As I wrote in my Forbes article, Seven Disruptions That Are Shaping Customer Experience Today, today’s rapid pace of disruptive change is shaping customer expectations and, accordingly, customer experience (CX) in ways that threaten to leave less agile brands behind. This is true in all industries, and especially so in Insurance. Over the years, XTIVIA has helped many of our Insurance customers transform their digital experience across a number of use cases and user audiences, leveraging a market-leading Digital Experience Platform called Liferay. In this article, I share information about many of those use cases but, before I do so, let me go back to customer expectations.

Offering the right products, services, and solutions in the right place at the right time is a given for success today — and it’s not enough. Instead, it’s about what your customer expects from your brand as their individual experience, at any time, from anywhere and via any device. The value of your customer relationships is expressed through personalized one-on-one experiences, responsive customer service and connected experiences across channels.

What’s more, customers are judging brands against their most recent stellar customer experience, often as a consumer; that means industry disruptors like Amazon, Airbnb and Uber are the standards against which your brand is measured. Your CX must be on par or your business future could be in question.

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Customers today are judging brands against their most recent stellar customer experience, often as a consumer. Your #CX must be on par with disrupter like Netflix, Airbnb & Uber or your business future could be in question.

With this in mind, the key question facing CIOs and IT decision-makers today is the age-old build-vs-buy dilemma. Do they choose to roll with their own platform and solution from first principles, or do they choose to invest in a digital experience platform that gets them out of the IT plumbing business?

In our opinion, for the typical enterprise, the answer is the latter. In fact, our recommendation is that the right foundation for your CX initiative is Liferay DXP; we talk about our rationale in this article. Suffice it to say that Liferay provides a whole slew of capabilities that fast-track your CX transformation or modernization initiative and enable you to focus your energies on your business differentiators.

Before I dive into the core of this article, I want to clarify I use the term CX as an all-encompassing term to include your customers, partners, employees and even your vendors, board members and other stakeholders. It is important to ensure, in today’s digital world, you don’t leave any audience behind, as you cannot truly transform the experience of your end customers, without empowering your employees and partners.

Customer Experience Transformation Across Insurance Verticals

Enterprises are facing new expectations from their customers every day, as well as new challenges from their competitors, some of whom did not even exist until recently. The need for enterprises today is to reinvent themselves and become as frictionless as possible in their customer experience, whether the customer is external or internal. I introduce the frictionless enterprise in a recent Forbes article, and subsequently discuss the five enablers as follows to improve operations and digital experience.

  1. Exceptional experience
  2. Omnichannel presence
  3. Seamless integration
  4. Data-driven intelligence
  5. Cloud
the frictionless enterprise
Figure 1: The Frictionless Enterprise

While all five of the frictionless enterprise enablers are key to achieving the best results, the journey starts with creating an exceptional experience. At XTIVIA, we have had the privilege of working with a number of Insurers in creating a stellar customer experience for many different Insurer types including the following.

  1. Property and Casualty insurance
    This includes insurers who provide auto, home, umbrella, renter’s, watercraft, and other coverage for both commercial and personal lines.
  2. Life insurance
    This includes insurers who provide term life insurance, whole life insurance, universal life insurance, and annuities.
  3. Health insurance
  4. Worker’s compensation insurance
  5. Reinsurance

Common Use Cases for Insurers

Insurers that set themselves up as digital enterprises can differentiate themselves from, and gain advantage over, their competition by providing an exceptional customer experience to all their stakeholders – policyholders, partners, employees, and agents.

In almost all of our insurance customers, we helped them implement 3 or more use cases, and in many of them, there were 5 or more use cases.

XTIVIA has helped many Insurers to leverage the power of the Liferay Digital Experience Platform to transform their digital presence across a number of use cases. The following eleven use cases represent our most common applications of Liferay software in the insurance sector. These business use cases can help you visualize how Liferay applies to the Insurance industry to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

  1. Policyholder Portal
  2. Agent and Broker Portal
  3. Underwriter Portal
  4. Policyholder (or Member) Mobile App
  5. Member Portal
  6. Provider Portal
  7. Employer Portal (aka Group Portal)
  8. Customer Service Department Portal
  9. Claims Portal
  10. Digital Workplace Portal
  11. Websites

1. Policyholder Portal

A policyholder, or insured, portal provides self-service support for customers, including viewing account information, downloading policy documents, paying bills, filing claims, making policy changes, viewing and responding to secure messages, and much more. This empowers policyholders to get things done faster without having to call their agent or a call center, and without being limited to certain days of the week or work hours. By providing these self-service capabilities, insurers can reduce operational costs and improve support for employees.

Policyholder portals often deliver a seamless experience that hides a complex set of core operational systems including policy management, claims management, billing, ratings, electronic content management, and more. In our experience with property and casualty and worker’s compensation insurers, we have integrated with Guidewire, Duck Creek, PowerSuite, mainframe, and other core systems.

As examples, West Bend Mutual Insurance (property and casualty) and Copperpoint Mutual Insurance (workers’ compensation) are XTIVIA customers that leveraged the power of Liferay DXP to deliver policyholder portals, along with other use cases.

2. Agent and Broker Portal

Agent and Broker Portals are key to the success of many insurers that sell their products through independent and/or captive agents. They can be used to enhance agent experiences, deliver targeted information and incentives, and improve their productivity in key processes such as quote generation, application submission, policy changes, and customer service. An exceptional experience can help build agent loyalty, especially when working with independent agents.

Similar to Policyholder portals, agent and broker portals usually integrate a number of back-end systems and processes.

As examples, we have built agent experiences for Midland National and North American Life (life insurance), West Bend (property and casualty), and Copperpoint (workers’ compensation) among others. Additionally, we have built broker portals for health insurers, like Excellus BCBS and Regence BCBS, as well as workers’ compensation insurers.

agent portal quote generation
Figure 2: Agent Portal (Quote Generation)

3. Underwriter Portal

An Underwriter Portal allows an insurer’s underwriting team become more efficient in their operations by bringing together disparate data sets and functionality from multiple systems into a unified, exceptional User Experience. At XTIVIA, we have built these portals for insurers from the property and casualty, workers’ compensation, and reinsurance domains.

4. Policyholder Mobile App

With the need to serve policyholders whenever and wherever they want, a policyholder or insured mobile app provides the same self-service support for customers on mobile phones and tablets as the policyholder portal. Additionally, an app might provide some features that take advantage of mobile device capabilities, such as offline support for auto ID cards or member ID cards, camera and GPS for auto claim-related photos and location, face ID and touch ID for authentication.

As examples, we have built a policyholder mobile app for West Bend Mutual Insurance (property and casualty) and a member app for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama (health insurance).

insured mobile app policy summary
Figure 3: Insured Mobile App (Policy Summary)

5. Member Portal

Health Insurers often create member portals to serve their health plan members and enable self-service capabilities. Some forward-looking insurers turn their member portals into member engagement platforms by providing personalized wellness content and rewards programs. XTIVIA has worked with a number of health insurers including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, Regence, and Excellus.

6. Provider Portal

A Provider Portal enables health insurers to serve medical (and possibly dental) providers, enabling self-service functionality, such as member verification, benefits verification, claims, billing, pre-authorizations, and more.

7. Employer Portal (aka Group Portal)

An Employer Portal (aka Group Portal) enables employer groups to self-serve using functionality such as online enrollment, contract maintenance, benefit inquiries, reports, premium payment, and more.

XTIVIA has built provider and employer portals on Liferay for many of our health insurance customers.

8. Customer Service Department Portal

A Customer Service Department Portal, or a Call Center Portal, enables insurers to optimize their customer service operations by aggregating various tools and information into a single, unified portal. Such a portal can provide a knowledge base (like the one we implemented for BCBS Alabama), aggregate a performance dashboard, and enable customer service functionality, among other things.

9. Claims Portal

A Claims Portal allows the claims team and the customer service team at an insurer become more efficient in their operations by giving them a single, unified view into claims management processes. At XTIVIA, we have built these portals for insurers from the property and casualty and health insurance domains.

10. Digital Workplace

A common use case of Liferay is the creation of productivity-boosting company intranets and collaboration tools in order to create a helpful digital workplace for employees. Every enterprise can benefit from the advantages that such a workplace brings – increased employee efficiency, greater agility, and increased customer satisfaction through empowered employees. In cases where an Insurer has multiple lines of business and/or an international presence, or has recently gone through a merger or acquisition, a digital workplace portal can be invaluable in unifying different business units and geographies and improving the speed and effectiveness of employee tasks. It also supports cultural integration post-merger.

As an example, XTIVIA worked with Maiden Reinsurance to tie together the holding company and its multiple subsidiaries using a portal that provided employees with a personalized experience of various tools and information to simplify their everyday life.

11. Exceptional Websites

Liferay can be used not only to create logged-in, role-based portals but is frequently used to create websites for unauthenticated users. Many of our insurance customers leverage Liferay to consolidate their digital presence, combining content, applications, and personalization, while balancing form with function to deliver an exceptional experience to anonymous users. In some cases, it makes sense to create a single, unified website, and in others, it makes sense to separate out the websites by audiences such as prospects, members, providers, employers, Medicare, and brokers for a health insurer.

As an example, a health insurer may allow prospective members to shop for a health insurance plan and enroll in one when they find the right one. Similarly, a property and casualty insurer’s website could allow a prospect to generate a quote and apply for insurance.

Summary

CTA XTIVIA Liferay ServicesInsurers that innovate using digital technologies to deliver an exceptional experience to their customers, partners, and employees are likely to stand out against their competitors. While this article focused on how XTIVIA has helped insurers implement Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to transform the top experience layer, we have also enabled them on various other technology fronts – API-led connectivity, seamless integration, cloud, devops, data-driven intelligence and much more.

If you are part of an insurer that is getting ready to launch an exceptional experience initiative for your enterprise, we can help not only with strategy but also with a successful implementation approach that delivers superior quality results.

If you have questions on how you can best leverage Liferay DXP and/or need help with your Liferay DXP implementation, please engage with us via comments on this blog post, or reach out to us.

Additional Reading

You may also want to read some other perspectives from my fellow XTIVIANs and yours truly –

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