In my last Tech-Tock article, I wrote about learning about the latest innovation in insurtech by attending onsite industry conferences. I am very excited to continue to inform you of the latest technology that can help your business grow and stay on the cutting edge. Sorry for the cliché. I continue to discover more new tech innovations and solution providers. This article is focused on two topics. The first is automation in insurance marketing. Whether you are a BGA using the platform or offering it as an agent recruiting tool, you will learn about the power of automated marketing for direct to consumer insurance sales. As I try not to be too technical when writing this column, you have seen since last year that I occasionally write about APIs to educate you on the next generation of sharing information and creating a seamless user experience. I have discovered another powerful API solution that is simply magical for carriers who are developing illustrations for new insurance products.
Conquer Your Marketing With One Solution
For insurance marketers jockeying for position in an ultra-competitive market space, the name of the game is leveraging formative tech tools to enhance customer outreach, increase conversion and retention rates, and boost ROI. Fortunately, as communication methods evolve, Phonexa’s all-in-one marketing automation solution for calls, leads, clicks, email, SMS, accounting, and more has shaped how insurance direct marketers and carriers connect with consumers and make more financially sound marketing decisions. Automating marketing initiatives allow insurance agencies to rely more on organic marketing and new technology to complement their back-end leadgen processes. Recent case studies have found that Phonexa helps insurance providers, agents, and agencies reach their full business potential through an all-encompassing automation platform.
Key highlights include:
- Significant reduction in marketing spend
- Less manual work stemming from more automated tasks
- More time to convert leads to sales
- Increased revenue due to heightened conversion rates
- Lowered fraud resulting from an advanced vetting process
There are multiple solutions that are critical to the success of automating marketing. Starting with data analytics, which needs to have fast-loading real-time data insights that uncover key information about your insurance lead generation and ROI. You then need an application to handle your calls. Insurance lead applications for inbound calls help you create better customer interaction. Reporting is key to measuring results, especially comparison reports. These reports help identify the most relevant data specific and KPIs specific to your campaigns. You need an application that can filter by geographic area, such as by state, to measure campaign performance and outcomes by a specific region. In order to get adoption, speed-to-contact technology is essential. These LeadGen and communication tools are needed to initiate an efficient customer outreach. Now personalized outreach utilizes outbound calls, emails, and SMS tools for personalized drip campaigns and contact with insurance client segments. Traffic flow optimization allows you to segment your incoming insurance leads to vet out low-intent clients and re-engage lapsed prospects. Phonexa, https://phonexa.com, offers all of these tools as an All-One-Element that integrates all of your lead generation and management in one place in a comprehensive tech stack that covers all areas and demands of the business.
Do Not Be Afraid of APIs
In New York at the Insurtech Insights Conference back in May, I met with the team from Coherent Global, https://coherent.global/. I was amazed at their technology. Even though I am not an actuary, I know tech—this is a game-changer. Nick Leimer, senior technical director at Coherent Global, helped explain in layman’s terms how it all works for their application Coherent Spark.
APIs, (application programming interface) are just a way to connect to different parts of a business process, set of calculations, or both together, while adding speed and flexibility. Think Legos for business processes. Build whatever you want or need from all the parts you have in a box or change out one set of blocks for another. If the process changes, just reconnect the blocks and/or add new ones. Complete flexibility.
What if you had a Lego that would calculate the price for an insurance coverage. Then that Lego could be used by the pricing department to generate the same results with the same inputs and outputs to calculate over and over again and only need to make changes in one location to adjust the calculations in that department. Now think bigger. That block can now be used by the illustration application, and it will always match the results expected from the pricing team. Even bigger still, the same block could feed the valuation system, the project system, and even then the cash flow testing system. The same results from the same block across all business units in different systems. One source of truth managed from one location.
The use of APIs to address this issue is applicable to a wide range of business and process calculations. The same base calculation is used in many different systems with the expectation that the results are consistent in all systems. Anyone who has been part of a large transformation or upgrade project has found a calculation or process that should be the same for all parts of the company. But because a system is only rarely used, or will not be used until a later date in the transformation workflow, it is pushed to the bottom of the backlog where it is likely deemed out of scope or forgotten. Now instead of a single source truth for this calculation from an API, the calculations in different systems will be updated at different times by different resources which typically cause the calculations to deliver inconsistent results requiring re-work and timeline extensions.
The solution Coherent Spark has several use cases for life, health and annuity products. It can be used for ”back office” actuarial calculations in which a client uses Spark for common regulatory market value and reserving calculations. It can also be used for new product development and illustrations such as to a complete illustration for a new IUL product and recover botched delivery for new distribution partners. For supplemental health benefits, Spark can be used to create an API from plan design and rate excel model. The last use case is that Spark can be used for life policy administration conversion which significantly reduces costs and risks.
Here are two quotes about the APIs that sum it all up: “They no longer have to build a core application that tries to do everything. Instead, they can contract out certain responsibilities by using already created pieces that do the job better. So APIs are the Lego bricks of software development: Standardized tools for software to communicate with other software, leading to faster building and deployment and faster load times,” says Corey Walther, Allianz Life. And: “Coherent Spark enables an API-based cloud ecosystem making it easier for internal and external processes to talk to one another so data can be quickly handed off from one process to the next, making automation easier and the development and deployment of new workflows quicker,” says Todd Buchanan, US CEO of Coherent.
