Key takeaways:
- Automation with well-designed insurance management software can save huge amounts of time and thus money
- Companies with a proven track record of developing effective financial software solutions are your best bet for developing custom insurance software
- Custom-built insurance management software can make sure all your needs are met and as many processes simplified as possible
If you were to say there’s a fair bit of number crunching in the insurance industry, you might be on to something. Everything from policy administration and policy management to claims management, workflow, and underwriting involves a complex system of inputs and outputs that can be hugely time consuming. Fortunately, we live in the future, so insurance software companies can help insurers with systems automation to streamline their work and assist in making multifactorial decisions. Simply put, an insurance agency management system can help insurers with many parts of the business.
Just like there is no one type of insurance company, there is no one type of insurance agency management software. Insurance companies have to juggle countless responsibilities in real-time, from processing claims to keeping up with regulatory demands. Software solutions for the industry reflect this reality, and offer insurers a leg up on the ever-present competition — who are also busy performing their own juggling act.
Some of the chief ways software can help insurance companies include:
- Customer relationship management (CRM) tools
- Agent-facing tools to streamline workflow and increase efficiency
- Claims and policy management software
- Document management
- Policy renewal
- Marketing automation
- Numerous other features as required (did we mention we make custom software?)
The key feature of insurance software is making both the agent and the clients’ lives simpler. Let’s take a look at some of these ways software can help the insurance business and take some of the grunt out of the grunt work — as well as how an insurance company can choose the right software developer.
Insurance CRM: Responsive, Robust and Easy to Navigate
She’s shocked at just how easy it is to navigate her insurance company’s user interface.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is the customer-facing side of a modern business. The primary goal of any good CRM is in to make for the best possible customer experience to ensure repeat customers and encourage new ones to subscribe to services.
A CRM also has to manage and sift through mountains of data gathered all along the customer journey to help insurance carriers optimize their services. Client information has to be shared across the entire company in real time while simultaneously responding to customer queries in that same real time, helping automate task management.
Above all, this means the software will have to be responsive and robust in all aspects of development. Insurance agents will rely on it to predict sales, optimize insurance policies’ pricing, handle lead management, notify customers of new products, and much more. Essentially, most business processes will flow through the CRM in one way or another, and a custom CRM tool can be a make or break aspect of insurance management.
In many cases, insurance CRM’s operate as software as a service (SaaS), where companies pay recurring fees to use the software.
The data gathered from a CRM plays a central role in any insurance software solution and in any sector of the industry: casualty insurance, P&C insurance, life insurance, health insurance, and so on. Any company that sells insurance products and wants to maintain good customer relations while collecting valuable data will need a CRM.
Insurance providers that have friendly client portals increase their chances of customer retention, cross-selling, and developing new business through word of mouth. This is as true for independent agents as it is for the big brokerage firms — whoever makes their customers’ lives easier stands to benefit from new lines of business and upsell consistent clients.
Automating Underwriting, Risk Management, and Claims Processing
Insurance software can save agents and companies from being crushed in an avalanche of paperwork.
In a paper-based insurance system, handling the mountains of data needed to make accurate decisions is a hugely time-consuming process. But many paper-based business models are going the way of the dodo and are being replaced by a digital business ecosystem. The principles of any insurance platform remain the same — but they’re just made to be much simpler for humans to use since software is handling most of the number crunching.
The entire lifecycle of an insurance product can benefit from automation, leaving insurance agents more time to do what they do best: handle the human touch and communicate along more personal lines. Not only does automation make the lives of agents much easier, but it can also significantly improve the experience of policyholders. Customers can receive automatic notifications regarding changes to their policy or claims being processed rather than having to pick up the phone or send an email. The company’s book of business can be visible and automatically updated with the right software. Everyone wins, basically.
Where possible, claims processing can become a self-service system for customers, for example. This automation can smooth out the workflow of agents, help with commission tracking, and reduce the need for overtime or hiring extra agents, improving profitability. If profitability isn’t a company’s favorite word, what is?
How to Choose an Insurance Software Company
SmartDev’s devs have software on the brain 24/7.
If you’re looking for customized insurance software, you’ll need a company that has extensive experience building mobile and web apps. A company that’s well-versed in financial services like SmartDev is a good place to start. Understanding the business needs of any company in the financial or insurance sector is a true specialty, and one that SmartDev has demonstrated expertise in before.
When interviewing companies for insurance software, be sure to have your CTO or other tech leads available in calls or emails to deploy their sniff tests. They’ll be able to ask the right questions to determine your potential partner’s capabilities.
A company that has successfully delivered products in fintech or insurtech will have an obvious leg up on companies that have not. Since insurance applications need to be exceptionally secure, for example, a developer that’s proven their mettle in developing secure, real-time software solutions will be a solid choice.
Of course, there are many different types of software, and any insurance company will need to determine just what they need before proceeding to the development phase. If a company is unsure what software would be best for them, their potential developer should be able to make clear and accurate suggestions.
One obvious decision a company has to make is whether to use commercially available software or have custom software developed. Let’s examine that some below.
Custom Software or Commercial Software?
You can choose commercial, or off-the-shelf software, as there’s been an explosion in insurtech in recent years. But off-the-shelf software may not be the right fit for you — you may find the software doesn’t offer all the features you’d like, or it offers more than you could possibly use and its cost doesn’t justify the extraneous features.
The alternative to off-the-shelf insurance software is custom or bespoke software. Custom software is created exactly for your business needs and will fit your company like a glove.
If you’re interested in finding out more about the pros and cons of choosing bespoke software, check out our article here.
SmartDev’s Fintech Legacy
Everything affects the bottom line, so getting software that works for insurance is crucial.
If you’ve got this far in the article, you may be interested in learning more about how SmartDev can help provide insurance software management solutions. In brief, we’d love to help insurance companies improve their business processes and are confident in our abilities to do so.
While SmartDev has branched out into numerous fields of development, fintech was always at the core of our services. Our success in launching a real-time fintech app used by hundreds of thousands of people daily speaks to our ability to build platforms that are robust, secure, and user-friendly. We’d love to build a system like that just for you.
Interested in talking to us to find out more? Contact us and we’ll discuss just how we could improve the workflow and profitability of your company. We’ve got some of the top tech talent available who love nothing more than delivering a solid product.
