PROVIDING GROUP INSURANCE IS A COMPLEX PROCESS. TRUE OR FALSE? 

That is true. The collective underwriting process is particularly complex in the insurance sector, with the complexity level increasing as per the company size. The company seeks to provide insurance services to its employees, under the best conditions. The company will not simply file an underwriting request but also look for the best insurance companies and request each to offer tailor-made coverage and services.

For the insurers, the process starts with the customer (company) needs and insurance coverage specifications. The salespeople fill in questionnaires; they create a list of insurance and services coverage, and they request the list of the company’s employees, as well as the respective supporting documents. These constitute the specifications that will be then submitted and accessed to develop their proposal.

Receiving the specifications, the insurer calls upon various service providers, including the department of finance, department of trade, Actuary’s Department, department of collective underwriting. Each of these services should be well-organized to produce effective outcomes. The vertical silo organization works well in reflecting such process.

Additionally, the process involves going back and forth between the different departments and the customer in order to complete the data and adjust the offer as the conversations progress. Interactions between business units are generally managed via obsolete workflows (or even directly by emails in Outlook). In fact, this process is cumbersome and complex due to many manual operations requiring a lot of re-encoding techniques or data transformation.

While being complex, the actual collective underwriting processes suffer from low procedures and lack of efficiency.

WHAT SOLUTIONS DO YOU SUGGEST?

Ever attentive in helping its customers and salespeople to reduce departments’ or stakeholders’-related difficulties in meeting their demands, VERMEG has built a “transversal” journey. Thanks to our simple, yet highly configurable digital transformation journey, you will get your contract active in six major stages.

The first stage is to carry out specifications’ dematerialization. The customer sales representative can initiate the offer process by entering the data and downloading the documents received. The system checks the data and verifies how close to complete the offer is.

During the second stage, an initial offer is put together by filling in the necessary data. An initial cost is also generated by using numerous specialized modules supplied either by customers or by VERMEG. This first offer can be transmitted electronically to other departments through a workflow for validation and adaptation, if necessary. At the end of this stage, the offer can be shared with the client for initial review, feedback and comparison with other insurers.

During the third stage, a detailed sample proposal is to be provided. All articles and offer’s description will be included in the collective agreement for validation from the customer.

During the fourth stage, the contractual approval process is to be carried out (risks analysis, profitability, conformity).

During the fifth stage, the contract is submitted to the customer corporate manager for the electronic signature.

At the final stage, once the signature is received, the contracts, details of insurance coverage and services, as well as the employees’ files are sent to the Management Services.

To remove business process complexity, we should use technology. The different stages are thus accessible from any terminal. Data is directly checked for completeness. Different teams can intervene through the journey workflow, with adapted profiles, in order to allocate capacities and validate, adapt, trigger, and transmit the file for opinion and decision.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF LIFE INSURANCE ?

here are many advantages. First of all, this customer journey improves its productivity thanks to services collaboration into a unique and seamless process.

The user experience is considerably improved, for both internal and external users (sales representative, end customers), thanks to the technologically redesigned ergonomic methods, such as Angular. An entire digitization process is carried out to reduce the errors arising from encoding phases and the process as a whole.

Finally, the digital transformation improves the interaction of sales teams by making the creation and adaptation of the offer proposed to customers faster. This interaction process speeds up the underwriting through showing the insurer’s efficiency.