What do you do if your competitors are outpacing you with data analytics tools in the insurance industry?

In the insurance industry, effective use of data analytics is crucial. An insurance company needs to leverage advanced methods to understand customer needs and manage risks effectively. This approach enables informed decision-making and personalized service offerings, enhancing overall customer satisfaction. Utilizing these modern analytics tools is essential to maintaining competitiveness in a dynamic market.

Advancement in Data Analytics has little to do with tools. A strong insurance data analytics team should include an innovative leader with a team of open-minded, cross-industry quantitative professionals. The innovative leader knows the insurance industry and its data and can teach the rest of the team. The team should include members from the existing workforce who are changemakers and actively seeking to upskill and new members hired from outside. Together, this team can challenge the status quo, advance the practice by combining knowledge from the other industries with the insurance practice.

Beyond having the right tools, empowering our team is crucial. I believe in upskilling our staff through targeted training in data analytics. This ensures they can effectively harness advanced analytics tools to drive better decisions and innovate with insurance products that meet evolving customer demands. Investing in our team's skills is essential for staying competitive and delivering value in the insurance industry.

Use your team and tools well. Focus on using data to get useful insights. Collect, process, and analyze data to plan better. This helps set prices, assess risks accurately, and improve how customers feel about your service. Using data this way helps you make smart decisions and stay ahead.

The insurance industry has a trove of data, often sitting in silos. It's crucial to cleanse, categorize, connect, and link the data to be individual based vs. policy based. Once the data is in a better shape, the data scientists can dig into the specific areas that is correlated to corproate strategy and may show anomalies. Figure out the norms and the outliers. Often this simply analysis will yield some myth-dispelling intelligence. This is step one.

Leveraging data is important in the current environment. If one can use data properly, some innovative things happen quickly, like moving from manual reporting to real-time reporting, which may eventually help reduce error ratios and speed up policy issuance. It's just one example; there are a number of things that can be achieved with data leverage.

Collaborating internally is a must for change management and creation of a changmaker mindset. The long-tenured workforce will have a lot of specific knowledge that makes a carrier unique. Be comfortable and open to learn from others. Ask questions. But don't take the lessons as the gospel. Always verify the learnings with data. TRUST AND VERIFY. Then, take one step further, find something the existing workforce does not know and share the findings. It may take time and repeated conversations before the new insights will sink in. The amount of time it takes for a new insight to be adopted by a carrier determines the carrier's ability to compete and win in this new technology and AI-driven world. Let's go!