Harness the power of analytics

First, the good news. Around 90 million millennials are moving into life stages that prompt insurance sales. So, for life and annuity (L&A) insurers, new opportunities abound. At the same time, large L&A insurers are facing multiple headwinds. New trends and players are challenging the traditional ways in which they sell insurance and run their businesses – particularly in the digital sphere, where insurtech startups are selling directly to customers. The pressure is on for bigger insurers to protect and grow their share of the market. They'll do this by selling more policies more efficiently. But bigger L&A carriers typically rely on brokers to drive sales. So, transforming their distribution and marketing approach is key.

To remain competitive and seize new opportunities, L&A insurers must shift from being product-centric to customer-centric. Three key challenges are preventing them from making this shift:

• Customer understanding: The current data environment at L&A carriers has become fragmented and siloed across multiple homegrown and legacy systems. Over the years, multiple mergers and acquisitions in the industry have made this problem worse. Fragmented data prevents the carriers from fully understanding their customers and their customers' behavior

• Agent understanding: Similar problems with siloed data and insufficient analytical capabilities beleaguer carriers when it comes to agents. Because carriers rely on independent brokers to drive sales, the ability to analyze sales data, track these independent agents, and understand productivity and trends is essential to ensure customer-centric sales and marketing. But carriers struggle to do this

• Digital marketing: Because carriers don't have a detailed overview of customer data, they are unable to develop customer-centric engagement strategies for agent segments. The lack of customer and agent insights also prevents carriers from launching highly personalized digital campaigns that will enable them to win new customers and retain or upsell their current customer base

So, L&A carriers need to shift to a customer-centric approach. And that means leveraging data to sell more and better. But how? Carriers must modernize their data architecture, transform their workflows, and optimize their marketing. Fortunately, Genpact's marketing and distribution analytics solution connects customer and marketing analytics and provides end-to-end support to carriers in all three challenge areas:

• Customer analytics: By analyzing customer data, brokers can better cross-sell and upsell and provide more personalized quotes to customers. Genpact's Cora SeQuence is a workflow management solution that analyzes data using advanced digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The resulting analysis reveals topics that are of interest to buyers, identifies when insurance interventions might be appropriate, and proactively predicts customer lapse. This means that insurers know what to offer customers – and when – to achieve the best results.

• Agent analytics: When an insurer better understands its customer data, its independent brokers can use that understanding to target customers more effectively and offer the best products for them. Genpact's marketing and distribution analytics solution includes an agent performance dashboard that provides real-time sales intelligence and clearly displays information on key metrics, such as productivity, submission volume, and policy volume. The dashboard also improves planning and resource deployment. Using the dashboard, insurers can also more accurately review agent compensation and bonus structures to incentivize agents effectively, which helps them to better mobilize the agency workforce and enables agents to reach their full potential

• Digital marketing: Marketing is much more effective when you know what to say to your customers. That's where customer analytics helps. By connecting those analytics to the digital marketing strategy and putting the resulting personalized information in the hands of properly supervised agents, Genpact helps insurers target customers in ways that really work. To ensure speed to market, our marketing solution also includes campaign activation strategies and campaign management

Our comprehensive solution, deployed by one of the most experienced talent pools for the insurance industry, delivers tremendous benefits for carriers, such as:

• A 5–10% improvement in product placement ratio, which ensures customers get personalized policies when they need them most
• A 10–20% improvement in producer satisfaction
• Accelerated sales growth and reduced costs
• Increased submission volumes, which they can attain by attracting, incentivizing, and rewarding high-potential agents

L&A carriers have to address shifting customer behavior and preferences and attract the tens of millions of new customers who are now seeking L&A insurance for the first time. Any strategy they devise has to marry the power of customer and agent data to deliver targeted digital campaigns. It's not easy. But Genpact has the team and expertise to plan and deliver fast, accurate, and intelligent end-to-end digital solutions for L&A insurers.