This one digital transformation mistake is costing insurers millions

By avoiding this single mistake, you can save your organization millions each year, improve customer experience, and finally bring your insurance company to the digital age.

‍

The Challenge:

• Enterprises deal with hundreds or even thousands of paper forms that must be digitized ASAP.
• Coding takes a long time: A release cycle for a single digital workflow ranges anywhere from 3 to 8 months.
• Maintenance: Forms must be maintained and updated frequently due to regulatory changes, business needs, and market conditions.

‍

Even though digital transformation is on everyone’s minds, the gap between the will and the ability to execute is clear.

‍

Customer onboarding, quoting, and claims administration workflows are often managed with clunky PDFs and even paper forms that require wet signatures and need to be sent via snail mail.

‍

If you are a CIO, CDO, or CTO in an insurance company faced with paper and PDF forms that need to be digitized quickly, you’ll want to continue reading. By avoiding this single mistake, you can save your organization millions each year, improve customer experience in insurance, and finally bring your company to the digital age.

‍
Faced with the challenges outlined above, technical leaders roll up their sleeves and start planning a lengthy and expensive digitization project. In the end, there is no way to get around the fact that such a project will take months (if not years), hundreds of developers, millions of lines of code, and TONS of cash.

‍

You wouldn’t code your company’s CRM marketing automation system, so why do some IT leaders still insist on coding digital forms?

‍

Step 1: Creating an MVP
‍

Creating digital forms is expensive and introduces new risks and delays

Let’s assume that you need to digitize only twenty PDF paper forms. Let’s also assume that developing a single digital process takes at least a few hundred development hours.

And that is just for relatively non-complicated forms with fields and checkboxes. The moment you introduce complex workflows, multiple roles, co-browsing and accessibility support, multi-language support, calculated fields, payments, ID and KYC checks, and personalization capabilities, coding the form becomes more complicated, and as a result costs grow exponentially.

So what happens when you have a hundred, not just twenty, of such forms and manual workflows to digitize? You are in for a very long and resource-intensive project.

‍

Step 2: Managing complexity

‍
As your company becomes more digitally mature, the complexity of your forms grows exponentially.

‍

• Complex digital customer journeys: A simple form might be sufficient at the very beginning of your digital transformation, but as your company becomes more digitally mature, you will need to add advanced functionalities such as multi-language support, personalization, complex workflows involving multiple signers and roles, payments support, instant quoting, claims-reimbursement, ID scans, and KYC. This adds significant complexity to both the initial development and ongoing maintenance.
• More code = more problems: Adding more code inevitably means bugs and security risks. As a result, you constantly find yourself prioritizing a backlog of security and bug fixes.
• Suboptimal use of internal resources: Now, you have a team of developers coding front-end digital forms full-time. These are crucial resources that are pulled away from other projects that you are forced to put on the backburner. Just imagine what you could achieve with those resources deployed elsewhere?

‍

‍

Step 3: Maintenance‍

Ongoing maintenance takes the focus and resources away from other projects, creates organizational noise and delays.

After all the pain, sweat, blood, and tears, you finally finished digitizing all of your paper-based forms. It seems like the worst is over, and you can finally concentrate your efforts on other priorities. Not so fast…

‍

• Rapidly growing backlogs: All departments, including compliance, legal, marketing, and customer support, now depend on your development team for even the smallest changes. This means release cycles are longer, and backlogs are growing.
• Compliance, legal and risk management: every time the compliance, risk, and legal departments require changes across all of your company’s forms, you will need to implement those manually.
• Product & Marketing: every time the marketing or the product team wants to update the copy, change the colors, make changes to the UX or adjust the order of the questions or pages, your team stops its day-to-day agenda and starts a new coding-QA-fixes-deployment cycle.
• Technical changes: You will need to keep up with new browsers and devices to ensure that your form acts and reacts appropriately on any device.

‍

Leading insurers have teams of hundreds of developers dedicated exclusively to maintaining and coding customer-facing processes.

‍

Step 4: Staying relevant

‍
The bright and shiny form that your team has just finished coding will become outdated almost as soon as you publish it.

New technologies are introduced all the time, and customers expect businesses to implement new channels and add functionality on an ongoing basis. To transfer your existing process to any new technology – be it a chatbot or a voice assistant – will require you to start from zero. Every. Single. Time.

‍

In today’s tough employment market, where developers are worth their weight in gold, you really don’t want to waste their precious skills and time on tasks that can be solved with a no-code form builder.

‍

No-code platforms are here to support the modern enterprise, accelerate development, and reduce costs with:

• Rapid Time-To-Market: Accelerate release cycles of digital processes from months to days.
• Reduced overhead: No-code platforms amplify your internal resources. Your development team can finally stop coding, editing, and maintaining forms and focus on other, more substantial tasks.
• No code = no bugs: Drag-and-drop platforms eliminate the need to introduce new code, which means no new bugs, no newly introduced security issues, easy maintenance, effortless standardization across the board, and uniform, fully responsive design with no additional effort.
• Standardization across all processes: All processes are standardized across the board, which means that you need only a very lean team to support all your front-end operations.
• Future-proof: You won’t need to remake your processes every time a new customer-facing, front-end technology is introduced. All you need to do is to transfer your existing process and its underlying business logic to these technologies with a click of a button.
• Channel agnostic: Easily transfer your business logic to any channel
• Powerful features right out-of-the-box: The right no-code platform can give you all the tools you need to continuously improve customer experience, such as:
• Deep insights and auto-optimizations
• Data analytics, tracking, and A/B testing
• Automatic workflows and communications

‍

For digital leaders in legacy enterprises, there is no shortage of “must finish yesterday” projects. As a CIO, you deserve a quick win. In the end, enterprise-wide projects are a thankless job: they are expensive, take months or even years to complete, and are often outdated by the time you are done.

‍

So if you have a tool that can accelerate the speed of digital transformation, improve customer experience, and free up valuable IT resources, why not use it?

‍

EasySend for Insurance

EasySend empowers global enterprises to convert paper forms and clunky PDFs into smart digital forms – quickly, efficiently, and without writing a single line of code. Schedule a demo with our team and see how EasySend can empower your team to digitize any paper-based or PDF form within days.