Insurance CIOs Are Turning Vendor Consolidation Into a Competitive Edge – Here’s How

CIOs in insurance are under constant pressure to implement services that add business value and are cost-efficient at the same time. To drive that business efficiency and value, they routinely work with third-party vendors — but managing multiple vendors can add significant complexity, overwhelm your IT department, and bring confusion that’s counter-productive for your customer-facing departments, which can slow sales and claims processes.

Why More Vendors Mean More Problems for Insurance CIOs

With so many software solutions in the market, CIOs face multiple vendor management challenges when trying to meet these top priorities:

1) Aligning multiple SLAs with key business goals:

The more variables you add to your software environment the more complex it becomes to focus on what actually matters. Settling prescribed SLA measurements and testing them to ensure they actually deliver expends IT time and resources. Onboarding solutions that only impact some key performance metrics can overwhelm IT teams with too many objectives to monitor and maintain, often making it unclear to accurately assess their combined value at the end of the day.

2) Transferring knowledge to in-house staff:

Each new service requires training IT resources to operate and maintain on the backend, and customer-facing employees in the revenue organization. Not only does that swamp time and resources across the organization, information overload usually adds friction and delays to employee processes that bring frustration to both them and insurance customers. That’s counterproductive to turnaround times and for many of insurers’ top business KPIs.

3) Fixing compatibility issues & breakpoints between point solutions:

Stitching together functionalities of multiple siloed systems saps more time from IT staff devoted to fix compatibility issues between them, resulting in gaps and manual breakpoints between point solutions. Important features and updates can fail at the wrong time, undermining the intended customer experience. Moreover, siloed solutions demand manual data management from your IT staff and can open up major data integrity issues that can risk non-compliance issues.

4) Keeping maintenance costs down:

Many vendor offerings are code-heavy, causing friction within the organization as LOBs cannot deploy solutions to improve sales or servicing without depending on - and burdening IT. And the more resource time is needed to connect, fix, update and maintain multiple vendor solutions the more staffing costs add up — not just for your IT department, but also for every LOB that needs to juggle all of these solutions on the job.

Gaining Simplicity & Efficiency By Moving to One Unified Platform

Consolidating vendors with the right technology helps CIOs drive efficiencies, cut the fat out of their operations, and simplify management both for technical and business objectives. Point solutions are not capable of encompassing all of the touchpoints and interactions that need to use data securely and compliantly. Having one unified platform helps CIOs:

1) Unify data and operations from all touchpoints:

A completely digitized end-to-end platform can manage numerous front-end interactions — from ID Verification to eSignatures to payments. A platform that can deliver this must be able to encompass every touchpoint for insurance processes from the contact center, website and digital channels, mobile applications, to face-to-face. This streamlines all customer-facing interactions, enabling employees to collect all requirements they need to bind policies and process claim requests efficiently.

2) Cut resources and costs needed to integrate functionalities:

Replacing multiple siloed systems with one platform eliminates problems involved with integrating numerous features and capabilities. All capabilities are integrated and available for use. And instead of exhausting time and resources tweaking integration and compatibility between silos, insurers can automate workflows end-to-end using integratable APIs & automated workflows and simple webhooks to extract data from any system.

3) Simplifying & aligning business expectations with One SLA:

Consolidating vendors immensely simplifies vendor management for CIOs. Trying to match up a myriad of capabilities and KPIs that must be measured is no longer necessary with a digitally complete platform with the technical capabilities to deliver the efficiency and agility insurers need on both the back and front end.

4) One trusted partner for innovation:

Partnering with a platform that can verifiably demonstrate the ability to help insurers intelligently scale their data and operations across all touchpoints helps CIOs focus on future innovation with a more precise lens. A true innovation partner takes a consultative approach and helps CIOs analyze current insurance processes and bring insights on how digital technology can bring efficiency and value to your data and operations in ways that empower growth while pinpointing opportunities for cost savings. Partnering with an innovative platform to deliver digitally complete insurance processes can help Insurance CIOs deliver the operational efficiency and value they strive for while tremendously simplifying vendor management in parallel.