Why It’s Time to Automate Your Customer Onboarding

The Benefits of Automated Customer Onboarding for Insurance Companies
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With stiff competition in the insurance industry, customer expectations are higher than ever, therefore, it comes as no surprise that a simple and seamless customer onboarding experience is an aspect of the customer journey that is worth investment. It is especially important for insurers, as customer relations is a major pillar of their business.

Customer onboarding times continue to increase despite insurer’s best efforts to streamline the process. Over 90% of customers think that companies “could do better” when it comes to onboarding new clients. A solution to these problems may lie in transforming customer onboarding by leveraging the power of data integration and Business Process Automation (BPA).
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Core Operational Challenges in Onboarding  

Traditional onboarding processes are usually time-consuming and can involve multiple systems and departments within the company including compliance, risk management, claims, underwriting, and others. This means that the onboarding process can take up to several weeks to complete, resulting in frustrated and dissatisfied customers. This can be extremely detrimental as customer onboarding affects client loyalty, referrals, and profitability.

Although insurers continue to make improvements to their onboarding process, the results often still leave much to be desired, as several obstacles make customer onboarding initiatives ineffective.
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Siloed Data and Departments

Onboarding can be considerably time-consuming as insurers transfer data between siloed departments via fax, email, PDFs, and by shuttling paper between branches. These manual processes can result in longer executions and slower customer service. Not to mention the potential to leave customers confused or frustrated as to why they are having to provide the same information multiple times to different departments.  
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Data Overload

Traditional onboarding processes usually involve the management of countless documents. The same documents need to be processed several times by different departments at various stages of the onboarding process. This can lead to multiple errors and omissions of client data that are time-consuming to fix, and if left unresolved, can have a detrimental effect on the operational efficiency and performance of the company, and ultimately customer satisfaction.
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Dated Legacy Systems

Many insurers still use dated legacy systems that make it difficult to provide customers with a smooth end-to-end experience and create problems for maintaining and updating the data across all systems. Customers often endure symptoms of the challenges insurers face behind the scenes, resulting in a negative customer experience and poor customer satisfaction.
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Automation As an Onboarding Enabler  

When insurers begin to consider how to improve their onboarding process, automation most often comes to mind. BPA can help insurance companies reduce costs, reduce errors, and speed up the onboarding process. This is particularly vital as insurers face pressure from emerging Insurtech companies as well as evolving customer expectations when it comes to interacting with modern insurance companies.

Insurers that choose to go down the BPA route can drastically improve their customer onboarding efficiency and shorten the time it takes to onboard each customer. This means that insurers can successfully onboard more clients faster and don’t miss new opportunities due to obstacles with manual processes. Increased speed and accuracy are not the only benefits of BPA that insurance companies can expect. Other benefits include:
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• Improved regulatory compliance results in a significantly lower risk of fines
• Enhanced customer experiences and higher customer satisfaction and customer retention rates
• Increased accuracy of data processing removes the need to repeat the same steps within a process
• Better analysis of the onboarding process helps to identify and get rid of bottlenecks that were unnoticed before  

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Solving Onboarding Challenges with Synatic

Synatic’s Nimble, Simple, and Powerful Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) allows insurance companies to de-silo their systems, enabling departments to get the right data, to the right person, at the right time. From core policy management tools to identity verification and compliance, insurers will be able to establish a central platform that can easily make data visible to all departments. With the data in a central location, Synatic can effortlessly build workflows that can be automated to speed up the onboarding process and eliminate needless delays. Additionally, customers will no longer need to repeat information previously shared with other departments within the business.

Gone are the days of physical paperwork and re-keying client information. By using Synatic, insurers can automate this process and trigger flows to feed client data directly into the back-end of their bespoke systems, eliminating error-prone data, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks. With an improved data management process insurance companies can offer a smoother and more efficient onboarding process.

Synatic can help insurers that still use traditional paper-based onboarding and expedite the entire process. The HIP can machine-read and auto-populate data into a digital form via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Super Mapping features. This will allow insurers to feed any supporting documents from clients safely and securely, saving insurance companies and their clients valuable time.

It’s clear that data lies at the heart of many key insurance customer onboarding processes. However, for far too many insurers, this data lies trapped in silos across the company. With data locked in archaic legacy systems, how can leaders hope to make sense of their data and automate business processes?  Synatic’s HIP empowers insurers to automate various operations in customer onboarding to stay competitive and offer a seamless customer experience. If you want to learn more about how you can save time, save money, and improve the customer onboarding experience contact Synatic today.    

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