Deciding What’s Best for the Insurance Industry

All businesses succeed or fail based on the decisions they make. Some decisions are strategic and high level, such as the overall direction of the company or major marketing objectives. But, most decisions are tactical and operational, repeating day after day.

The insurance industry is a prime example of a decision-intensive business where thousands of decisions are made daily. In fact, decisions comprise up to 70% of the tasks in core insurance processes such as policy underwriting and claims processing. What’s more astounding is that in today’s automated world, a large number of these decisions are still being made manually. This is where a business rules management system (BRMS) can make a big impact on streamlining operations in the field and in the office.

By implementing a BRMS solution such as Progress Corticon, insurance agencies are automating many of the decisions they make every day to process customer eligibility, complete risk assessments, generate price quotes, commission payments, claims processing, and more. By automating logic-based decisions, agencies can save time and money as well as eliminate inconsistencies from manual input. This obviously has a significant, direct impact on the bottom line but also helps improve offerings and customer service by reducing quote times and reducing claim settlement times.

Another key advantage of a BRMS solution is the ability to quickly and efficiently make changes to the decision making process. Whether it’s for regulatory requirements, market demands or simply product changes, the decision-making process is in a constant state of fluctuation. When done manually, personnel have to be trained on the new rules or processes that must be followed. Not only is that process time consuming and expensive, but there will undoubtedly be an uptick in errors as employees familiarize themselves with the new rules.

With a BRMS solution in place, changes to the decision model can be made easily by a business team and instantly put into effect without any uptick in errors. With Corticon, this can be done through a spreadsheet-like environment that business users can quickly master. Not only does that save the cost of training personnel who make the decisions but it also eliminates the need for complicated coding from the IT team which can be costly and time consuming, ultimately enabling IT to focus on other projects.

With the power of an agile BRMS system, insurance agencies have seen a 75% reduction in customer acquisition costs and a 90% reduction in manual underwriting tasks, among other significant gains. The combination of the direct internal benefits and improved customer service are a one-two punch that will help improve offerings and free up resources that could provide the crucial boost an agency needs to take another giant step forward.

Sign up for a free trial of Corticon and see for yourself. If you have questions, ask us on Twitter at @ProgressSW!