The COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed customer needs and expectations, compelling insurance companies to adapt digital transformation solutions for ensuring business continuity and streamlining operations.

With the world becoming digital-first, insurance companies are increasingly depending on digital platforms to engage with the customers for designing customizable products, managing claims/policies or carrying out timely customer issue resolutions to drive exceptional customer experience and service across touchpoints. Overhauling their legacy core IT infrastructure and adopting cloud-based solutions has become a must for insurance companies to reap the benefits of total experience.

According to Gartner, the three drivers to map if legacy transformation is required are business fit, business value and agility. If the legacy application does not meet the new requirements imposed by digital business, it needs to be modernized to fit properly, and should be upgraded to provide greater business value.

In this blog, we will discuss the top 5 reasons why insurance companies need a legacy system transformation to unlock growth in a post pandemic world.

1. Reduce Operational Costs

Most companies in the insurance sector are typically dependent on legacy software for end-to-end policy administration and management of key financial data. Legacy systems act as a roadblock to an insurance company’s digital transformation initiatives, as it is difficult to integrate the latest tools and technologies with their outdated infrastructure. Deploying custom APIs and enhancements on these legacy systems is not only time consuming but can also be expensive.

By implementing state-of-the-art digital platforms which can include embracing Cloud solutions, insurance companies can develop a roadmap to transition from their legacy systems in a more seamless manner, thus enabling more cost effectiveness.

Espire helped a leading London-based insurance company carry out a legacy transformation by deploying a scalable cloud-based crystallisation system to drive process automation and reduce operational costs. Read more

2. Deliver Impeccable Customer Experience

'Customer is the king', the common catchphrase of business world has proved to be the absolute truth in the post pandemic world. With the burgeoning growth of insurtech startups, driving personalized customer experience across touchpoints has become the key differentiator for insurance companies to build customer loyalty. Legacy systems and processes change challenges, do not readily support the latest DXP platforms and hamper the CX delivery with a slow time to market.

With latest digital experience platforms that address customer journey mapping, digital content management and personalization, insurance companies can mitigate the problem of distorted digital experience and deliver contextual customer communication across multiple touchpoints at scale.

This success story showcases how Espire leveraged Sitecore to deploy marketing automation to drive personalized & contextual experiences to customers across touchpoints. We carried out effective customer journey mapping providing a 360-degree view of the customer, put in place persona driven marketing campaigns with custom predefined goals to drive greater customer acquisition and retention. Read the complete case study here>

3. Mitigate Data Security Threats

Legacy systems can also be prone to potential security threats, where updates are not timely or indeed challenging to address. These risks in a highly regulated market and indeed with access to so much data can pose a huge challenge for insurance companies.

To address this, it is paramount to have security monitoring, regular cloud security maintenance and timely security testing with assessment and review.

4. Enhance Employee Experience

Mckinsey & Company states that businesses with modernized IT are substantially more productive than their peers with legacy IT systems-for example, the total number of policies processed is more than 40 percent higher.

By overhauling the legacy systems with the latest digital workplace solutions, brands in the insurance sector can improve workflow mechanisms with easy access to information- eliminating duplication and fostering greater collaboration between departments, which will not only improve productivity but also result in enhanced employee experiences across enterprise functions. For example, setting up a central document repository, maybe hosted on the cloud, to be shared between different departments like claims, policy, customer services for seamless access anytime anywhere.

5 Improve the Time to Market

As opposed to the legacy system, state-of-the-art modern IT core systems can easily integrate with modern tools and technologies to support end-to-end insurance processes like automated document generation and premium calculations, delivering relevant & contextual customer communications across touchpoints and much more, which improves the time to market and reduces churn rate.

As per Gartner, by 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use total experience to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels.

In conclusion, companies in the insurance sector should adopt Total Experience solutions to craft impeccable customer experience, business experience and employee experience to bolster growth in the new normal.

As a Digital Transformation leader, Espire is helping leading insurance companies in their legacy transformation journey by deploying modern and scalable technology architectures to meet the ever-changing demands of the customers and stay ahead of the competition. To know more about our service offerings, visit > https:// www.espire.com/industries/insurance or get in touch with us at marketing@espire.com