In today’s world, with accelerated digital transformation, everything has become digital. Starting from meetings to teaching, from banking to trading, from entertainment to games – everything has changed.
And in the long run, how the trust issues unfold with lesser human intervention, remains to be seen. This is where the need for ‘insurance advisors’ arises. Believe it or not – an insurance advisor is the strongest link in the entire insurance distribution chain.
So, the need-of-the-hour today is a smart combination of digital technology and insurance advisors.
“It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.”
Steve Jobs (1994)
Today, insurance advisory is not only relevant, it is critical for the insurance distribution. During the COVID pandemic, the insurance advisors made maximum use of technology and tried to sustain the insurance distribution process online ! A global outlook survey by Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services found that 95% insurers are already accelerating or looking to speed up digital transformation to maintain resilience. However, it seems Asia-Pacific needs to step up its game!
How technology can empower insurance advisors?
- Extending advisory to end-to-end life cycle
Not only offering a proposal to customer, digital transformation can be of a great help in various stages of end-to-end sales life cycle such as –Insurance Need Analysis/ Customer Fact Find/ Life Stage Analysis/ Risk Profiling/ Customer Affordability/ Product Sustainability/ etc. With the help of specialized tools and programs, the advisors can accomplish these tasks remotely. Also, after the initial customer onboarding is done, the advisor can offer post-sale top-ups/ add-ons/bundled products/ ways to give extra benefits or discounts to the customer.
- Handling typical sales closure objections/ FAQ
An insurance advisor invests time and energy in providing a proposal to the customer. However, sometimes the customer refuses from the sales closure due to certain doubts or need for comparison or at the verification stage. With the help of futuristic tools and technologies/ investment-linked features OR ‘solvers’ – the advisors resolve such queries or objections, educate the customer about the benefits, and ultimately do successful sales closure.
- Helping close the underwriting scenarios proactively
The prospects of a successful sale depends on field underwriting for every individual case. Whether the customer is a regular case or a substandard case for whom the terms and conditions need to be revised – can be decided at this stage. Advisors can close the underwriting scenarios in a smarter & faster way, with a reflexive underwriting questionnaire in which the questions are dynamically adapted to suit to customers earlier responses. It allows the insurer to create a rule-based progressive auto-underwriting system.
- Ensuring proposal ownership by online sign-off
In insurance sector, there should be need based selling. This is why ‘Sales Illustration’ processes are put in place, to recommend the right product. But sometimes, there are chances of mis-selling if the insurance advisors want to earn higher commission.. The sign-off processes are implemented to ensure distributor ownership. Digital transformation allows the customer & advisor to sign-off the final proposal online, with the help of technology.
- Protecting insurers from customers’ own decisions
One of the biggest concerns of the insurers and regulators both is ‘miss-selling’. There are insurance regulators who protect the interest of insurance customers from miss-selling. But still sometimes the insurers have to face litigations and complaints, even when the customer has made a mistake. Digital transformation helps put in place a system for insurance distribution – encompassing every level including the advisors – to maintain a proper record and ensure total control, so that nobody can manipulate the system.
‘Digital Onboarding’ is the way forward for the global insurance sector. And this is possible only with the help of specialized tools and systems which are designed to ease the work of insurance advisors. Especially when it comes to underwriting, C2L BIZ has simplified the process of field-underwriting with the auto-underwriting tools which offer multiple benefits including faster operations and total convenience.
Today, we need to empower the insurance advisors with digital transformation.
Let 2021 be the year of DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!