Customer experience (CX) is just about the lifeblood of virtually every industry in the world. Carriers that once sidelined it in support of other internal facets of their business have come to understand that positive and expedient customer interaction is integral to maintaining customer relationships and building brand new ones. While there are a myriad of methods to accomplish this, a simple yet often underrated way to overhaul CX would be to move from paper forms to electronic smart forms. Not simply a cosmetic improvement, it is very good at both reducing internal inefficiencies and improving relationships with policyholders.
Consumers — especially millennials — have grown to be accustomed to real-time, above-and-beyond customer service from companies like Amazon and Apple. They prefer to do business with organizations that provide a comparable or superior experience, and insurance coverage is no exception. New entrants like Lemonade attract a millennial consumer base because of their transparency and simple communication. An essential part of that is standardizing and digitizing forms so they don't become a burden on either the carrier or even the consumer, especially with regard to claims.
What would be the biggest benefits to moving from legacy forms to new templates or web-based smart forms? We break them down here:
Smart Forms Eliminate Costly Errors: Insurers face a major problem for the reason that most mistakes are human errors. Handwriting can be hard to see from both colleagues and policyholders. This can lead to misinformation that may have severe implications months, or perhaps years, down the road if a claim happens. Another issue is missing information and supplemental forms which are required based on previous responses that never get filled out. Additionally, errors frequently occur on physical forms because consumers aren't pointed to their mistakes until the forms are already submitted. Insurance forms are often complex and confusing and therefore are difficult to fill out correctly without correct guidance. Oftentimes, there are certain non-obvious questions that just apply to specific applicants.
These errors can result in wasted time and resources for carriers who need to decipher illegible handwriting, correct errors or request missing information before submitting the form. One carrier we spoken with said that errors are extremely common that it takes 2 to 3 weeks to obtain via a procedure that requires Half an hour once automated. This delay could be deadly when it comes to new business acquisition, as consumers don't want to wait that long. A digital form can alleviate the issue immediately by guiding the customer through the completion process, such as indicating where information needs to be entered, prompting to acquire more information based on previous responses or catching unsigned documents.
For example, GroupHEALTH Benefits Solutions, any adverse health benefits solution provider, saw a significant improvement if this switched from paper to smart forms. Their original paper-based method was error-prone, and employees had to take lots of time to research and resolve missing or conflicting information. The company realized it might improve enrollee experiences and cut costs by implementing digital transformation techniques for example automation and intelligence through smart forms. When the implementation happened, there was a near-immediate ROI. The brand new online enrollment process ended up reducing errors, which helped the organization concentrate on providing excellent CX.
Confusing Forms Can result in Customer Drop-Off: While errors on paper forms can waste significant time and resources for any carrier, the forms can also leave customers angry, frustrated and prepared to give their business to some competitor. According to Ernst & Young’s Global Insurance Consumer Survey of 24,000 individuals 30 countries, 40% of customers made insurer in the past 1 . 5 years. The most interesting finding was that respondents in The united states placed “ease of doing business by having an insurer” (60%) weight loss important even than “value for money” (53%) – especially in P&C insurance. Respondents said that, since there were often very few opportunities for carriers to interact with their customers, each touch point became critical to their look at the organization.
Consider then, the importance of forms, which are the primary source of collecting data between carriers and policyholders. Smart forms create a system that enables only the correct information to show once a real question is answered, whittling information down to only what that specific customer must know and fill out. At GroupHEALTH, as an example, enrollees would mistakenly assume their company plans included coverage not offered by their employers. This confusion led to customers completing unnecessary forms and back-and-forth that ate up time and resources and increased frustration levels. After the change to smart forms, however, the machine would automatically prompt enrollees to provide missing information, noticed inconsistencies and flagged missing information. It had been a runaway success, with GroupHEALTH estimating that, in just the very first 8 weeks, it reduced the cost to handle enrollments by 20% to 25% — just from switching to an online-based method.
Digital Forms Help Employees, Too: When there are fewer errors, customers are happier (of course), but so are employees. For every mistake on the manual form, an employee must take time to correct it, send it back and re-process it. This cuts time from providing an excellent customer experience, replacing it with tedious correction work. When an online-based forms procedure is implemented, workers are able to take more time on sales and customer support, rather than dealing with the mundane tasks related to monitoring forms and fixing incorrect ones. Online forms offer real-time customer access to policy details, billing, claims and beneficiary information. All of these are as important towards the employees regarding the customers simply because they create an atmosphere of efficiency and transparency.
Making changes in the ground level with digital documents might appear to be a small step toward providing exceptional customer service in a sea of emerging technologies, but it is also essential to the health of a carrier's main point here.
