From Yesterday to Tomorrow: Efficient, Results-driven Insurance Technology Modernization

Insurance companies are committed to serving customers with the best service levels and engagement experiences possible. They’re also looking to empower their employees to be successful and make a growing contribution to the business. With high expectations for using technology to enable and evolve their businesses, they want to keep their spending controlled. At Sikich, we know that all these goals are realistic, and we can help you reach them. This article shares a high-level view of our approach to the insurance industry. Download our recent ebook, The Best of Modern Technology for Your Insurance Firm, to see what’s possible with the right solutions and an expert consulting team.

When you look back at the predictions analysts and industry participants made regarding insurance and technology trends in 2023 just a few months ago, you find that expectations diverged widely. Some well-known consultancies and analysts anticipated radical transformations that would involve quantum computing to speed up business processes or a thorough interweaving of augmented, virtual, and physical reality in insurance companies’ customer interactions. Only a few articles also mentioned more immediate measures like chatbots enabled by AI or efficiency boosts achieved through automations of routine workflows.

Pursuing realistic, high-value transformations

Most insurance companies we hear from are most interested in transformations and improvements that benefit their customers and employees right now. They hope to accomplish tangible outcomes with minimal disruption, in a low-risk, economical manner. For example, many outstanding companies produce remarkable business outcomes with legacy, limited, and disparate software tools. For them, modernizing and integrating their customer relationship management (CRM) and agency management system (AMS) software in the cloud is one of the most practical measures they can take to unleash their potential and deliver the best possible customer experiences.

When we think of clients like these, what Forrester anticipated for 2023 still rings true. The firm’s analysts expected that insurance firms would be looking to control technology spending, but that they were also likely to make new investments that helped them automate and become more efficient.

Taking a similar position, Gartner analysts reviewing an industry survey discussed in greater depth the strategies and trends they observed in insurance businesses. Gartner pointed out that insurance companies regard operational efficiency as a top priority while they also aim to improve the customer experience. They hope to achieve high returns from controlled technology spending and prefer to consider cloud-based technologies instead of costly, on-premises infrastructure investments. Automation will continue, especially in areas that previously may have received little attention. According to the Gartner survey, the top-five technology categories where insurance companies expect to invest more are:

• Application modernization
• Cybersecurity
• Business intelligence and data analytics
• Integration technologies
• Cloud platforms

Expert partner team with proven approach

You can rely on the Sikich team to help you tackle each of the areas Gartner tagged as insurance industry priorities.

Identifying opportunities, delivering solutions.

When we review your business strategy, goals, and technology environment early on in an engagement, we help you identify ways to simplify, modernize, and connect your technologies. Some of today’s most powerful, cloud-based CRM, AMS, and ERP systems are in our arsenal. We know how to deploy them efficiently, targeting tangible improvements in how people do their jobs and how workflows run. Often, relatively simple integrations or process automations can make a huge difference in accelerating processes, making employees’ lives easier, and allowing them more time to serve customers.

Future resilience and security in the cloud.

When it comes to cloud technology, Sikich has helped businesses migrate to and thrive in the cloud since the days when neither many businesses nor consultancies were convinced that the cloud offered a viable approach to delivering and managing technology. In addition to deploying, configuring, and supporting cloud solutions, we can migrate your data assets and sources securely to a cloud platform. Sikich is also a managed security services provider (MSSP), so we can assist you in safeguarding users, applications, and systems in the face of high risk and increasingly sophisticated cybercrime—in the cloud, on-premises, and in a hybrid environment.

From information to insight.

Because most of our insurance clients want to gain better visibility of their businesses and take advantage of data insight in decision-making and planning, we can optimize and extend your cloud infrastructure with analytics, dashboards, and reporting designed for the people in your organization. We perform data migrations, enable the right flows of information, and build connections so you can generate more value from data assets and extend the useful life of existing software systems you want to continue using.

Integrated CRM and AMS foundation.

For insurance businesses, we often deploy Salesforce as the state-of-the-art CRM system that allows you to streamline and connect workflows to deliver outstanding customer experiences and make your teams more productive. By integrating CRM with an AMS solution like Veruna, we provide a unified business management platform that offers the powerful capabilities and practically unlimited scalability to grow with you into the future.

Read this ebook.

The Best of Modern Technology for Your Insurance Firm” discusses key points as you consider your processes and systems, including:

• Why insurance companies should modernize their technologies
• How Sikich helps insurance clients design their technology strategy
• Our approach to implement the right solutions efficiently and with a short time-to-benefit
• How you can use your CRM and AMS software to automate and simplify processes
• Taking advantage of data intelligence as an empowering force
• Planning on ongoing transformations

Here to help

Sikich serves insurance businesses with advisory and technological consulting, solution delivery, and ongoing optimizations, support, and insight. We are always in touch with technical and business developments in the insurance industry and collaborate with leading technology innovators. We have delivered many successful engagements for agencies, brokers, carriers, independent agent networks, MGAs, and other organizations.

To explore how we can help you transform and modernize systems and processes, you can:

• Download our insurance ebook.
• Contact Sikich.