be simple for both brokers and customers.  Consider automating agreement preparation, signing and management workflows throughout all core insurance operations. Digitizing policy management, claims and underwriting with DocuSign accelerates the sales process. Brokers can quickly build the right policies for their customers by pulling the right information and customers can easily authenticate and sign off from anywhere on any device.

Managing risks better

The need to meet regulations while digitally negotiating contracts can be challenging for most insurers. Poor paper trails and manual authentication can open the door to fraud. DocuSign provides digital audit trails, redlining and the ability to view and report on exactly who agreed to what, when, and where. 

Reducing costs to operate

Even if you’ve already invested in comprehensive insurance-specific software, such as Guidewire’s P&C insurance platform or Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud for Insurance, you still require that crucial ability to sign agreements electronically—easily, legally, and securely. Without that, all those other technology investments made in the name of operational efficiency or customer experience are undermined the second you press “print.” With DocuSign, you empower your agents and brokers to automatically generate and send a customer-ready agreement with just a few clicks on an account record.

Learn more about how Agreement Cloud can improve the Insurance business here.