Who better to shed some light on the factors impacting the insurance value chain than Joanne Butler (pictured), head of product marketing and pre-sales at Charles Taylor InsureTech. Butler recently joined Insurance Business TV to delve into what’s happening in this space and the role of technology in improving performance along the chain.
Watch now: What’s impacting the insurance value chain?
“Our customers and our market want to talk about all sorts of different issues,” she said. “And they love talking to us about their challenges and we love listening to them. It all starts off with a customer. So, lots of people that we hear from, they want to get closer to their customer, they want to build their business, they want to want to really understand who they’re selling to - for lots of reasons.”
In addition, Butler said, some of the more back-office elements such as efficiency are also coming up repeatedly in her team’s market conversations, including considerations such as legacy systems. The challenges vary significantly depending on the different stages of the value chain but one that seems to be quite pervasive across the whole piece is the friction between the different elements.
“It’s quite hard to do that end-to-end process and there are lots of manual pieces to it,” she said. “It’s very error-prone, so there are lots of different pieces that people are working on individually as well.”
Technology is only part of the answer to the question posed by this friction, she said, and many other pieces go alongside that. But what technology does especially well is capture information digitally at the start of the process that can then be used and reused further down the chain – allowing the user to learn more about their customers, their claims process and what they want to be buying.
“Tech can be there when we can’t as people,” Butler said. “Tech is there 24/7... It can be answering queries when we’re all asleep. And people are brilliant at relationships and talking to people when that’s needed. And of course, there’s always going to be a place for that. But tech can take away some of that [more automated piece] and leave us then to do the bigger, more valuable, high relationship pieces.”
Watch now: What’s impacting the insurance value chain?
