6 Elements of Automated Workflows For Group Insurance Onboarding
By Leor Melamedov
Carriers that provide group insurance need to ensure the onboarding process is as smooth and efficient as possible. Group plans require at least a 70% participation rate, so it’s in the carrier’s best interest to provide an onboarding journey that customers glide through till the end. In addition, carriers typically offer add-ons, and an easy onboarding experience increases the probability of customers purchasing those advanced plans.
Here, we’ll discuss how digital automated workflows can help carriers increase their group onboarding rate and promote the adoption of advanced plans.
The Repercussions of Insufficient Automation in Group Insurance Onboarding
Many insurance companies already have digital tools in place for business process management. Yet these tools often only cover certain aspects of workflows rather than end-to-end processes.
For example, robotic process automation (RPA) is growing in popularity thanks to its ability to improve the efficiency of specific tasks, such as using bots to communicate with a company’s employees (i.e., the prospective policyholders).
The problem here is that silos remain, and processes are not always part of an integrated whole. Prospective policyholders are still not getting a unified, end-to-end digital onboarding experience. Often, one or more parts of the onboarding process requires switching to a different channel, filling out paperwork by hand, or other disruptive actions. Agents waste time chasing potential customers for paperwork and manually inputting data.
Most existing systems aren’t designed to onboard customers in a fully automated and digital way. Due to this lack of cohesion, onboarding cycles are long and cumbersome. The prospective policyholder loses excitement or starts having doubts.
Here are some of the insurance KPIs that are negatively impacted by these broken onboarding journeys:
Turnaround time: Agents spend an excessive amount of time reading terms and conditions (T&Cs), collecting documents, and requesting signatures. All the delays add up to time the policyholder isn’t signed on, and isn’t paying premiums.
Conversion rates: Bouncing prospective policyholders from channel to channel, prolonging phone conversations, and requiring paperwork to be filled out and sent through obsolete channels such as snail mail (or even email), are all symptoms of a broken digital workflow. This jeopardizes the onboarding process and lowers the overall conversion rate.
Compliance: Insurance is a highly regulated industry. Without the ability to quickly adapt process workflows and disclosures to changing regulatory needs, insurance agents put themselves at the risk of noncompliance.
Cost of onboarding: The operational and processing costs of traditional insurance onboarding processes can add up, from following up with customers, to reading compliance scripts, to manually collecting documents.
Why Use Automated Workflows for Group Onboarding
The insurance industry has multiple stakeholders, involves complex calculations, and is beholden to stringent regulatory demands.
Frequently changing KYC requirements mean that insurers need to keep their processes up-to-date. Failure to do so can result in policyholder complaints, post-onboarding cancellation, hefty penalties from regulators, and reputational damage.
Often this means that carriers are more focused on taking care of the mechanics of compliance, and less on making the onboarding process as seamless as possible.
Furthermore, insurers cannot afford to be dependent on IT departments every time they need to make changes to their processes. Such dependency leads to widespread inefficiency, and agent burnout.
Automating group insurance onboarding can make these obstacles to selling and staying compliant a thing of the past. With digital workflows, there is a real opportunity to automate the entire insurance onboarding lifecycle.
With automated workflows, agents can put together more digital and engaging insurance product presentations, review the final policy in a collaborative environment, digitize documents (including T&Cs), request the customer’s eSignature, and set up automated billing. This can all be handled by project owners or agents, without the need for coding.
Here are some of the tangible benefits of automating insurance onboarding:
Simplified processes: A single system controls the entire end-to-end process with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
Digital tools in one digital suite: At various stages of the workflow, rules trigger the sending of requests for eSignatures and ID verification, as well as sharing disclosures such as T&Cs for customer approval.
More streamlined processes: Easy and intuitive conditional rules can be set to ensure business logic between steps, within steps, and within form fields.
Optimized: Each step in the onboarding process can be optimized across touchpoints and existing systems.
More visibility: Digital workflows come with dashboards that allow business leaders to gain visibility into the KPIs that matter most, such as cycle time and cost of onboarding.
Zero IT involvement: Project managers can adjust their business rules according to their needs without requiring IT support or coding.
Top 6 Use Cases For Automating Group Insurance Onboarding
Automated digital workflows ensure that carriers’ processes reflect the latest compliance and business requirements. At each stage of the onboarding process, requests for customer information or action are automated according to the regulatory requirements of their state.
During the onboarding call, the agent sends in a request to the solution’s interface. This activates a smart workflow that dynamically pulls in the relevant assets, such as T&Cs and eSignature requests based on conditional logic. The workflow gets delivered to the customer’s mobile phone in a visual and streamlined manner.
Here are the key stages of a typical insurance onboarding process using automated workflows:
Gone are the days of PowerPoint insurance sales presentations or worse, in-person presentations. Automated digital workflows allow agents to create an “order” showcasing potentially relevant insurance products, and share it in real-time with prospects in a collaborative mobile environment.
2.) Real-Time Shared Review of Documents
Once the customer expresses interest in purchasing a certain insurance product, the agent shares a document with the customer for an in-call review. The agent and customer can zoom in and mark up specific parts of the document to clarify questions collaboratively.
3.) Form Filling
Static PDF or physical forms prolong the onboarding process. On the other hand, smart eForms allow policyholders to complete through key forms in a mobile-friendly format, speeding up the process.
Evidence of Insurability (EOI): This form features a combination of field types, including free text, check boxes, and numbered boxes. Smart eForms make it easy to employ these types of fields. In addition, if a customer answers “no” to all the health condition questions, conditional logic ensures the section for elaboration is hidden.
Statement of Health: This lengthy form can be shortened through conditional logic, which hides the section for health problem details if the customer doesn’t specify any health problems. Furthermore, a Statement of Health in eForm format can be sent back to the agent via a secure mobile session, preventing the exposure of sensitive PII data.
4.) Instant Consent
Instead of the agent reading lengthy compliance scripts, damaging the customer experience, agents can simply send terms and conditions to a customer’s mobile phone for instant click consent.
5.) eSignature Collection
Once the customer agrees to purchase an insurance product and reviews the final order, the workflow automatically triggers a request for the customer’s electronic signature. The customer signs in the moment via the text message interface, and an audit trail of the signed document is produced and stored in the CRM.
6.) Automatic Payment Collection
Agents can set up newly signed customers with an automatic payment plan for their insurance premiums. The workflow sends out ACH forms for the customer to fill out, making it easy for customers to pay premiums regularly and automatically.
Automated Workflows for Faster Insurance Onboarding
Automated digital workflows allow insurance companies to dynamically build and adjust processes to meet the needs of groups, such as employees. This flexibility means that customer interactions with the insurer are more targeted. Customers are asked to provide only the information that is needed from them, no more and no less. Automated workflows ensure insurers keep the ball rolling between critical steps in the insurance onboarding cycle, promoting both better compliance and efficiency.
Lightico offers such a workflow automation solution that uses conditional logic to streamline the end-to-end insurance onboarding process. The platform includes eSignatures, smart eForms, digital T&Cs, co-review of order, and more.
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The most helpful thing about Lightico is the fast turnaround time, The upside is that you are giving your customer an easy way to respond quickly and efficiently. Lightico has cut work and waiting time as you can send customer forms via text and get them back quickly, very convenient for both parties.
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I love the fact that I can send or request documents from a customer and it is easy to get the documents back in a secured site via text message. Our company switched from Docusign to Lightico, as Lightico is easier and more convenient than Docusign, as the customer can choose between receiving a text message or an email.
Many insurance companies already have digital tools in place for business process management. Yet these tools often only cover certain aspects of workflows rather than end-to-end processes.
For example, robotic process automation (RPA) is growing in popularity thanks to its ability to improve the efficiency of specific tasks, such as using bots to communicate with a company’s employees (i.e., the prospective policyholders).
The problem here is that silos remain, and processes are not always part of an integrated whole. Prospective policyholders are still not getting a unified, end-to-end digital onboarding experience. Often, one or more parts of the onboarding process requires switching to a different channel, filling out paperwork by hand, or other disruptive actions. Agents waste time chasing potential customers for paperwork and manually inputting data.
Most existing systems aren’t designed to onboard customers in a fully automated and digital way. Due to this lack of cohesion, onboarding cycles are long and cumbersome. The prospective policyholder loses excitement or starts having doubts.
Here are some of the insurance KPIs that are negatively impacted by these broken onboarding journeys:
The insurance industry has multiple stakeholders, involves complex calculations, and is beholden to stringent regulatory demands.
Frequently changing KYC requirements mean that insurers need to keep their processes up-to-date. Failure to do so can result in policyholder complaints, post-onboarding cancellation, hefty penalties from regulators, and reputational damage.
Often this means that carriers are more focused on taking care of the mechanics of compliance, and less on making the onboarding process as seamless as possible.
Furthermore, insurers cannot afford to be dependent on IT departments every time they need to make changes to their processes. Such dependency leads to widespread inefficiency, and agent burnout.
Automating group insurance onboarding can make these obstacles to selling and staying compliant a thing of the past. With digital workflows, there is a real opportunity to automate the entire insurance onboarding lifecycle.
With automated workflows, agents can put together more digital and engaging insurance product presentations, review the final policy in a collaborative environment, digitize documents (including T&Cs), request the customer’s eSignature, and set up automated billing. This can all be handled by project owners or agents, without the need for coding.
Here are some of the tangible benefits of automating insurance onboarding:
Static PDF or physical forms prolong the onboarding process. On the other hand, smart eForms allow policyholders to complete through key forms in a mobile-friendly format, speeding up the process.
Instead of the agent reading lengthy compliance scripts, damaging the customer experience, agents can simply send terms and conditions to a customer’s mobile phone for instant click consent.
Once the customer agrees to purchase an insurance product and reviews the final order, the workflow automatically triggers a request for the customer’s electronic signature. The customer signs in the moment via the text message interface, and an audit trail of the signed document is produced and stored in the CRM.
Agents can set up newly signed customers with an automatic payment plan for their insurance premiums. The workflow sends out ACH forms for the customer to fill out, making it easy for customers to pay premiums regularly and automatically.
