Agility as core business driver in insurance in 2021

The insurance landscape is evolving rapidly and is fraught with challenges.

Insurance providers are expected to deliver seamless engagement, ensure outstanding digital experience and assure immediate responsiveness while adapting to fluctuating market demand. At the same time, insurers must address the requirements of the ever-stricter regulatory and compliance environment.

Dealing with these issues all at the same time requires one thing above others – agility. The urgency to find ways to reduce the time to market of new digital products cannot be overstated. Traditional IT projects that take anywhere from 4 to 12 months are no longer feasible in the current environment.

Digital transformation is a lengthy process, and the focus of digital transformation initiatives is shifting according to business requirements. Operational efficiency has been the main focus at the initial stages of digital transformation, but as mature digital organizations are increasingly focusing their efforts on improving customer experience. 

Today, digital product delivery speed and the agility with which insurers are pushing new digital products to market are becoming core competitive advantages. Crafting digital experience in insurance is being democratized with the introduction of no-code platforms and tools that revolutionize the way we create digital products. In a rapidly shifting environment, agility comes to the forefront as the driver of growth.

The four stages of digital transformation 

The role of technology keeps evolving. We can broadly identify four stages of digital insurance technology: record keeping age, processing age, digital age, and platform age. 

During the record-keeping and processing age, technology’s role was reserved for optimizing back-office processes and operations. Needless to say, this age is markedly behind us.

Granted, organizations are moving at their own pace,, and some organizations are only now starting to optimize their back-end operations. But such organizations that are markedly behind the times in their digital transformation efforts are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to core competitive capabilities. Laggard companies that are still catching up with the times and haven’t reached the digital age must quickly adapt or risk becoming irrelevant. 

Today, we are firmly in the digital age, and the role of technology has shifted fundamentally. Today, technology is not playing a supporting role but is becoming the central business value driver within the organization. Technology today, is ever-more customer-oriented and plays the central role in connecting the back- and front-office functions. In a way, technology no longer supports business – it, in many ways, IS the business.

Doing business is impossible without heavily relying on digital channels for customer origination, onboarding, service, and support. The next leap – the platform age is the new paradigm shift required to maintain the competitive edge. 

What are no-code platforms, and why do they matter for the digital insurance experience?

No-code platforms introduce new ways of creating and releasing digital products. Instead of developers and code, business users can now create digital insurance applications through visual, drag-and-drop interfaces.

How no-code platforms drive agility and help insurance companies reach the platform age of technology

Gone are the days when insurers could afford months or years-long digital transformation projects. Today, success depends not only on the quality of the digital products in your offering but also on the speed you are able to push new products to market, test, make changes, learn and optimize.

In the past, the only way to release digital products to market was through a lengthy process of development that involved both internal and external IT resources. No-code platforms are introducing the new player to the mix – the citizen developer.

Citizen developers are employees who are not expert programmers but who can use no-code tools with graphic, drag-and-drop interfaces in order to create digital applications.

Democratizing digital experience

No-code platforms don’t only accelerate the time to market by orders of magnitude but also create a better customer experience by giving the front-line employees the power to craft experiences they know the customers need. 

When the chain from the person who needs the application to the one developing is long (as is often the case with enterprise IT projects), by the time the requirements of the project are crafted, the business need might have already changed.

By moving the development closer to the product’s actual users – to the employees whose business needs the application answers – we can ensure that the digital experience is not lagging behind the ever-changing business requirements. 

Improving feedback loops

No-code platforms are a great tool for creating rapid feedback loops between customers and the organization. By collecting data, iterating, and tracking the results of changes to the customer experience, the organization can quickly respond to customer preferences in order to create an outstanding experience.

Accessibility to data is of the essence here. When applications are unified into a single platform, and anyone who needs access to data can have it from a single dashboard, the optimization process becomes much more efficient.

But no-code platforms offer another advantage – rapid experimentation. Citizen developers can quickly test hypotheses aimed at improving customer experiences – such as changing fonts, colors or location, location of elements in the application, or the order of steps a customer goes through. By running many rapid experiments on an ongoing basis, the resulting customer experience is improved by orders of magnitude.

Amplifying existing resources and reducing backlogs

Today, no-code platforms are widely used not just by citizen developers but by programmers themselves. In 2019, 37% of developers were using or planning to use low-code products. By mid-2020, this number is expected to surpass the 50% mark.

Overextended IT teams require tools that help them amplify their existing resources. By turning to no-code platforms, it is possible to do more with less, so it makes sense that efficiency-loving IT departments are turning to no-code platforms to solve specific tasks.

Agility and ability to experiment

As any digital experience expert will tell you, the only way to craft outstanding experiences is to experiment, adjust, iterate, and change frequently based on the data and the feedback you receive. By shortening release cycles from months to days, no-code platforms give insurers the ammunition to rapidly iterate development, deploy new experiments, and continuously improve their benchmarks.

Reaching the platform age with no-code to boost the bottom line

Bridging the gap between front- and back-end technologies to improve business outcomes is the secret sauce missing from many digital transformation initiatives today.

Customer expectations are as high as ever. Not only do they demand top-notch digital experiences from their insurers, but also expect that their personal information and data would be used to create personalized and highly targeted experiences for them. Therefore, the seamless flow of data throughout the organization is required to ensure efficiency and high quality of service.

No-code platforms drive business outcomes

• No-code platforms empower insurers to focus on customer-centric strategies in order to generate more growth and revenue.
• By connecting back- and front-end technologies together, no-code platforms empower insurers to utilize end-to-end automation to drive results.
• By removing manual workflows through digitizing customer-facing front-ends, no-code platforms improve the accuracy of data capture and reduce errors.
• No-code platforms accelerate all processes in the organization from claims management, onboarding, and other core processes.

To acquire and retain customers in 2021, insurers need to step up their digital game. No-code platforms are the perfect tool to quickly reach this goal, efficiently, and at a fraction of the costs. 

No-code platforms empower business users, amplify existing resources, and remove the “code” obstacle, significantly boosting agility and the speed of digital transformation. Forward-looking organizations searching for new ways to gain a competitive edge should look into no-code development platforms.