DataNovata will Help Insurers to Achieve TX in "Industry 4.0"

A leading philosophy major insurers are adopting to ensure their organizations become a seamless, digital entity is the idea of Total Experience (TX). TX is the intersection of several faces in the IT sphere:

• Customer Experience (CX): meeting changing customer expectations and promoting continued transactions.
• Employee Experience (EX): investing in employee skills and job satisfaction
• User Experience (UX): implementing the best digital products possible based on best practices
• Multi-experience (MX): flexibility across media and mode types

Gartner reports that 44% of Insurance CIOs will continue to invest in TX solutions in 2023, but they point out that “TX is not a technology that is purchased but is a vision where multiple technologies must be compiled and integrated.” This means that total TX will come from a variety of touchpoints within the insurance organization, making every area of investment worthwhile.

Unless insurers are able to integrate their legacy estates, TX will always be just out of reach. The legacy insurance industry is built upon M&A. That, and various system upgrades over the decades, has created an impenetrable stack of siloed databases. Data history from a single case history may exist across multiple, incompatible databases.

How does this impact the intersection of TX (CX, EX, UX and MX)?

A long-standing policy holder contacts customer service regarding her policy data. Perhaps she wants to revive a lapsed policy or simply get information on her transaction history. Due to M&A and legacy databases, her data is scattered across multiple independent systems.

The employee struggles to fulfill her request. Perhaps they haven’t been trained in the outdated legacy technology. Even if they do know how to access each legacy database, the search is endless, with no way of knowing which databases are pertinent to the customer and no way to search all the databases at once. The UX is simply too complicated due to the multiple unintegrated touchpoints involved. The employee (or multiple employees) have to spend significant amounts of time on a single request, drawing resources away from other tasks.

What is the result?

The customer is frustrated by the lack of a timely response to her request. She begins to doubt her provider’s reliability and digital capabilities. She chooses to take out a policy elsewhere.

The employee is frustrated by the time-consuming manual search and the lack of tools available to speed up the process. They look for a job offering better UX that matches their skills training.

The impact of regulations

Legacy databases introduce significant cost and risk to insurers outside of loss of customers and employees. For example, within a legacy estate, a single FOIA request can take $1500 in resources to fulfill. Requests for information across regulatory authorities typically allow up to 3 weeks for a response. Noncompliance generates complaints which trigger regulator investigations (in the US, these are DOI investigations), a process that can take weeks or years. The investment required to cooperate in an investigation far outpaces the regulatory fines, which in the US in 2021 totalled $207,922,008 across 2513 regulatory actions. Failure to fix the issue can lead to removal of an insurer’s license to practice.

In order to avoid noncompliance and maintain access to legacy databases, insurers must hire highly specialized IT staff with proportionate salaries; and legacy licenses and maintenance piles up the cost for systems that are only required for retention.

Legacy infrastructure impacts TX initiatives across the board. As an unstable support system for insurance IT, a TX supportive solution for data history retention needs to replace it.

Data history integration to support TX

The DataNovata solution can help to support the entire TX cross section by making all databases accessible through a single viewing platform, independent of the source. It can maintain the referential integrity of the original database schemas, and index searches across multiple databases. Data history can also be hosted independent from any legacy platform that needs to be retired. This achieves:

• UX: the interface is intuitive to use, requiring minimal training and no specialized skills
• EX: employees can quickly access all the data they need with a few taps on the keyboard
• CX: customers receive responses in quick time, increasing satisfaction and trust with the provider
• MX: DataNovata is supported on a variety of media and platforms, with mobile accessibility.

Adapting to the Expanding Role of TX in Modernization

Accounting for TX is not limited to a single buying decision; it is crucial across the entire organizational infrastructure.

In the current technology boom, which has changed both our buying culture and the way we work, the most successful insurers will consider the buyer journey and how employees support that journey in every acquisition. What modes of communication will be used? How will the information be processed? What is the customer’s expected timeframe? What do employees need in order to meet these expectations?

It follows that the ideal technology buying strategy across the organization would involve ensuring that every application and tool is mutually supportive and compatible. A seamless digital strategy prevents delays when information or services need to be relayed through departments.

This may lead to the creation of a Total Experience team within the enterprise. They would function as the extended arm of the CIO or CTO, urging the consideration of TX within buying teams, guided by extensive knowledge of the company’s portfolio.

These decisions need to begin from the ground up. If the foundational technology of the organization is not TX compliant–such as legacy infrastructure–the rest of the organization will never be fully integrated. There will always be a gap within the customer and employee journey that will need patching up, rather than the seamless experience insurers are aiming for.

With data history integrated and legacy burdens eliminated, insurers are free to pursue TX across all their operations. By ensuring that back-end IT is TX enabled, the front end can soon follow with fewer barriers to adoption.

For more information about DataNovata and TX, you can contact our Press Office.

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