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May 09, 2019 at 07:20 PM
E-underwriting has transformed the life insurance new business underwriting process — and the technology continues to evolve and adapt.
Yet, far too many carriers make the fatal mistake of misjudging modern e-underwriting capabilities. Automated underwriting is often considered just another form of back-end software, rather than a key means to improve the customer experience.
(Related: Life Insurers Can Use Social Media Data in Underwriting. Should They?)
It’s time to make sure we effectively deliver on what our slick new user interfaces are promising consumers.
Insurers are seeking to echo the elegant, accessible web and application design commercialized by firms such as Apple to help attract and guide customers through the life insurance application and buying process.
Perhaps like no other modern entrepreneur, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was obsessed with beauty, and Apple’s engineers came to expect a brutal rejection of “good enough” — Apple’s products had to be “insanely great.”
Less discussed is the uncomfortable fact that function mattered to Jobs as much as form. Designers on projects from the iPhone to the Mac were often sent back to the drawing board when the resulting product did not perform as promised.
What our industry is realizing is that how you sell is just as important as what you sell.
Under the UI/UX
Many carriers seem to be applying only part of this lesson, concerned primarily with the niceties of digital design, from user interface (UI) to user experience (UX).
Too many fail to extend available e-underwriting technological capabilities to enhance the underwriting decision process. New business (application) and underwriting processes are intricately intertwined, after all. To ignore one at the expense of the other risks failure of the whole. Only consider where the real exposure lies for an insurer: not in the digital front end of the process, but during the underwriting, or risk analysis, phase.
