Digital Transformation Enables Insurer to Lower Costs While Delighting Customers

A 20-year-old insurance company was in a bind. It faced a fearsome threat from digital natives beginning to offer three times the productivity while scoring 4-5x higher in customer NPS scores. This came in a price-driven industry with rivals racing to lower premium rates, but failing to deliver satisfactory service.

Hamstrung by legacy infrastructure, InsuranceCo* was unable to provide the frictionless digital experience that customers have come to expect. So they asked us to help them develop a new strategy that would position them as a digital-first organization. After assessing incremental approaches to improve the legacy systems, the goal was set to design an all-new technology platform that would deliver a superior customer experience.

We used our NextEngine approach to translate strategic use cases into requirements and select the platform upon which InsuranceCo could build the customer-centric features shaping the industry’s future for a fraction of the cost. When completed, the new digital chassis will reduce by nearly 40% the annual costs for InsuranceCo across areas like claims, operations, and IT.

InsuranceCo’s new, ultra-low-cost architecture will dramatically increase the percentage of its customer interactions that are self-service. When fully implemented, the swift data processing it enables will better equip the company for a market ruled by price comparison websites. Having these solutions in place will let the company focus on innovations like usage-based insurance and connected devices.

Key to the platform selection was our collaboration with Endava, a Bain Alliance Ecosystem partner that specializes in next-generation technology services. An integrated team of Bain and Endava experts worked with InsuranceCo to test software solutions creating working prototypes in a sandbox environment. This approach enabled us to understand the effort and time required to implement a new system and deliver innovative functionalities in practice. We were able to cut through the noise of sales claims and identify quantifiable sources of agility and future competitive advantage for InsuranceCo.

The Bain-Endava team assessed more than 50 vendor solutions to enable efficient workflows for quote generation, claims handling and policy administration – tasks that had all been routed through slow and costly call centers. In the target state, new mobile solutions allow InsuranceCo’s customers to easily change their addresses, add policy members and more, without the costly delays associated with mailing documents and dialing into call centers.

When completed, InsuranceCo’s new platform will allow for sophisticated pricing and cross-selling, a slick sales conversion funnel and a far better footing to respond to changing fundamentals of the insurance market. In short, NextEngine has put InsuranceCo in position to lead industry disruption, rather than become a victim of it.