How InsurTech Can Help You Grow Your Business

While insurance may still be a relationship-oriented business, insurance agents can benefit from using technology to grow their businesses. In fact, using insurance technology, known as InsurTech, can even enhance client relationships. That’s because this technology can improve your efficiency in operational areas so you can spend more time building client relationships. 

Plus, InsurTech can help insurance agents transition to digital agencies, making it easier for clients to do business with them. In addition, a digital agency has the ability to market their business online and practically automate the quoting process.

Today’s consumers generally want to be able to go online to find what they want, when they want. If you’re only able to serve clients in-person or over the phone, that might not be very appealing to them. Yet if you use InsurTech, such as Wheelhouse, to offer policy quotes online or to allow current clients to analyze their coverage through an online portal, that can help you attract and retain more clients.

In this guide, we’ll dive deeper into what InsurTech is, the types of InsurTech software solutions you can leverage, the benefits of InsurTech and how you can implement new tools to grow your business.

What Is InsurTech?

As the name implies, InsurTech can be a fairly broad term regarding technology used within the industry, but it’s not just about the basics like using computers in place of paper and pens. “The insurance industry has used technology for a long time, but insurtech refers to more innovative and disruptive technologies making their way into the space,” explains software and services reviews site G2.

And InsurTech isn’t limited to just one area of business. 

“InsurTech innovation is occurring across the entire insurance value chain—from distribution and marketing, product design, underwriting, claims management and balance sheet management and across all lines of insurance—property and casualty, life and health,” explains the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC).  

Types of InsurTech Companies

To better understand what is InsurTech, it helps to look more closely at the types of InsurTech companies and software solutions that exist.

As McKinsey explained in a 2017 report, InsurTech started off primarily on the personal side before making its way into commercial insurance. The consultancy notes that these InsurTech companies help in areas ranging from product innovation, such as with peer-to-peer insurance, to using drones for inspections. 

Some specific examples of InsurTech companies include:

Cape Analytics: 

This InsurTech company uses computer vision technology to analyze properties, such as to help with underwriting decisions.

Quantivate: 

Clients may not always interact with InsurTech software solutions, but behind the scenes, InsurTech companies like Quantivate can help insurers handle governance, risk and compliance (GRC) issues.

Talage:

We are an InsurTech SAAS company. Our product Wheelhouse solves the time-consuming process of selling and servicing small business policies, making digital distribution simple and easy for any agent.

Why Use InsurTech?

InsurTech isn’t a fad that is going to fade in a few years. As an agent, it’s important to educate yourself about the tools and technology available. In addition, agents that choose to invest in and use these solutions today will be in a good position to dominate the market tomorrow.

“Highly automated insurance platforms will become the new normal. The successful incumbents will be the ones who learn from them, adapting and adopting their tech where appropriate,” says KPMG.

In particular, using InsurTech offers benefits such as:

Increasing Efficiency:

The right technology can streamline both internal operations and external client interactions. Doing so can improve client satisfaction and free up your time to focus on growing your business.

For example, if you leverage a GRC InsurTech tool to spend less time manually dealing with compliance issues, you could spend more time networking or blogging to gain new leads. Or, if you used a self-service tool, like Wheelhouse, to reduce redundant work, and generate quotes automatically, you would be able to focus on writing more premium, rather than entering data.

Improving Customer Experience:

Increasing efficiency can improve the customer experience in its own right, as customers appreciate receiving information they need quickly. Beyond efficiency, though, InsurTech improves the customer experience by helping you better understand client behavior.

For example, an InsurTech platform that can help you analyze customer data may be able to help you predict what types of sales and marketing strategies you should try. If an InsurTech software solution suggests that a customer is at risk of not renewing a policy, for instance, you might then put more time into discussing your client’s situation and seeing whether the issue is pricing, coverage options, etc. 

Expanding Sales Capabilities:

In the past, writing small business policies may not have been profitable due to the amount of time required compared to the amount of revenue stemming from these clients. InsurTech, however, can expand your sales capabilities. For example, this type of software makes it possible for you to offer instant quotes and sell policies 24/7 through your website.

That way, you can bring on more small business clients without having to spend every hour proactively making sales or entering data to retrieve quotes. Plus, InsurTech can help you operationally handle an increase in clients. It may not be feasible for you to manage so many accounts manually, but if you can use InsurTech to automate areas such as invoicing and generating renewals, that could help you take on more clients.

Cost Savings:

In addition to saving time, InsurTech can save insurers money. “A move towards cloud-based platforms means not only lower up-front costs, but also smaller ongoing infrastructure spending…Disintermediation, self-servicing and automation of core insurance functions will lead to further savings,” says PwC.

How to Leverage InsurTech

InsurTech can provide significant benefits to insurance agents, but not everyone knows how to get the most out of these software solutions. Fortunately, you often don’t need to be tech-savvy to understand these tools. Many InsurTech companies provide intuitive offerings, and agents can quickly get up to speed.

Still, insurance agents need to think about how they leverage InsurTech from an operational standpoint. Some of the most important steps to take include: 

Embracing Change:

Much of the investment in InsurTech companies comes from existing insurers and reinsurers, according to a report from Oliver Wyman and Policen Direkt. “This underlines the industry’s strong belief in the necessity of change and the increasing relevance of new technologies to become more customer-centric, cost efficient, and even to re-invent the business of covering risk with new business models,” the research says.

That doesn’t mean all insurers have to invest in InsurTech but rather that the industry should embrace these new software solutions instead of ignoring them. 

Analyzing Your Options:

Even if InsurTech makes your job easier, that doesn’t mean every software solution is a good choice for your firm. Within each category of InsurTech you want to use, analyze a few different vendors to see which InsurTech company most closely matches your needs.

You don’t want to end up in a situation where the software is too complex for staff or clients to use, or where the solution is clunky and creates a poor user experience. To narrow down your choices, schedule demos to see how different InsurTech software solutions work for you.

Investing in Rollouts: 

Once you select InsurTech platforms, it’s important to invest resources behind their rollouts. For example, if you use Wheelhouse to enable instant quoting, it’s important to invest the time and money into driving traffic wherever you leverage the tool. 

For example, if you use Wheelhouse on your website yet don’t get many visitors, you may not get the full benefits of the platform. Yet if you invest resources into areas like developing your blog, that could boost website traffic so that you can potentially have more prospects using the quoting tool.

Want to learn more about how InsurTech platforms like Wheelhouse can help your insurance agency grow? Schedule a demo today.