Insurance knowledge workers spend far too much of their time on repetitive, mundane work that offers little value to the policyholder or agent. Guidewire’s Value Consulting team has worked on more than 300 engagements over the last decade. Based on this experience, we estimate that 80% of workers’ time is spent on basic tasks and compliance
Guidewire Insight
In this third of a three-part series, Guidewire's Brian Desmond identifies another important outcome when insurers embrace the engagement era by using engagement era systems. It is the potential to elevate the work of insurance. These systems offer myriad benefits to insurers, including the ability to gain time that can be invested in more strategic work so that knowledge workers can better apply their expertise and experience.
Even before the ball dropped to signal the start of 2017, it seemed obvious this year would be a wild ride. For those following the moves of our leading technology solution providers, it was difficult to keep up as mergers and acquisitions moved at a pace not seen for years. Throw in the influx of insurtech companies, the already crowded core-solutions market, and the threat of major technology companies hanging over the heads of everyone in the industry—solution providers and insurers—and there were more than enough issues to keep us thinking for months.
Guidewire Insight
"It’s difficult to be a core system technology company," says Guidewire CEO Marcus Ryu. "The functional footprint to have a minimal offering is substantial. You can go a long time before being rewarded. That’s a risk prospect. When we started Guidewire, we had more of an open field. It was difficult, but the competitive landscape now is less favorable for new entrants. Entrepreneurs interested in the industry are not generally looking to build a core system, but are looking at starting a new style of MGA or applying some horizontal technology in IoT, drones or machine learning and apply it to an insurance problem. That’s much more of the orientation we’ve seen." Ryu and other core system provider CEOs share their thoughts on today's market in this ITA article.
The guiding principle for engagement era systems is to enable the insurer to meet users on their own terms, to provide the experiences and journeys that they want. Rather than equating ”users” solely with customers, as most commentators do, we at Guidewire define “users” to be customers, agents, and insurance knowledge workers. Users have many expectations. When viewed under the lens of engagement, a number of these expectations rise to the top.
Guidewire Insight
Designing for user engagement starts with user journeys, which require seamless integration between Digital Experience solutions and Operational Systems of record. Digital Experience solutions need to support a variety of channels and engagement modes for each journey. Operational Systems must support the journeys for both transactional and analytical purposes—in fact, all of the permutations of channels, engagement modes, journeys, and integrations with operational systems that make up the total engagement experience that we aspire to support. In this second of three blogs on the topic, Guidewire's Brian Desmond explores the attributes of engagement era systems in more detail.