BI in the insurance industry: Key benefits 

In our information-driven age, companies accumulate and operate vast volumes of customer and business data in their operations. However, its sheer amount can’t benefit organizations until they learn to derive actionable insights from the company data. This is where business intelligence tools come in handy. They streamline and facilitate the routine of data collection, cleansing, analysis, and visualization, as well as enable users to leverage their predictive capabilities to forecast industry trends.  

Realizing the immense value of state-of-the-art business intelligence platforms for their workflows, business leaders invest heavily in software with expected market size of  in 2029 (Statista), displaying a solid CAGR of over 5%. The insurance sector moves in the wake of this across-the-board drive, embracing insurance business intelligence solutions among other specialized insurance products on an ever-growing scale. 

This article covers the role and key assets of business intelligence for insurance, highlighting the use case of insurance business intelligence software, and outlining future prospects for BI tools in the domain.  

Business intelligence in insurance: How it works

To perform their business functions adequately and outstrip rivals, insurance companies need to know their customers inside out and adopt informed decisions concerning where, when, whom, and what insurance products to sell. For decades, such market and customer data analysis relied on mathematical and statistical models, demographic patterns, environmental data studies, and other time- and effort-consuming methods while often rendering questionable results.  

By integrating business intelligence software into its digital ecosystem, an insurance company can perform data analytics faster and more efficiently. The power of BI solutions comes from the four-element data management pipeline they utilize.  

• Data mining. Relevant customer and market data is retrieved from all available internal and external sources (CRM, ERP, social media, weather reports, medical records, police protocols, etc.) and stored within a centralized database. 
• Data curation. The information is cleaned and structured to ensure data consistency, accuracy, conformity, understandability, completeness, and timeliness. 
• Analyzing data. Specialized mechanisms sift through the cleansed data to detect trends and regularities, or, vice versa, anomalies.  
• Data visualization. The results are presented in the form of easy-to-read reports, tables, interactive dashboards, graphs, and other visualization means to uncover actionable insights and enable making more strategic business decisions.  

How does it work in the context of insurance?

For instance, an insurance company wants to find out why claims processing is so sluggish. The person responsible for business performance employs BI tools that dig into claims management records and key performance indicators of the company’s personnel. The advanced analytics the system yields reveals what aspect of the claims handling workflow (inefficient processing, waiting for documents, staff errors, etc.) causes delays to enable insurance executives to take corrective steps and fine-tune key business processes.  

What perks does BI software bring to insurance agencies? 

Benefits of insurance business intelligence solutions

Our team distinguishes the following advantages of BI tools for insurance companies: 

Data consolidation 

When all available business information is pooled into a centralized depository and structured in accordance with the best data governance rules, insurance organizations obtain a single source of truth accessible to employees across departments, which promotes the free exchange of information, prevents data silos, and ensures enterprise-wide collaboration.  

Operational efficiency 

With complete database visibility, all workforce members are on the same page, enabling the company’s pipeline processes to run faster. Moreover, BI solutions can be filled with performance measurement functionalities, allowing managers to track employee productivity, determine departments that lag behind, and take remedial measures. 

Improved decision-making 

Advanced analytics provided by business intelligence software is utilized as a collection of valuable insights into multiple processes, giving decision-makers a safe ground while opting for certain tactical steps or conducting strategic planning.  

Enhanced customer experience 

BI solutions help insurers obtain a 360-degree view of each client and perform granular customer segmentation according to people’s demographics, location, preferences, income levels, etc. With such data at their fingertips, sales departments can personalize offers and services, launch targeted marketing campaigns, and unlock the hidden potential of cross-selling and upselling initiatives. As a result, agencies maintain a high level of retention among existing customers and attract new ones, increasing brand recognition and loyalty.  

Sharper competitive edge 

Insurance companies can not only monitor their own KPIs but also get a glimpse of third-party data related to particular operations of their rivals in the niche. By comparing them with internal performance indices, they can understand their current position, pinpoint problem areas, and take thought for their improvement (for instance, adopt advanced technologies, integrate a new software product, fine-tune pricing policy, switch over to new marketing channels, target emerging demographic strata, etc.). 

Profitability source awareness 

The specialized features of a well-crafted BI solution provide complete transparency of sales channels that an insurance company leverages to create an omnichannel customer experience. The revealed profit indices allow marketing experts to identify the ones that generate the most income and direct more investments in the development of these channels. Moreover, they may decide to abandon the least effective sales instruments or, on the contrary, double their efforts to improve their performance. 

Given such weighty perks, it is no wonder that business intelligence solutions find multiple use cases in the insurance industry.  

Applications of business intelligence in insurance

There are four major areas of the insurance pipeline where BI tools excel. 

Claims management 

This is the fundamental workflow that, to a large degree, conditions the success of business outcomes in the sector. To meet customer expectations, insurance businesses must provide prompt, efficient, and fair claim handling following policy terms. Thanks to business intelligence solutions, adjusters and claims processors can access claims data in the client’s profile, check its validity, approve settlement, and calculate disbursement sum in a New York minute, enhancing customer satisfaction and thus fostering increased customer loyalty.  

Underwriting and quoting 

Here, it is all about risk management. Before offering people a policy and determining the price of the premium, employees should conduct an out-and-out risk assessment, taking into account claims history, previous coverage, customer behavior, creditworthiness, property details, healthcare records, and other factors. BI tools allow agents to do it quickly and error-free, leveraging business analytics to generate appropriate quotes.  

Fraud detection and prevention 

The insurance market suffers from fraudulent claims that cost the sector more than $40 billion annually in the USA alone. Unscrupulous clients forge information on applications, inflate actual claims, report fake injuries and damages, or even stage accidents to get money from insurers. Business intelligence software can minimize insurance fraud by tracking claims data, identifying suspicious deviations, and alerting personnel who should look into numbers and subject the claim to a thorough investigation.  

Customer relationship management 

Improving customer satisfaction is one of the principal business objectives in the insurance sector as well as in any other vertical. It can be achieved by conducting a meticulous BI analysis of feedback data from customer support teams, call centers, and consumer reviews. By regularly discovering customer queries, pain points, and preferences, insurance companies can address issues before they escalate and provide a top-notch customer experience.  

To get maximum value from business intelligence, insurers  should monitor market trends and keep abreast of the fresh approaches. 

Current trends in BI solutions for insurance

There are three cutting-edge technologies that will shape the contours of the field in the foreseeable future and let forward-looking insurance organizations stay ahead of the curve.  

Artificial intelligence and machine learning 

AI-powered technologies (ML, large language models, natural language processing, deep learning, and more) are revolutionizing the domain of data analytics. They can be utilized to bolster BI tools and allow insurers to exercise more knowledgeable risk prediction, improve predictive analytics, create customer personas more accurately, and automate simple and repetitive operations related to data processing. 

Internet of Things 

Wearable devices and various sensors geared for collecting and transmitting real-time data serve as an additional source of vital information concerning a person’s health parameters, property state, vehicle conditions, etc. When accumulated and analyzed with the help of BI mechanisms, this data enhances insurers’ risk assessment efforts and allows them to determine premium pricing fairly.  

Blockchain 

Together with improving multiple business intelligence tasks, IoT devices pose new security threats, becoming access channels cyber criminals can exploit to penetrate the company’s digital infrastructure and get hold of sensitive data circulating there. The distributed ledger system the blockchain technology relies on can mitigate such hazards and add an extra level of security to data repositories, ensuring the inviolability of dossiers stored there and leveraged in business intelligence initiatives. 

To make the most of BI tools, you should not only pay attention to the latest trends in the niche but also partner with a seasoned IT vendor, well-versed in business intelligence software implementation and development. 

Augment your business intelligence with DICEUS

We offer ready-made data analytics software as a part of our comprehensive ready-made software suite for insurance. The BI solution can be onboarded as a standalone product but brings more value when operating as a pivotal element of an omnichannel system. 

Our data analytics solution captures and dissects data coming from various sources (both from our tools and third-party systems). Its intuitive and interactive dashboards allow users to track metrics related to vital aspects of the insurance company’s functioning. 

For example, the sales dashboard can showcase the efficiency of all sales channels the company leverages by showing the number of policies purchased via each of them, the dynamic quantity of written premiums, and the amount of quotes not converted into policies for a certain period. Armed with these figures, you can determine the most-selling channel, take remedial measures for the ones that underperform, and understand where your marketing efforts should be directed.  

On the claims dashboard, you can see their total number with the segmentation by type and completeness. This information will help you track patterns in claims data and allocate additional resources to handle pending claims if their number is substantial.  

The customer profile and marketing dashboard enables personnel to dig deep into their customer profiles and explore their behavior (clicks, engagements, views, conversions, and purchases) on each interaction channel. Such analytics are instrumental in assessing the efficiency of marketing campaigns and tapping new cross-selling and upselling opportunities. 

If the functionalities of our Vitaminise data analytics solution don’t live up to your business and technical requirements, our high-profile developers possess in-depth niche expertise and skills to craft a unique BI solution from scratch. Drop us a line to reinvent your data analytics with the best-in-class business intelligence software for the insurance industry.  

Key takeaways

Business intelligence is a software-driven effort consisting in collecting, cleansing, analyzing, and presenting business data. In the insurance context, it is geared to essentially facilitate and streamline basic industry workflows, such as claims management, underwriting, fraud prevention, and customer relationship management.  

When implemented by an experienced vendor and bolstered by disruptive technologies, BI tools can help centralize relevant data under one virtual roof, increase operational efficiency, boost decision-making, augment customer experience, sharpen the competitive edge, and assess the profitability of existing sales channels, thus revolutionizing the entire performance of the insurance organization.  

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