What difference can a year make to the insurance industry? 2020 may be the answer. The ongoing pandemic transformed customer needs, habits, and expectations, stressing on overnight virtualization of operations.
Now, customers desire quicker transactions for insurance services. According to the PWC report, rising customer expectations are tipping the power balance in favour of the consumer.
The ripple impact of the switch is so strong that insurance businesses adopting a remote working model are struggling to adapt to these technological changes. It is directly impacting their brand name and customer service in the market.
To address these issues adequately, electronic signature technology has emerged as the strongest, fastest & safest option to approve insurance documents quickly.
Here is how the insurance sector benefits from electronic signatures:
1) Increase productivity of Insurance agents & employees
Electronic signature has become well known as a powerful technology to ease signing documents for clients, offering an impressive productivity boost for insurance agents and employees.
– You can adequately categorize and archive different types of insurance policies in digital format using this electronic method.
– You can send updates about the insurance deals status that helps reduce human error chances.
– You can track clients more quickly and efficiently, as every document that is signed, transmitted, opened, and read is handled from the eSignature dashboard.
– It ensures that insurance policies are not mixed, lost, or sent to the wrong address.
– Get more policy orders from customers, boosting productivity & business revenue.
– Automates insurance process flows and minimizes repetitive tasks.
2) Enhancing business efficiency
As paper or faxed insurance policy agreements are challenging to track, it isn’t easy to follow the steps of the clients in the process of signing documents. Different parts of the world are experiencing a lockdown, disrupting the document delivery methods and supply networks at all levels.
This situation makes it particularly difficult to track down actual insurance documents and the sudden absence of a critical stakeholder like the delivery partner can derail the entire process.
In this case, electronic signature technology allows for improved speed and transparency, allowing insurers to take action to move the process along by implementing reminder mechanisms or forwarding the documents to a new signing authority.
This mechanism saves precious time for the employees and the clients in follow-ups for document receipt acknowledgment, follow-ups for contract or agreement closure, thereby enhancing business efficiency.
3) Security Prioritization
As the insurance sector ventures into uncharted territory with digitalization, it is critical to guarantee sufficient checks and balances to ensure that the industry’s highly regulated norms are permanently adhered to and followed.
With so many data breaches hitting the insurance companies, there are so many questions to answer:
– How does the company handle the signed documents after receiving them from customers?
– How secure are the storage services used to store insurance documents?
It is pretty easy to tamper with paper-based documents, and even physical signatures get falsified easily.
Electronically signed papers route to high-tier data centers with SSL-encrypted endpoints and 256-bit AES encryption which are the most acceptable security measures to keep sensitive data safe at all times.
4) Mobility and speed in the signing of insurance policies
Customers can utilize an electronic signature to complete the entire onboarding procedure as fast as possible after acquiring a policy.
One of the most significant advantages of employing eSignatures in the insurance sector is that documental work is done from the comfort of one’s own home or anywhere globally using a computer, tablet, or smart device.
When the client has decided to purchase insurance policies, the electronic signature solution allows them to complete the documentation formalities and the related processes almost immediately without waiting for confirmation from the company’s end.
Customers’ confidence in utilizing eSignatures on the go grows as they sign insurance policies online.
5) Reduced spending on insurance paper policies
Research has estimated that 1.024 billion pieces of paper are required each year to deliver insurance policies and the cost to deliver these policies using paper is USD 703 Million.
Check out the savings to deliver insurance policies electronically:
– Reduce costs by up to 85%
– Cut more than 20 days off of delivery cycle times
– Reduce not-in-good-order policy delivery by 99%
Apart from that, an electronic signature results in significant savings in paper costs and other linked materials such as ink, scanners, and printers.
Furthermore, businesses that adopt paper-based processes create an image of being forward-thinking and environmentally conscious. These are the qualities that digital consumers highly value when evaluating service providers.
6) Improved insurance investment experience
Another significant advantage of electronic signatures in the insurance sector is that they assist in improving the insurance investment experience for clients.
Clients have gotten used to the older experiences of facing delays in taking insurance policies.
Digital signatures have given a magical transformation to the customer experience. You get instant verification and confirmation of purchased company policies, which serves as a differentiating element for world-class companies.
In addition to increasing the speed and efficiency of the policy signing procedure, it also reduces the danger of policyholders switching to another alternative carrier before the signature.
Case Study
Knight insurance group is a member of the Hankey Group of Firms, a financial services conglomerate centered in Los Angeles that consists of seven operating companies with 3,100 workers worldwide and $15 Billion in assets at the time of writing. It is a capital support provider and underwriting capability for casualty insurance programs and niche property. The group operates in six Midwest locations: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo and Findlay, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, and Indianapolis, Indiana.
In addition to delivering outstanding insurance products and financial services to people and businesses of all sizes, Knight Insurance Group has maintained its dedication to superior customer service.
Challenges
The Knight insurance group agents located at these six different locations were processing all paperwork manually. Their new clients took two weeks to fill out and return the applications. Because of this procedure, the likelihood of client churn grew, and administration times exceeded the desired time.
Solution
Following a thorough review of the process, Knight Insurance Group decided to investigate the possibility of digitizing the business processes. Following an inspection, the system administrator for the Knight Insurance Group began looking for alternative methods of completing the documentation. eSignature expedited the paperwork process, and after the research, they decided that eSignature was the most suited solution for such situations.
Benefits
- Client forms that took two weeks to complete began arriving within one or two days, and they returned 75% of the documents within 24 hours of receipt.
- Customers of Knight Insurance Group express high satisfaction with the ease, simplicity, and convenience of submitting papers by electronic signature.
Conclusion
An electronic signature massively benefits your insurance business. It moves you ahead of your competitors and prepares you to meet the needs and demands of the next generation.
eSignature solutions bring out the best in insurance companies that have adopted this technology. Sign up for a free eSignature account today.
