How to transform and upgrade insurance companies

Nowadays, the insurance market in China is undergoing profound changes, which poses more and more challenges to the back-end operation of insurance companies. From the external environment of enterprises, the demand for customer behavior is changing, especially in the Internet era, the demand of insurance consumers for convenient, comprehensive, consistent and integrated services is gradually increasing, which challenges the service ability of insurance companies.

At the same time, new technologies emerge one after another, such as cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things. These technologies contain great potential, which makes it possible to further improve the efficiency of enterprises. How to effectively use new technology to improve the efficiency of enterprises has become an urgent problem for enterprises to study. From the internal environment of enterprises, affected by the market and policies, the profits of insurance companies at both ends of underwriting and investment are being squeezed. How to reduce costs and maintain profits determines whether an enterprise can survive for a long time. With the expansion of business scale and the continuous adjustment of business structure, the demand for rapid innovation of enterprises is also increasing, and the workload and complexity of back-end operations are rising, which tests the comprehensive operation ability of enterprises.

To sum up, changes in customer behavior, development of new technologies, profit pressure and structural adjustment all put forward higher and higher requirements for the back-end operation of insurance companies. In this context, a competitive insurance company must have excellent operational capabilities to achieve three major goals: consistent and convenient customer experience, effective optimization of operational cost efficiency, and effective prevention of operational quality risks.

At present, the global insurance business transformation presents five major trends.

The operation mode solves the problem of "how to do it", from interface, delivery to management. In order to achieve the goal of operational excellence, global insurance companies are actively looking for ways to change their operations, taking customers as the center and achieving consistency, convenience, enjoyment and value. At present, it is undergoing five aspects of adjustment and transformation:

1. The customer-centered end-to-end perspective makes up for the shortcomings of traditional service scope and customer concept.

Traditional enterprises are subject to the isolation between functional departments and lines, and the concept of customer service is limited, and they can only provide fixed services within a limited scope, such as simple operational services and customer service. Although each line adheres to the principle of "no mistakes", there are many breakpoints that lead to the lack of customer experience from the whole process.

In order to meet the needs of customers and improve the customer experience, insurance companies need to take customers as the center, from limited services in a small scope to customer-oriented and comprehensive management. Taking Allianz Insurance, the world's leading insurance group, as an example, the original business line model with three business lines operating independently is changed into a * * cooperation model integrating front-end customer acquisition and back-end operation, and the three business lines are integrated and a customer overall management mechanism is established, finally realizing the transformation to the end-to-end customer perspective. In this process, the enterprise has established a set of service-oriented mechanism driven by customer demand, including the establishment of customer demand listening mechanism, customer demand overall management mechanism, customer-centered guiding principle and daily operation management supervision and optimization mechanism to support successful transformation.

2. Provide a consistent customer interface, and put an end to the problems of scattered traditional customer information and inconsistent service standards.

In order to improve customer experience and facilitate internal management, insurance companies also need to unify customer interfaces and implement data management. Although traditional insurance companies have more or less customer information in various business lines and channels, these information has not been effectively communicated due to lack of technology and poor cross-line integration. Once customers cross channels, it is difficult to connect high-quality services and the customer experience is affected. Therefore, it is very important to provide customers with a unified customer interface and standardized services.

A unified customer interface contains two meanings. First, enterprises need to provide customers with unified service information knowledge, including product types, product terms, business processing channels and processes, and ensure that multiple channels answer the same questions. Secondly, enterprises need to provide customers with unified customer information data, including customer personal information, purchase records, communication records and so on. To ensure that multiple channels can enjoy the real-time synchronization of customer information and reflect the consistency of services.

To achieve a unified customer interface, enterprises need to isolate channels from the inside first, and then establish a unified data standard, including data caliber and statistical methods. In addition, they must ensure that the data sources requested by different channels should be consistent and that multiple channels have a unified data directory.

3, simplify the process, rely on new technology to make the operation intelligent, instead of the traditional complex process.

Simplifying the process is the only way for insurance companies to play the "intensive" effect. The traditional process is based on on-site authorization, paper authorization and layer-by-layer authorization, and there are many interactions before and after the process. Take the channel claims process of property insurance agents as an example. In the traditional process, only authorizing this item will involve many round trips between the insurance agent and the background operation. If the enterprise can centralize the operation steps such as document authorization, the optimized process can make the division of labor between the front and back office clear, and multiple interactions can be completed at one time, which reduces the cost and improves the efficiency.

Using new technologies to make operations intelligent has also become a key trend for insurance companies to improve their operational capabilities. A leading Japanese life insurance and medical insurance company applied artificial intelligence (AI) optical character recognition (OCR) technology to customer credit business acquisition, policy management and claims management, and applied robot process automation (RPA) to approval process to improve the level of intelligent operation. Today, new technology has covered 60% of the company's operating business, bringing about 20% reduction in operating costs.

4. Maximize professional enjoyment and flexible scheduling, and reverse the situation of scattered resources under the traditional mode.

Today, many leading financial institutions in China are expanding their business territory. In this context, better access to resources has become a key step in development. Effective resource sharing can help enterprises control and utilize customer data efficiently, so as to maximize customer potential, lay a solid foundation for new business, provide rooting conditions for old business, and maximize resource allocation, thus effectively improving resource utilization efficiency.

Taking Allianz Insurance, the world's leading insurance company, as an example, in order to realize professional enjoyment and flexible scheduling, a unified demand acceptance interface and task allocation platform can be established, which can realize job management, customer data control, centralized allocation and intensive operation, and improve the utilization rate of enterprise resources.

5. The operation should transition to productization and specialization, and change the setting of the traditional cost center.

With the development of internal control system and the promotion of business, the operation of insurance enterprises should not only play the role of cost center, but also the value management of operation should become the norm. Under this trend, the operation department will become a professional service provider for internal and external customers.

The value of operation can be realized in the following three ways: first, the operation department can integrate internal and external resources and become the information resource center of insurance companies; Secondly, we can change from internal service to serving internal and external customers at the same time, and make the service productized to complete the change from cost center to profit center; Furthermore, it can be different from the sales department, and it has its own charging method and exclusive brand to provide paid services.

Excellent operational transformation is imperative. The global insurance group with multiple business lines has established a group operation department to ensure overall coordination and resource sharing. China's insurance companies should refer to the above directions in time, change the traditional business philosophy, and build a lower-cost and more efficient claims system.

How to upgrade the operation of domestic insurance companies?

Now that the concept has changed, what measures should insurance companies take as soon as possible in practice? We suggest that the objectives of operational optimization should be defined first. Operational transformation is a continuous process, and its motivation mainly comes from the evolution of business model. Today, with the rapid development of business model, insurance companies need to constantly think about operational changes and set new goals in customer experience, cost efficiency and quality risk control. The common quantitative goals are mainly to improve customer satisfaction, optimize comprehensive cost and reduce risk error rate. At different stages of development, it is particularly important to effectively balance the priorities among the three goals.

On the premise of clear objectives, we should focus on customers and start from the following four aspects: overall interface, lean process, resource sharing and transparent management.

1, interface planning

Customer interface refers to the physical existence of channels for providing services to customers, including telephone centers, mobile apps or WeChat, stores and salesmen. Customer interface coordination, information exchange and sharing are the core points of successful operational transformation, and insurance companies should pay enough attention to them. At present, although many insurance companies have built online and offline diversified customer service interfaces, the functional positioning, mutual drainage and support of each interface and the overall planning of interface construction still need to be considered.

BCG's survey of insurance customers shows that in the future, customers will accept the online interface more deeply, and more than half of them are willing to complete various activities through the online platform. Based on this, we believe that the mobile terminal will not only push information, but also carry more service functions and increase customer stickiness, while other interfaces will help the mobile terminal to better complete various complex activities. However, at present, most insurance companies have many and miscellaneous mobile terminals, and various business units are quickly launched, lacking coordination. Some unsuccessful apps or WeChat WeChat official account didn't quit in time, which caused troubles to customers.

How to optimize and unify the existing customer service interface? How to plan the interface to be developed as a whole? We suggest that insurance companies establish "five major mechanisms" and focus on "two major concerns".

A. Five mechanisms

Product system: that is, before developing mobile products, insurance companies need to make clear in advance what classification mobile applications need to form. What does it matter if different products are listed at the same time? Take the establishment of product system as the standard.

Demand access and exit mechanism: insurance companies need to have a clear plan for the vision and realization order of the mobile ecosystem, so as to do something different. In the process of development, enterprises can allow professional subsidiaries or functional departments within their functions and powers to develop mobile products as needed, but at the same time, they should also establish corresponding exit mechanisms, set time nodes for product effect acceptance, and stop developing products with unsatisfactory results as soon as possible to prevent unnecessary investment.

Quality control mechanism: Insurance companies should control product quality from the dimensions of content, function, usability and interface design, so as to create excellent user experience. This mechanism can also be used as an important reference for the exit mechanism.

Resource allocation mechanism: insurance companies need to form a joint force in resource investment in development, distribution and operation and maintenance to avoid resource waste caused by repeated investment.

Departmental cooperation mechanism: When problems and new demands arise, all lines and departments must break down barriers between departments to achieve rapid response and iteration in order to establish an efficient cooperation mechanism.

Second, two questions.

Development ability of mobile applications: Development ability is a key factor to determine the quality of products being developed, so insurance companies need to pay attention to which leading development concepts and tools are used in the current development process. At the same time, simple interface, simple operation and efficient background system are the basis for the acceptance of mobile terminals.

Mobile application promotion and operation ability: increasing the number of users and frequency of use is very important to improve the activity of mobile products. Therefore, in the process of product development and later iteration, insurance companies need to always think about how to improve the customer traffic and frequency of mobile applications. The establishment of integral system is also helpful to the promotion of mobile phone interface. For example, QANTASASSURE in Australia and Qantas, an Australian airline, jointly launched a points plan. Its mobile health management platform encourages good health behaviors through points, and gives points back to customers as value, while helping customers find the most suitable insurance products.

2. Lean process

There are six main methods for process optimization: First, is the process simplified? Second, is the process standardized? Third, which process links can improve efficiency and save costs through centralization? Fourth, what operations can be outsourced? Fifth, can more digital and automated means be applied to some technological links, even advanced technologies such as robots (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI)? Sixth, can management be more optimized and reduce unnecessary resource investment? Allianz Germany is a model of process innovation. In the past 10 years, NPS has been used to monitor customer experience, input the requirements of process optimization, and continuously realize process innovation through end-to-end lean process optimization mechanism. Through this effort, the whole company achieved about 15-20% cost savings.

3. Enjoy resources * * *

Intensive resource sharing refers to improving the overall efficiency of the operating system through the optimization of resource combination and the overall arrangement of resource input. Through * * *, reduce costs, improve efficiency and improve customer experience. With the progress of science and technology, the enjoyment of resources is no longer limited to the construction of physical centers at the group level. Through the construction of cloud platform, logical intensification can be realized.

Definition of resource cloud platform: based on the network, the platform mode of * * * enjoying operation services is realized in a way that is easy to expand on demand. For customers, this platform can bring a consistent experience; For the company, this platform can ensure the flexible allocation of resources and improve efficiency; For enterprise employees, this platform can accurately match, maximize the ability of employees and improve their skills.

Although the concept of "cloud operation" has not been widely used in the field of insurance operation, it has already existed in other industries. Taking Didi as an example, the resource scheduling platform helps match passengers and drivers to reach a deal. At the same time, through the background time, GPS positioning and other data to track and analyze the rules of passenger group car use, and then serve the driver group. The platform is also a management platform to help manage the fleet and drivers. It can be seen that demand coordination, accurate matching and closed-loop management are the core characteristics of cloud platform operation.

The experience of BCG project shows that many insurance companies have many opportunities to enjoy resources: they can enjoy interfaces, operations with the same responsibilities, simple basic operation services and customer communities across lines to promote excellent operations.

4. Transparent management

Operation work is easily destroyed by details, and scientific, meticulous and transparent management is the basis for operation to settle down. The current operation index system aims at service assessment, which mainly reflects the work results at the macro level, but it is still not enough to reflect the operation efficiency transparently in quantity. To build an operational value management system, it is necessary to start from the operational objectives and take value as the driving force, decompose the core operational indicators such as efficiency, quality, risk control, service and key projects layer by layer, and correspond the indicator systems at different levels with the responsibilities of management (groups, subsidiaries, branches and sub-branches) and management units (operational management related departments, back-office centers, etc.). ) form a logically rigorous, comprehensive and digital value. The formation of value management system is the basis of the transition from cost center to value center, and it is too early to talk about value creation without this basis.

Data quality directly affects the effectiveness of value management, so the construction of operational value management system needs to establish a clear mechanism for collecting and sharing operational data. At present, domestic insurance companies generally face data quality management problems, including inconsistent data caliber of branches or departments, lack of unified standards and single person in charge for parameter setting, lack of "collectable points" of data in the system, and a large number of manual processing leading to data lag. To improve the quality of operational data in the future, we need to start from two aspects: governance and technology.

In terms of governance, the sources of operational data often involve multiple lines and departments (operations, human resources, finance, various business lines, etc.). ). It is necessary to set up a cross-line data management working group to sort out the operational data and designate the responsible persons of each "data category", who will take the lead in unifying the definition, calculation method and acquisition path of "data category". On the system, according to the requirements of the person in charge of data, realize the automation of key operational data, including updating, collecting and reporting; The database is separated from each production system and integrated into a central operation data platform to reduce overlap.

In addition to the above four aspects, we think it is very important to establish a fast and agile operation optimization system, ensure the rapid change of operation with the change of business model through agile project team, realize the stability of operation through professional division of labor, form a "two-speed mechanism" and find a balance between change and stability.

Operational optimization is a protracted war, and we firmly believe that insurance companies with good operating systems will show more and more competitive advantages.

Further reading: How to buy insurance, which is good, and teach you how to avoid these "pits" of insurance.