Data-Driven Insurance: How to Build Stronger Customer Relationships

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Insurance as an industry arose centuries ago from savvy data management and tracking. The exponential increase of data in our own century offers tremendous opportunity for insurers ready to think about Data-Driven Insurance.

We have never had as much data as we do today

By this time next year, the world’s data will have increased another 27% to 175 zettabytes of data. A third of that will be in real time via transactions, smart devices, and other online activity and interactions.

With such a mind-boggling amount of data, opportunities abound for insurers who can ingest, analyze, and act upon this information. This isn’t news to most in the industry: SwissRe reported that 92% of P&C insurers expect big data to generate significant improvements in their pricing, client experience, underwriting, and claims management.

Insurers’ Data Expertise Needs to Expand

Insurers are already experts at using data for product differentiation and pricing factors. You can bring that same level of expertise to engaging with your customers. This is the new frontier for data: strengthening your appeal to your prospects, agents, partners, and policyholders.

Historically, customer segmentation was limited to high-level demographic and firmographic information. External sources of data that can be married to existing data for drastically more detailed insights include:

  • Pre- and post-purchase behavioral information and transactional data: profile attributes, payment timelines and methods, advance and deferred payments, app usage, social media activity, and other online behavior.
  • External data: credit score and purchase history.
  • Lifestyle data: occupation, physical activity, travel plans, extreme sports, etc.
  • Firmographic data: type of organization, geographies served, number of clients, etc.

Holistic insights on prospects and customers empower insurers to:

  • Personalize products and pricing, including bundled options.
  • Craft targeted marketing messages and optimize customer journeys.
  • Identify lucrative new market opportunities.
  • Improve pricing accuracy.
  • Boost customer retention rates.
  • Optimize risk management and enhance overall profitability.

Data Empowers Digital Transactions

Today’s customers are tech-savvy and expect a seamless experience while doing business. This has profound implications for how insurers need to prioritize customer satisfaction in digital transaction journeys.

In addition, the expectations that customers bring from other industries affect their willingness to abandon traditional insurance companies altogether per 2021 research 2021 research from Accenture.

A comparison of consumer interest in insurance from supermarkets/retailers and online service providers like Amazon or Google over the years.

The digital experiences that customers value from these insurance outsiders are driven by external data.

The future of customer engagement lies in ditching the cookie-cutter approach to insurance sales by leveraging a variety of data. In an age where businesses are customizing all recommendations and products, clinging to generic solutions will leave your customers feeling ignored and unsatisfied.

Use Cases for Leveraging Data in Customer Experience

Enhancing how you engage with your customers through more personalized, data-driven experiences results in greater customer satisfaction and higher retention rates. The next question is where, exactly, do you start?

With such a diverse data landscape, the potential applications are boundless. We’ve outlined a few below that help bring customer experience into line with the expectations customers bring in from other industries.

Personalize and cross-sell insurance products

Many insurers already have plenty of experience offering tailored products and personalized risk advice in large commercial insurance transactions. The risks are so unique that there’s no mass market product available to satisfy the customer’s unique situation. A product is designed and delivered at the time of underwriting. Given the size of these transactions, insurance companies are compelled to deliver indemnity and non-indemnity-based solutions to differentiate themselves for larger customers.

Data helps insurers put these same mechanisms in place for smaller B2B and B2C insurance transactions. Consumers and companies who are segmented as mass-market risks tend to see commoditized products paired with mass-market, generic risk education.

This one-size-fits-all model is being tested as these customers are served tailored recommendations and products by businesses in other industries, such as retail. These customers are likely to demand similar treatment from insurers. Let’s face it, we all want to be classified as ourselves, not generalized as a market segment.

Insurers already have a ton of data pertaining to risk and claim experience. By combining this data with external sources of data including social, behavioral, transactional, and lifestyle, insurers gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers that allows them to personalize insurance products in a meaningful way. They could also bundle products dynamically and offer them as a package.

This approach enhances customer experience by communicating the message that they know customers’ risk intimately and have products and solutions to address their needs. They can also optimize risk education to what a specific customer actually needs.

For example, picture a new business owner looking to start their mobile pet grooming venture. When they seek an insurance quote online for a business owners policy, they receive a suggestion to also explore general liability and commercial auto coverage, considering they’ll be driving a grooming van. This tip comes as a surprise to the business owner, but it means they’re more likely to have the right coverage to protect their new business. The insurer also gains credibility as a partner in the customer’s overall risk management strategies.

Improve customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty

Nearly 70% of consumers would share significant data on their health, exercise, and driving habits in exchange for lower prices from their insurers – an increase of 19% from two years ago, per the Accenture research cited above. Also, by collecting data on customers’ preferences, usage, transactional, and behavioral patterns, insurers can proactively identify emerging risks and help policyholders address them.

Continuous risk assessment builds a closer relationship between insurers and their customers. By engaging in ongoing communication, particularly during periods of heightened risk, insurers demonstrate their commitment to protecting policyholders and their assets.

Consider the case of an approaching tropical storm where insurers proactively reach out to policyholders through various channels—such as text, email, or calls—advising them to secure their vehicles in garages or avoid parking under trees. This proactive communication not only mitigates potential risks but also reinforces the insurer-customer relationship.

This is new territory for many insurers. Our industry has traditionally been more transactionally based: premium goes in, claims payments come out, and dense paperwork is generated at every stage.

An insurer who can help their customer avoid a claims payment through preventing damage to their car is in a very different relationship. They have become a trusted advisor on risk management, not merely a black box. This helps insurers move away from the traditional image of a transaction-based entity to a trusted partner, thus paving a path based on mutual benefit and understanding.

Business data shows that the cost of acquiring a new customer (individual and firm) is always higher than the cost of retaining one. Customer retention not only impacts the bottom line but also helps us improve word-of-mouth marketing, brand loyalty, referrals, NPS and others.

Strengthen your customer-centric brand

Analyzing customer and firm data parameters also gives insurers valuable insights for a deeper understanding of each client. Armed with these data points, they can identify tailored solutions to address process and service-related issues, anticipate additional upselling and cross-selling opportunities, and ultimately deliver a seamless and holistic customer experience.

Additionally, data can streamline marketing and communication efforts. By analyzing client engagement rates, insurers can optimize communication channels to maximize effectiveness. Furthermore, identifying the demographics of their target market with varying levels of engagement and preferred communication modes (phone, email, video call, etc.) allows for the development of relatable messaging and improved ease of doing business.

You Need the Right Tools to Deal With Data

Insurers need to invest in tools and technology that can intelligently source customer engagement, risk, and policy transactional data to convert them into actionable insights. These actionable insights can be delivered to insurance prospects and customers to help them better manage their risks. This needs to be performed at all stages of the customer’s lifecycle, from lead through loyalty.

Putting this data to work by leveraging a robust data platform can transform this data into powerful/actionable insights.

OwlSurance offers a modern data platform to help insurers do exactly that. You’ll find more information on the solution and our customer success stories on our website.

Mastering the Art of Online Presence for P&C Insurers: Transform Prospects Into Loyal Customers

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P&C insurers know how important it is to have a happy customer base, but that depends on a healthy, robust sales pipeline: you need to keep making new customers. The sales process is tricky and not all prospects convert into leads. You need to strike the perfect balance in your sales approach, lead engagement, pre- and post-sales service, among many other factors. Fortunately, insurers have options to ensure that there is a steady stream of prospects waiting to convert into customers.

Turning prospects into customers is complicated

All kinds of insurance businesses, from carriers and MGAs to program administrators, need to optimize the lead-to-sales ratio. Keeping a sales pipeline robust means consistently gaining new, quality leads, following up with them, diversifying engagement channels, and equipping your sales team with effective tools to streamline communication and back-end processes. 

That’s a lot to manage, and doing so ineffectively can make the difference between meeting your goals and falling short.

Make the process simpler with the 3Es

OwlSurance has a simple three-pronged approach to nurturing your prospects. We call it the 3Es: Engage, Educate, and Emotionally Connect with a potential client through every stage of the sales lifecycle.

  • Your prospects may or may not be aware of your products and solutions. They may not even recognize their need for insurance! You cannot count on them to initiate the conversation. Therefore, you must proactively engage with them to build awareness.
  • Once engaged, you can educate your prospect about personal, professional, and business risks. Insurance is a notoriously opaque industry with its own complicated vocabulary. Make sure that you are communicating in a way that your prospects will understand. 
  • This helps you build trust and credibility with your prospects and consequently forge an emotional connection. Building this rapport will ultimately lead to a more promising conversation – and, ultimately, a sale.

How to enhance your presence at the Prospect stage

The interconnected 3Es all require online presence and communication channels. Connecting with potential customers becomes much easier when they can find you online. Although presence can be a very complex topic in marketing, there are simple strategies to boost your visibility in the channels where your prospects spend their time.

Here’s a closer look at some techniques to enhance your presence:

Website Optimization

Make sure that your website content provides what prospects most want to know: a holistic overview of your organization, the products & services you offer, and your key business differentiators. Prioritize clarity and ease of use. Analyzing your website’s traffic and performance can uncover patterns in how effective your engagement and marketing campaigns are. These insights help you make informed decisions on how to better connect with your prospects.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Improving your search rankings makes it easier for you to get noticed online. SEO is an umbrella of strategies to do that, ranging from small enhancements to major overhauls and external consulting.

Fortunately, you can start small by enriching the keywords on your website as part of your website optimization projects or independently. You can make specific enhancements to your website and content’s keyword libraries to achieve better visibility. Identify and implement keywords that are:

  • Informational – what does business insurance cover?
  • Navigational – a specific name, brand, or location
  • Commercial – discount auto insurance or auto insurance reviews
  • Transactional – buy insurance online

SEO can become a very complicated technique, but even small improvements will make a difference when you consider that 70% of new customers who buy insurance online or through agents use an online search.

Content Marketing

Leverage communications related to your products and solutions to enhance your search profile. These can include blogs, case studies, success stories, press releases, or educational materials. The content that you create for your website can also be disseminated through other channels.

Make sure that you’re thinking about what content works best in which channels. You need to be present in the communication channels your customers frequent. That can vary by personal preference as well as cohort, age, and many other factors. The more ways you have to reach different groups of prospects, the more prospects you can target.

Grow Your Network

Get involved in insurance thought leadership through engagement with analysts, trade publications, and industry influencers, including on social media. Some possibilities include case studies, white papers, webinars, and participation in awards programs as well as developing content for content hubs such as Medium.

Ready to take your sales pipeline to the next level?

Your success hinges on effectively converting leads into customers. By implementing the 3Es (Engage, Educate, and Emotionally Connect) throughout the sales lifecycle and employing the strategies outlined in this blog, insurance companies can optimize their sales pipelines, cultivate meaningful customer relationships, and achieve sustainable growth.

At OwlSurance, we have developed these strategies based on our extensive experience working with insurance businesses across the P&C industry. In addition to expertise, we offer a number of technology solutions to streamline your operations and enhance innovation, including quoting, rating, business intelligence, and a modern data platform.

Power Up Your Product Development With Repeatable Processes

Agility and speed-to-market capabilities remain critical for an insurer looking to grow their business. In the highly saturated P&C market developing and launching new products quicker than the competition is vital.

Easier said than done! According to a Deloitte study, it usually takes 12 to 18 months to roll out a new insurance product. Even modifying existing coverage requires three to six months.

The mandate for speed is hampered by outdated legacy applications and operational silos. Often overlooked is an insurer’s inability to create replicable processes to build efficiency. To put it plainly, launching a new product means doing many things that the insurer has done before. With a structured methodology for product launch, insurers can use these repeatable tasks as a basis for customization rather than the inevitable mountain of repetitive busywork.

Speed to market doesn’t just mean faster product launch, of course. It also means updating products quickly and pushing them out across multiple distribution networks. Internal inefficiencies create friction, resulting in product rollout that is both time- and labor-intensive.

To address the twin challenges of accelerating the launch of new products as well as the maintenance of existing products, P&C insurers are levelling up their agility with substantial investments in product development solutions at scale. A modern product development solution must provide a structured methodology to launch products fast and make products available as a service.

Creating a shared blueprint using a product development solutions helps insurers expedite the repetitive launch processes for multiple products and geographies in product development, maintenance, and rollout. That blueprint includes integrating with administrative systems and portals, preparing the necessary materials for risk assessment and underwriting, and all customer-facing capabilities.

This is the first post in our new blog series on the possibilities and challenges of product development in P&C insurance. We’re sharing our expertise on creating and maintaining insurance products to give you new ideas to enhance the ease of doing business. We’ll look at lessons learned from our clients, specific case studies, thought leadership, and technology trends that affect your product development processes.

We’ll be posting more content on thought-provoking technology topics that affect the industry in the following weeks. Our next topic is the top pain points in product development.

To learn more about the power of repeatable processes in product launch, check out our case study library to learn how we helped Players Health achieved an impressive 90-day launch for their new GL product for sports organizations as well as other success stories from our clients.

At OwlSurance, we have years of experience working with our insurer and MGA clients to streamline their business processes. We help our customers prioritize ease of doing business and provide the technology and insurance know-how to help them get there.

1 Product development data from Deloitte.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

Streamlining Submissions Means Less Busywork

An agent can spend 20 minutes to over an hour filling out an insurance application, depending on the line of business and risk complexity – and that’s just for a renewal. What each insurer requires in terms of forms, data, and process also varies. Agents typically work with an average of five carriers. Multiply all of that paperwork and processing per submission per insurer, and it becomes clear how much time an agent must dedicate to busywork.

Within the insurer’s organization, the submission lifecycle can lengthen even more through siloed, high-touch processes without a coordinated approach to customer acquisition. Meanwhile, the new prospect or renewing policyholder is waiting for indicative pricing to decide which insurer and agent can best serve them.

Submissions are critical to ease of doing business, market share, and agent and customer satisfaction. Agents and insurers alike lose out with inefficient submission processes and risk losing or disappointing customers who have to wait.

Fortunately, this is a solvable problem. Efficiency gains in the submission process benefit everyone involved. An insurer who can streamline the submission-to-quote journey attracts and retains more agents and customers. At the same time, agents spend less time checking boxes and rekeying data in favor of serving their customers. Time spent in front of a computer screen is time they can’t spend more productively, dealing with the people they represent.

By leveraging and pre-filling 3rd-party data from external sources, insurers empower agents to create quotes fast. Information is more accurate, more current, and less likely to contain entry errors. By fulfilling all submission guidelines at once, insurers can minimize back and forth with the agent, resulting in quicker quote response times.

They also reduce errors in their submissions and increase compliance by automating the quote review process. When the quality of submissions increases, quoting processes become faster with a higher overall rate of closure.

This blog post is the second in a series on streamlining your quoting processes with an emphasis on getting the most bang for your buck. Our next topic is the top pain points in the Qualification stage of the quoting process.

We’re sharing our expertise on the quoting lifecycle to give you new ideas to enhance the ease of doing business. We’ll look at lessons learned from our clients, specific case studies, thought leadership, and technology trends that affect your submission and quoting processes.

To learn more in the meantime, you can look through our case study library for quoting success stories, like the 85% reduction in quoting time achieved by our client Appalachian Underwriters. We also helped a regional carrier shift more than 60% of their BOP business to straight-through processing.

At OwlSurance, we have years of experience working with our insurer and MGA clients to simplify their submissions and streamline their business processes. We help our customers prioritize ease of doing business and provide the technology and insurance know-how to help them get there.

1 Renewal timeframe statistics from Insurance Business America.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

Digital Transformation in Lean Times: A New Blog Series from OwlSurance

“Digital transformation” has been a key mandate for the P&C insurance industry for over 25 years, but Verisk and APCIA just released industry data that puts a different spin on it. The news isn’t great – so it’s more important than ever to prioritize high-impact digital initiatives that won’t hurt your bottom line.
2022 wasn’t a good year for the P&C insurance industry, according to newly released financial results from Verisk and American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) reported a variety of data points that show losses increasing at a startling rate while income is falling.
  • Overall underwriting loss is the highest it’s been since 2011, at a staggering $26.9B. That’s more than a sixfold increase over losses in 2021.
  • At the same time, net income decreased by more than a third. Other key indicators including surplus, combined ratio, incurred costs and loss adjustment expenses are also worrying in light of increasing natural disaster exposure and inflation.

As lousy as these results are, there’s still good news for insurers. Digital transformation is a way of investing in efficiency, cost reductions, and staff satisfaction as well as staying up to date with technological advances.

A tight financial situation forces companies to focus their spending on the most important projects. It’s easy to forget that digital transformation can be tackled in smaller, more manageable chunks rather than as a single juggernaut initiative.

In fact, that’s the smartest way to do it! You can still impress your customers and prospects and further your digital savvy – without breaking the bank.
In our new blog series, we’ll lay out actionable recommendations for low-cost, high-impact ways to better leverage your existing technology.

Upcoming topics include:

  • SEO for non-experts
  • Leveraging industry influencers
  • Collaborative customer acquisition

We’ll also discuss easy technological improvements to increase automation, including straight-through processing, and speeding product launch and maintenance with repeatable processes.

The bottom line is that possibilities abound to leverage technology without hurting your bottom line.

1 See Reinsurance News for more details on the new industry data from Verisk and APCIA reported March 30, 2023.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

New Research Shows Agents Flourishing – What This Means for Quoting

Today, agents are flourishing, according to brand-new research published last week by Property & Casualty 360 and the PIA. They’ve always been a vital part of the insurance distribution ecosystem, but these latest findings show exactly how crucial they are as our industry grows. Two in three agents grew their businesses in 2022, and more than a quarter grew by more than 10%. Even during the pandemic, agents did good business as people turned to their agents as trusted advisors to recommend increased coverage for better protection. Nourishing those relationships with policyholders has given agents this impressive growth as the market has picked up.

Insurers can benefit from this growth so long as they view their agent relationships as a high priority. Year after year, agents have emphasized how important ease of doing business is in their work with carriers. All else being equal between two insurers, ease of doing business is liable to tip the scales. To put it simply, making life easier for agents is good for the bottom line.

Ease of doing business is an enormous and nebulous concept. It’s easy to agree to its importance and hard to figure out how to make significant improvements. In addition, insurers need to invest in process and technology innovation that will create the biggest impact.

Over the next few weeks, we’re zeroing in on quoting as an area where insurers can get a lot of bang for their buck to improve ease of doing business. Quoting is a complex process, especially for more complicated risks. There will always be back and forth between the carrier and the agent and the prospect. What insurers can do is find ways to streamline their processes by reducing friction and touchpoints.

In this new blog series, we’ll examine the quoting process one stage at a time: Submission, Qualification and Pricing. We’ll share our expertise on the top pain points in each stage while offering tangible, actionable ways to reduce friction and promote ease of doing business. We’ll look at lessons learned from our clients, specific case studies, thought leadership and technology trends that affect your quoting processes.

To learn more in the meantime, you can look through our case study library for quoting success stories, like the 85% reduction in quoting time achieved by our client Appalachian Underwriters.

At OwlSurance, we have years of experience working with our insurer and MGA clients to simplify their submissions and streamline their business processes. We help our customers prioritize ease of doing business and provide the technology and insurance know-how to help them get there.

Our next topic: the top pain points and ways forward in the Submission stage, which will help guide you in determining where to prioritize efficiency gains.

1 2023 Independent Insurance Agent Survey by NU Property & Casualty and the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

All Together Now: Unifying Your Data For Exceptional Customer Service

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Context is one of the most powerful tools we can give customer service representatives (CSRs). When they have the ability to see the person on the other end of the phone line, chat window, or email program as an individual rather than a transaction, CSRs can make the leap from “good enough” customer service to “everyday extraordinary.” And context hinges on information – or, in digital terms, data.
When your data is siloed between multiple systems, you’re never seeing the complete picture of a single customer. Pulling data from those various sources together is possible, but it’s a lot to ask of a (CSR) during a phone call.

Customer-360 Makes It Easier

A better approach is through Customer-360 technology, which automatically brings all that data together into a unified view, reducing hurdles and giving critical context to any interaction with that customer.
Customer-360, or a 360-degree view of the customer, gives you the ability to see all the information and activity surrounding a particular policyholder at the same time, often through a dashboard. It unifies data from all kinds of different internal systems, like policy administration, claims, and billing, alongside past service interactions and external data such as credit history and data from IoT or telemetry. Embedded analytics use that data to recommend the “next best step” to a CSR, be that up-sell or cross-sell, retention conversations, avenues of customer service, or “trusted advisor” interactions around necessary coverage and customer education.

Getting the 360-Degree View of Other Stakeholders

Unifying your data helps your CSR see the context on the whole relationship with a policyholder, but there are plenty of other compelling uses for the technology that supports a unified data view.
Since it can provide the whole picture on any number of individuals or other moving parts within an insurance company, you can use it to answer critical contextual questions about an individual agent or agency, stakeholder, business unit, product, or line of business.
  • With an Agency-360 view, you can analyze an agency’s performance from multiple angles. What populations are their best buyers of multi-line products? How can we evaluate their ability to use digital tools to increase sales or to provide more bindable quotes? Have performance incentives helped their momentum in the past?
  • A Partner-360 view shows you the range of all of your supporting partners, such as law firms, independent claims adjusters, and body/repair shops. Should a claims adjuster’s extraordinary efficiency be celebrated or re-evaluated, if they investigate claims separated by a large distance on the same day? Should repairs be consolidated with a single repair shop? Are particular law firms seeing higher settlement rates?
  • A Product-360 gives you the ability to monitor how products are performing within the larger portfolio to provide both a granular and global perspective. With an accurate, timely view of product-centric claims and underwriting, how could you improve financial modeling and day-to-day management decisions? Are there external factor affecting product growth, such as a rise in unemployment leading to changes in BOP sales patterns?

Where Do You Go Next?

If you don’t yet have the ability to answer critical contextual questions for these different stakeholders with a unified data view, you can get started by planning which data to bring together and how to incorporate it into your business processes.
If you’ve already made progress on unifying your data, are you really at a point where you’re enjoying all of the benefits detailed above to their fullest extent?
Data fluency is a process, not an end state, and incorporating data driven insights into business processes and value added services is a continuous evolution. Accelerating that evolution is the key promise of unified data.
Read more on the power of the unified data view and a real-life example in the Summer 2022 edition of Pulse, published by PAMIC, the Pennsylvania Association of Mutual Insurance Companies.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

New Insights on Accelerating Speed to Market for New Insurance Products

How fast can you launch a new insurance product? The usual answer we hear from insurers, regardless of size or line of business, is, “Not fast enough.” According to 2021 industry research, property and casualty insurers need more than eight months, on average, to launch a new product.
Let’s look past the numbers here. Even the outliers who are at the front of the bell curve still report product development and launch as a key area of improvement. Basically, it doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum – you want to roll out products faster.
That’s easy to say and hard to do. Even the most efficient insurer in the market faces significant regulations to navigate when launching a new product, especially if they’re looking to roll it out in multiple US states. Since there’s no getting around that, we have to look for areas of improvement elsewhere.
We believe one way insurance carriers can speed up product development is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of how they handle rating content. Verisk’s ISO Electronic Rating Content™ (ERC™) has been a significant tool in that process for our own clients. In fact, we’re proud to be an ISO™ partner. Using ISO™ rating content has long been a way for insurers to speed up product development, giving them a foundation for products they may tailor to their own business strategy and markets. ISO ERC™ digitizes that process, proving to be an important enhancement of capabilities and timelines. Research from analyst group Celent last September has quantified those benefits.
To illustrate these benefits in real life, we invited Bryan Guilbeault, Vice President of Technical Services at Ryan Specialty, to talk about his own experience in accelerating the launch of new insurance products. Bryan explained the best practices in increasing speed to market with ISO ERC™ and how they were able to leverage solutions from ValueMomentum, their long-standing vendor partner. We also welcomed Mark Sheehan, Vice President of Underwriting Solutions at Verisk, to discuss more of the details around ISO ERC™.
If speed to market matters to you, you’ll want to hear this story. You can access the full recording here.
We’re excited to showcase our customers and their successes in upcoming webinars! If you’d like to learn more about our customer success stories in the meantime, check out our collection of Case Studies.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

What Does “Ease of Doing Business” Mean to You?

While attending InsurTech Boston in May 2022, I had the opportunity to talk with a number of carrier representatives who are interested in partnerships and improving how they do business with advanced technology. Ease of doing business came up again and again in our conversations.
This was a critical topic among all of the organizations in the room, not just carriers. Insurance as an industry is notorious for complex documents, black box operations and timelines, and the almost mystical reputation of actuaries. That’s not the way it has to be! The goal is to improve ease of doing business throughout the insurance lifecycle, for every stakeholder. We can agree on that.
An intriguing question came up in one discussion with a large mutual. How would you actually define “ease of doing business”?
Let’s leave the industry talk for a moment, and look at what people as individuals value in their own experience. What’s most important to you when you’re interacting with a company?
For me, my first realization is that a speedy turn around with an opaque process is less important to me than a longer process with excellent transparency. I don’t mind complexity, especially in a process and product that I know is extremely complicated, highly regulated, and has a lot of moving parts. Honestly, I just want to know what’s going on. You may have different priorities than I do, and that’s OK.
In fact, your company will have its own answer, based on your organizational values and strengths. What matters most is that we engage in this thinking before embarking on the journey. It’s easy to be caught up in the excitement of making it easier to do business with your company without having a clear path the how you will actually tackle that extremely complicated process.
I use that language deliberately. We as an industry excel at dealing with complexity. What policyholders, agents, and other stakeholders value may vary based on individual preference, but in the end, our job as an industry is to provide a complex product with associated services while making it easier for all stakeholders to play one’s role within that product’s lifecycle.
Organizations must answer this question for themselves, knowing that the answers are interdependent, but setting a clear target based on their own identity and strategies. The specific ways to determine your company’s individual goal come through technology that enables change and progress toward that value. We’ve done it as much as we can with the technology that we have. It’s time to look beyond our current state and see where technology can take us.

We at OwlSurance appreciate the complexity of this charge. What we promise our customers is a commitment to their priorities, backed up by the best technology we can offer in the cloud. Cloud technology has changed the way we do business, and it should be accessible by everyone, no matter how big or how small. The great thing is that as you pursue one goal which cloud technology, you reap all of the associated benefits. Want more transparency? Cloud also increases your systems availability and speed of transactions. Want better user experience? The APIs embedded in our cloud technologies make that possible.

Wherever you decide to start as you improve the ease of doing business with your company, you can depend on OwlSurance to prioritize your individual goals.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.

Welcome to Our New Blog on Innovation in Business and Technology

Piscataway, NJ – May 18, 2022 – OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, is thrilled to announce the launch of the OwlSurance blog. Check back soon for thought-provoking content on business and technology trends.

About OwlSurance

At OwlSurance, a cloud business unit of ValueMomentum, Inc., we offer a unified data platform because we believe in the power of unified data to transform how people do business. Let us help accelerate your data journey with the right technology and the expertise you need to put it to work for you. For more information, visit us at www.owlsurance.com.