The 3 Ms of bringing flexibility and speed to the digital insurance experience

By Adam Goran

Speed and flexibility are essential to customer satisfaction and business success in 2023. Over the years, the insurance industry has gained a reputation for operating and adapting to change slowly due to the intricacies of client care and strict regulatory guidelines. But the traditional slow and steady means of operating will no longer win the race for established insurance providers, with 52% of consumers—and 80% of millennials—more open to working with newer innovative players in the insurance space, delivering the digital customer experience they know and now expect.

To compete in today’s digital world, insurance carriers must embrace digital innovation and new insurance models to meet growing customer demands and industry standards. However, embracing and achieving organizational transformation is no easy task. It requires insurers to look inwardly at current processes and business culture to instill the three Ms — mindset, measures and mechanics — needed to successfully implement new working models that improve the speed and flexibility of the customers’ insurance experience.

Instilling a growth mindset

For insurance companies, understanding that old habits die hard will help leaders and managers alike save time and avoid headaches. Chances are that employees are in a fixed mindset when it comes to approach. Although a fixed mindset is excellent for delivering results within a fixed environment, it is incompatible with transformation.

Before implementing new technology or modernized business processes, insurance leaders must introduce a growth mindset within their business environment. How can insurance providers instill a growth mindset? It starts with ensuring employees are constantly in the know about customer needs and market trends and then using that knowledge to provide innovative thinking and experimentation. By embracing forward thinking and experimentation within the work environment, leaders encourage employees to never fall into routines and constantly search for new and better ways of working. In doing so, employers will organically instill a growth mindset within their employees, ready to implement quick and innovative change at every turn.

Measuring for success

After a growth mindset is established, companies must set the right measurements to determine and ensure progress. To generate accurate measurements for business growth, insurers must understand what success looks like to the company. To uncover this, leaders must continuously ask themselves three questions:

How diverse can we be as a business and still succeed without losing focus?
How will we know we’ve successfully executed on our digital business strategy?
Where will we need to go next, and when will we know when to go?

Through these questions, business leaders will determine both the proper mechanics to target and the right measurements to track to assess progress. For example, say an insurer is looking to implement customer relationship management technology to improve internal communications and customer interactions. By asking how the company will know it successfully executed on its digital business strategy, employers can easily gather that measurements’ tracking needs to revolve around the speed of customer support. Thus, the company can begin tracking metrics like ticket speed and cost to serve, to determine successes and areas of improvement.

Implementing the right mechanics

As we touched on above, the right mechanics can only be determined through continuous questioning. Insurance companies must understand that the right mechanics today may not be right tomorrow. And innovative digital tools will not solely improve operations. After employers target areas and implement digital change, their job is not done. They must constantly audit operational processes to understand how to fully optimize new technology, gauge employees’ understanding of new digital tools and question how processes around the technology can be adjusted to further promote speed, flexibility and improvements to customer experience.

While each insurance company will find its own path along its digital journey, transformation is essential to keeping up with customer needs and remaining competitive among innovative challengers looking to disrupt the market. By taking an inward approach to digital transformation and establishing the three Ms, insurers can not only ensure a streamlined operational transformation but establish a business environment that encourages continued growth and innovation.

Adam Goran is client partner with Emergn. He may be contacted at [email protected]