Tackling insurance industry challenges with resilience and agility

Key attributes and themes driving business resilience and agility in insurance

Through our research, we uncovered 10 core attributes highly resilient and agile companies all have:

1. Dedicated people, processes and tools for gathering business intelligence that reveal market opportunities and threats
2. Ongoing data analytics on products and services to understand performance and customer usage
3. Effective change management processes that ensure new technologies impact the organization in a positive way
4. An understanding of and willingness to follow leadership’s vision for the company
5. Voice-of-employee processes and tools that help understand and adapt to employees’ changing needs
6. Compliance controls that ensure employees follow policies
7. Voice-of-customer processes and tools that reveal customer sentiment on the company and how their needs are evolving
8. A strong ability to learn new capabilities or innovate the business when faced with threats or crises
9. A workforce with sufficient autonomy to act on threats and opportunities without the involvement of executive leadership
10. A clear vision for the future understood by the entire organization

Compared with other major industries, some attributes are well-leveraged in the insurance sector (over 50% of respondents are actively leveraging these drivers). Of the 10 most impactful drivers, insurance companies leverage six most capably:

• Business intelligence (1)
• Product analytics (2)
• Leadership’s vision followed (4)
• Voice-of-employee processes (5)
• Effective compliance (6)
• Adding new capabilities (8)

However, insurance companies are also underleveraging other attributes. These three attributes are impactful, but barely leveraged at all: 

• Effective change management (3)
• Voice-of-customer processes (7)
• Employee autonomy (9)

Given that these underleveraged attributes are among the top drivers of business resilience and agility, the analysis suggests that insurance companies invested in sustainable growth and long-term success should prioritize their voice-of-customer processes and tools, employee autonomy and effective change management.

Overcoming these challenges

From the 10 attributes previously mentioned, we uncovered four unifying themes necessary to accomplish these objectives:

1. People
2. Leadership
3. Technology
4. Flexibility

These business resilience and agility themes aren’t just goals that insurance companies should aspire to achieve. They’re indispensable for riding out industry-specific market tremors. Let’s look closer at why a focus on each theme is so fundamental.

1. People

As the insurance industry becomes more tumultuous and competitive, so too does the need to make key investments in staff. Doing so helps organizations retain the people needed to more efficiently and consistently deliver innovative insurance products and services to as many customers as possible.

As teams analyze their people to rethink approaches to salaries, benefits and organizational processes, they’ll naturally gain insights into employee sentiment around pain points that can help make better decisions on how to make the most of staff and teams. In short, staffing investments in the short term optimize the company’s operational overhead to reinforce the business over time.

2. Leadership

Great people at an organization can’t operate at their full potential without a strong leadership team at the helm. After all, without a firm understanding of insurance industry laws and regulations informing a company’s decision-making, companies and their people risk being exposed to legal probes and associated costs that restrict the ability to stay resilient and agile.

Examining the company’s leadership helps uncover efficiency roadblocks like convoluted leadership processes and a lack of expertise in core insurance industry domains. Investments in necessary training and education programs can help leadership teams overcome these obstacles. In doing so, businesses are better positioned to tackle current and emerging insurance industry challenges.

3. Technology

In today’s end-to-end digital landscape, the tools and processes insurers use to do business are constantly evolving. The increased speed at which underwriting and claims are managed with digital tools has made particular waves in the insurance industry. As such, insurers that fail to keep pace with the latest technologies that are driving results with insurance professionals across the industry risk losing customers to companies that do.

Auditing the organization’s internal tech tools can reveal pain points that impact the workforce and the customers they do business with. Organizations can save time and budget by researching the solutions that match the business’ needs and providing ample training and support to staff to swiftly adapt to new digital tools and processes.

4. Flexibility

As a business theme, flexibility is universal; it encompasses not just the three prior themes — people’s needs change, leadership styles shift as necessary and technology constantly evolves — but also everything it means to be a modern business. Without flexibility, organizations are powerless to do anything in the face of today’s challenges and those yet to come. They can’t move forward, so they’re incapable of staying resilient and agile.

Insurance organizations become more flexible by incorporating the aforementioned 10 attributes — and this is only possible by embodying the themes of people, leadership, technology and flexibility. The themes are interconnected with resilience and agility, and as such enabling both requires organizations to consistently deliver on the core value propositions and differentiators that drive business.

Meet future challenges with resilience and agility

By making significant and consistent investments in people, leadership, technology and flexibility, insurance organizations will set the stage to continue innovating and delivering value to customers — all while facing economic turbulence head-on.