What is Digital Customer Onboarding for Insurance?

In the insurance industry, moments matter when it comes to capturing a new client and getting them onboarded. If you’ve been completing this process manually, or even partially manually, you’re losing valuable time and possibly customers.

Let’s take a look at what digital onboarding is and how insurance companies are making sure they’re able to capture as many clients as possible using it. 

What is Digital Customer Onboarding for Insurance?

Digital onboarding is the process of setting up a new customer in your system, using a user-friendly customer-facing website or digital app. During this process the following things can happen:

• Customer self-selects a product 
• Collect and verify information about the customer
• Present pricing information
• Allow them to purchase immediately, without a live conversation
• Collect digital signatures
• Produce insurance documents

In addition to the customer-facing processes, the data provided by your new client is automatically uploaded into the internal systems including the CRM. This allows customer service to quickly offer assistance with specific questions as quickly as possible. 

This is a typical experience for many types of standard insurance. But even commercial customers would like to see options for policies online whenever possible. More complex policies may require more than an online quote. But a great customer-facing experience can help keep your potential customers engaged with the quoting process.

Read more about how automated underwriting works.

Top 3 Reasons Insurance Customers Want Digital Onboarding

A lot of companies have steered clear from digital customer onboarding because they think it’s too complex, or costly. The truth is that it will cost you revenue if you don’t do it. Here are the top three advantages of insurance customer digital onboarding:

1. It’s the experience they want – and have come to expect.
   Research shows that people want to be able to do things online, without the need to interact live with another person, for purchases such as car and home insurance. This includes getting quotes, choosing a policy, entering your information and paying for it. Companies that require you to talk live to an agent for simple policies such as car and home insurance are likely to lose customers because of the added step they aren’t willing to take.
   
   
2. Policies can be issued immediately.
   The faster you can push out quotes with the option for instantly accepting, the more revenue you will see. Because insurance purchases can happen very quickly for many people, your digital onboarding system will make it so that they can get what they need right away, and you can get paid. 
   
   
3. There’s no “friction” or upselling.
   Many customers have negative experiences when speaking to a person because of the upselling that the sales team is trained to perform. There’s also no need to wait on hold or go through a phone tree. They can also make their purchase any time of day or night.

Top 3 Benefits Insurance Companies Get from Digital Customer Onboarding

The benefits of digital onboarding don’t stop with your customers - it also has excellent benefits for your organization and your staff. 

While simply being competitive in your insurance market is a huge benefit, there are important benefits for your company. 

1. Increased sales. Insurance companies who have utilized automated customer onboarding have found that they have higher conversions from leads to customers because there is no interruption between the time they get a quote and the time they sign up. They can do it immediately. And in this world of expecting answers immediately, this is what the customer wants. 
   
   
2. Digital onboarding is more cost-effective for you. Systems are in place to automatically assess risk and present product pricing. This reduces the low-level workload for your underwriters and helps keep them available for analyzing more complex policies.
   
   
3. The customer record is complete. Assurances are put into place so that all necessary information is collected to issue a policy. A member of your team no longer has to do that. 

Top 2 Concerns About Digital Onboarding You Need to Consider

While digital onboarding has many benefits, there are some concerns that insurance companies have. 

1. Data Security. In today’s digital age, the potential of becoming a headline due to a data breach is high. Digital onboarding for insurance has specific processes that can be added to your workflows to ensure there are checks and balances on all of the personal or sensitive information collected. You can also use highly protected data storage for your customer’s personal information. 
   
   
2. Compliance. Remaining compliant with current and changing regulations can be difficult. There are routine changes to the ways that companies must handle credit card data or personal information. Ensure your workflow meets all of these requirements using the process automation that is commonly a part of a digital customer onboarding experience.

How to Achieve a Digital Insurance Customer Onboarding Experience

Create an Impeccable Front-End Experience

Making it easy for your potential customers to understand what to do, their options, and completing the process is critical to stay competitive. Keep in mind the following:

• Nearly everyone will do this on a phone. Make the process a great one on mobile devices.
  
  
• Ensure the website is screaming fast so that people don’t get impatient and leave you for a competitor.
  
  
• Require as few steps as necessary, while staying compliant with all you need to be able to issue a simple policy.

Integrate the Front-End With Your Internal Systems

Seamlessly transferring data to where it can be used and interpreted for underwriting insurance policies is critical. No matter what you’re using for creating policies and managing them, it needs to be directly connected to the front-end experience so that there’s no double-entry of information. This is where automation comes into play.

• Connect your invoicing system with the payment processing. You don’t want to miss any payments or not know where they belong. 
  
  
• Auto-populate your CRM so your customer service can see the complete customer record immediately. 

Related read: 7 Most Important Insurance RPA Use Cases

You Can Integrate New and Old Software for Insurance Customer Digital Onboarding

No matter what software you’re using today, integration with automation is the goal. Integratz can help you assess and evaluate your current systems and then develop a plan to bring all the pieces together for you. A successful integration will produce:

• Less Manual Data Entry - This means your talented staff is free to do the more complex parts of their jobs that help improve the business and your customer’s satisfaction.
   
• Information Populates in the Right Places, Every Time - Your customers won’t run into issues because of a data entry error. Less time tracking down errors also makes your staff happier. Happy customers and happy staff is a win for everybody. 
  
  
• Compliance with Regulations - Without automated onboarding, you have to train your staff on what those changes mean for their business practices every time a regulation changes. When you use digital onboarding, you have to update the process to comply with current regulations, and you’re immediately back on track. 

Contact our team to find out more about what would work best for you to create the ultimate customer onboarding experience for your insurance business.