Need to lower allocated and unallocated loss adjustment expenses.
The problem.
Today’s economy has had a significant impact on the insurance industry and has exacerbated the ongoing issues of customer retention, lowering costs, and improving loss ratios. In addition to a struggling economy, regulatory pressures and the implementation of complex new technologies have been a burden on insurance providers. With all of these challenges, it is essential to focus on customer service and retention of existing customers, as the cost of new customer acquisition is significantly more than improving the satisfaction of one’s existing customers. And it is well known that insurers select insurance companies based on outstanding service, not just on low price. In addition to customer service issues, there are those impacting operations — namely, the need to lower allocated and unallocated loss adjustment expenses, reduce fraud and leakage, and maintain an improved loss ratio.
Overview.
Reduce fraud and leakage and maintain an improved loss ratio.
US Insurance firms polled by independent research firm, Forrester Research, said that their most important business priorities over the next 12 months were (in priority order – highest to lowest: lower operational expenses, grow the business, acquire and retain customers, drive new offerings, and comply with government regulations. The leading goal for IT, after lowering costs, was to improve business process execution speed. And of course, as it has been in recent years, they are still continually asked to do more with less. A prohibitively tall order? Not necessarily.
Complexity.
Insurance processes can be complex. Their core applications are highly interdependent and tightly intertwined. For example, claims processing starts with the first notice of loss (FNOL), to assignment, coverage, contact, investigation and evaluation, negotiation and settlement, litigation management, and recovery and salvage. Without deep visibility, it becomes a lengthy and expensive process to handle failure when it eventually occurs. Over time, the applications, the middleware interconnecting them, and the transactions they invoke in order to deliver these services will invariably develop performance issues, incur failures, and exhibit logic errors. This can lead to performance issues that slow the claim adjustment process.
Simplicity.
Simply stated, policyholders want their money as quickly as possible. With this level of complexity, a software solution that can auto-discover all applications, auto-discover and profile the performance of all IT transactions, and determine the root cause is essential, especially when required to do more with less. While insurance IT groups do utilize monitoring tools, unfortunately, in order to monitor application and transaction performance, it could require viewing as many as four consoles and figuring out on your own how they relate to each other. However, individual IT staff members can only focus on one at a time. Furthermore, these tools focus on individual Web, Java, DB or CICS silos, and their individual status may not enable the operator to know if the business is impacted by what they are seeing. These tools fail to provide big-picture transactional visibility.