The insurance industry is being transformed quickly. New practices are reimagining the entire insurance business process. Nowadays, insurers are overhauling their entire business to put the customer first and develop a more customer-centric approach, but that’s no surprise considering that many businesses are making the same move.
Insurers are recognizing the value of customer centricity, especially repeat purchases. Many insurers offer multiple insurance plans, from auto insurance to property and casualty (P&C) insurance. It’s in their best interest that their customers consider them for all their insurance needs, rather than buy, say, auto insurance from one company and renter’s insurance from another. To accomplish this, insurers are putting customers at the center of their business model to deepen their relationship with their existing customers while making new ones along the way.
Technology plays a big role in the transformation of the insurance industry. That’s because part of appealing to customers means meeting them where they are. Today, people live in the digital space. Everyone has a smartphone and we particularly value the anytime, anywhere access. Therefore, insurers are digitally transforming their business model to build a rapport with customers by demonstrating that not only are they more accessible and approachable but interested in the customers’ needs which is why they are accessible and approachable.
VIDIZMO is helping insurers on this path to digital transformation. Read on to find out how.
Speeding Up Claims Processing
A major change in the 21st century insurance is the inundation of digital media like videos and images. Video evidence for claims is not just a novel bonus anymore. It’s how insurances fundamentally function. Almost all types of insurance claims now generate video evidence to support them and field investigators capture images at the very least because visual representation beats taking notes.
Insurers face a challenge in storing, sharing and managing these evidence files. Keeping records, maintaining databases and then pulling those records for investigations and processing takes a lot of time and effort, which needlessly draws out claims processing. This makes customers impatient and they come out of the experience with a lowered opinion of the insurer’s service.
Attempting to speed this process along gives way to human errors and inefficiencies, which means that insurers are prone to claims leakage. Oversight in favor of quickness also often results in accepting fraudulent claims. That’s not good news for anyone but fraudsters.
To combat these challenges and securely accommodate this growing library of videos, insurance companies need a dedicated video platform because most case management systems don’t natively support video streaming, and those that do only do so much.
Using VIDIZMO’s device and network agnostic video platform, insurers can efficiently manage their digital evidence files and streamline claim processing. Field investigators and claims adjusters can easily capture and upload evidence media from out on the field, using their smartphones or tablets. They can record their interviews – in-person or over video conferencing – with claimants and witnesses and directly ingest the recordings into their VIDIZMO portal.
To further speed up processing, insurers can have a dedicated portal for their policyholders to submit video evidence files themselves that can then be reviewed by claim investigators. This effectively cuts out the step of inspectors having to travel to the site to collect evidence and then travelling back to the office, speeding up the entire process.
VIDIZMO leverages Microsoft Azure’s cognitive services for face, object and speech detection, as well as automatic transcription, translation and sentiment analysis. Insurance investigators can use these insights to quickly search not only for specific video files but also specific information within the video - be it a face, something that was said or an object. AI capabilities will also help investigators analyze the evidence and the authenticity of the claim and make decisions accordingly.
Documentation is still an inherent part of insurance claim processing and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be completely replaced any time soon. Insurance carriers can use VIDIZMO to manage all their digital files regarding a claim, including documents. They can make case folders and store all the files pertinent to a case – videos, images, audio and documents – in the relevant case folders within the VIDIZMO portal.
Breaking Down Information Silos
Personalizing Policyholder Experiences
As I mentioned before, the entire insurance industry is shifting their focus to customer-centricity. They are trying to get a 360-degree view of the customer’s products, relationships and interactions to enable personalized experiences for them. Insurers are recognizing that customers are willing to pay for great service. For that service, they’re willing to purchase insurance products from non-insurance companies, such as retailers. They are more concerned with the company they deal with firsthand than the one underwriting their insurance policies.
Therefore, insurance carriers are feeling pressured to up their service game and give the customers what they want. But they can do that only if they know what the customers want in the first place. And they’re well on their way to finding that out. Digital interaction yields unprecedented amounts of information about customers, but too often it is locked in silos that prevent agents and service staff seeing the full picture. To really get the most out of that digital insight and deliver exceptional service, insurers have to break down information silos to give their agents a seamless access to information so that they, in turn, can give customers a seamless experience.
The insurance industry is bigger than just insurance carriers. It involves a nuanced network of agents, brokers, direct employees of insurance carriers and the call center staff. This is almost every insurance customer’s pet peeve: repeating themselves over and over to each new representative of the insurance carrier they meet. Policyholders expect representatives at every touch point to know who they are and pick up the conversation where it was previously left off. To beat this nuisance and streamline customer experience across all touch points, insurers are investing in omni-channel experiences.
The most effective way to do this is by integrating their technological infrastructure and connecting disparate information systems together to allow all the representatives of an insurance carrier – be it independent agents and brokers, field investigators, call center staff, what have you.
VIDIZMO natively integrates with your existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 which allows you to automatically connect your customer database, including all their information about past purchases, preferences, claims and inquiries. Using your CRM integration with VIDIZMO, you can personalize your customer’s experience, existing and new, by engaging them with more personalized and targeted marketing videos and viewing analytics. You’ll see this boost the return on your video technology investment.
Enabling On-The-Go Access For Field Workers
A typical insurance carrier involves independent or employed field agents that deal with prospects and customers, inspect claims and collect evidence. These workers include sales representatives, brokers and claim adjusters and inspectors, among others. Their job entails a lot of moving around, as you can imagine. These workers inadvertently slow down claims processing because they have to rush back and forth to fill forms, conduct interviews, collect signatures, gather evidence for claims, and then rush back to the office to document all of that in the computer and run the process along.
By adopting digital work practices, insurers can help field workers speed their process along. Field workers need immediate access to standard information wherever they are and on whatever device they are using. Insurers can streamline processes by integrating their disparate information systems for instant access and breaking down legacy silos.
Furthermore, insurers are increasingly trying to cut down field work altogether. By using digital work practices such as video conferencing, field workers can communicate with their customers, existing or prospective, claimants and witnesses from the office. This is convenient for both parties because it eliminates the need for traveling and rendezvous. When you take out the time to meet someone, there’s an underlying pressure for making small talk to make the effort seem worth it. But, owing to its low-effort nature, video conferences allow you to get straight to the point. This means that communication is faster and more effective.
VIDIZMO allows integration with many Microsoft apps, such as SharePoint, Teams and Dynamics 365, which means insurers can not only store, share and manage their video files, but they can also link their documents and customer databases together with videos, including recording meetings, and make more complete and comprehensive case folders. Field workers can access all the files related to a single case or customer from a single entry point, such as a smartphone, tablet or a laptop, which effectively enables the 360-degree view of the customer that insurers are so enthusiastic about. And this 360-degree view will also be available for customer service agents and call center staff, enabling them to give them superior customer service by having immediate access to all the necessary information.
Field workers can save recorded video meetings with customers on VIDIMZO automatically. VIDIZMO’s integration with video conferencing solutions like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, BlueJeans, and others, allows automatic ingestion into the platform. Using Artificial Intelligence, VIDIZMO generates tags and intelligently categorizes the video, making the recording easy to search and find later. As mentioned earlier, you can search for information within the recorded meeting using the transcription, face detection and speech detection insights generated by the AI.
VIDIZMO can be deployed on a secure and compliant Azure cloud and field workers can access the portal from any network and on any device. Long gone are the days of printing forms out, getting signatures and scanning the documents for digital storage. Field workers can collect eSignatures on their smartphones and tablets, ingest documents onto SharePoint and link it with the customer or case folders in VIDIZMO, along with all the other digital files – videos, images and other documents – in the folder. This approach greatly speeds up processes and allows insurers to provide competent customer service and effectively make customers the center of their business model.
Data Stewardship
All the discussion up to this point begs one persistent question: how secure would all this be? Locking paperwork in file cabinets or behind passwords on hard drives seems like it would be much safer than making it easily accessible from literally everywhere.
Insurance carriers deal with massive amounts of data on a day to day basis. Needless to say, this data needs to be securely controlled, managed and regulated to protect customer’s privacy and confidentiality, in a process known as digital stewardship. VIDIZMO leverages the Microsoft Azure technology stack, including the Azure cloud, which means VIDIZMO is compliant with many security and data privacy regulations, including CCPA & GDPR for data privacy, HIPAA for healthcare data and IRS 1075 for Federal tax information, which makes it more than secure for all kinds of confidential insurance data.
Apart from compliance, VIDIZMO packs in plenty of security and privacy features. To start, VIDIZMO comes with built-in Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) that makes sure that only authorized and authenticated personnel have access to media files and restricts the actions they can perform according to their user role.
VIDIZMO also has a comprehensive array of sharing options that allows for media on the platform – videos, images and audio, as well as documents – to be shared with certain personnel or groups, for a limited period of time, protected with a password and only accessible to who has the link. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
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