How Business Intelligence is Helping Insurance Industry
Business Intelligence (BI) can be defined as a tool that uses procedural and technical infrastructure to collect, store and analyze data generated by a company’s activities and presents it in actionable forms like dashboards, reports, charts & more which can be used by an organization to make strategic and tactical business decisions.
BI includes a variety of tools, applications and techniques that can empower companies to gather and collate information and data from various sources and use it for data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking & descriptive analysis and present this processed data in simple, easy, actionable reports, performance measures and trends for the management.
This intelligence and tools are essential for any industry and business sector including the insurance sector. BI is the tool that is important for taking informed business decisions to sustain and enhance the business in today’s competitive landscape.
Insurance companies look at several areas like sales, distribution, claims, operations, underwriting, marketing, finance, and actuarial business. Using BI in a planned manner and executing its tools in the right way can help in delivering the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to take the best possible business decisions.
1. Enhanced decision-making capabilities: Today, companies track and analyze KPIs and business metrics from several data feeds. BI helps in accelerating and improving business decisions by giving a very comprehensive view of the business data and by generating visual insights offering a better and enhanced understanding of the data available.
BI monitors performance and can generate results in a visual format to give a better understanding for making informed decisions. It highlights business trends and can identify potential KPIs to be tracked.
2. Better organizational efficiency: Efficiency can get impacted when the data is analyzed manually to generate reports. With data streams getting generated in various formats, the probability for error increases resulting in a lag in reporting, which ultimately results in impacting the decision-making process.
Using BI, the data is sorted, processed, and analyzed & visual reports are generated faster giving better insights for taking decisions and generally increasing efficiency.
3. Productivity: Using business intelligence companies can reduce or eliminate bottlenecks, daily tasks can be automated, business processes can be refined and generally have better organization. Using the processed data, the management can take decisions based on the reports generated and direct teams for increasing productivity.
4. Reporting: Companies can use BI to track KPIs for sales, operations, and finance by using customized reports generated from various data streams. BI generates accurate reports which include visual reports that are generated in real-time using and collating various data streams. Insurance companies can utilize these reports to make faster decisions. Real-Time reports give a detailed account and variables can be added or removed to gain better insight.
5. Identifying trends and patterns: Business intelligence can assist in making informed decisions based on data analytics. The technology uses data analytics and assists companies in spotting trends and patterns that can be used to optimize the use of resources and processes.
6. Sales and marketing: Customer retention and the development of new customers is the goal of any business. Using BI and tracking the trends and patterns, sales and marketing teams can get a detailed analysis of customer profiles who make significant regular purchases and which kind of profiles can be targeted for increasing sales. Sales and marketing teams can track and evaluate promotional activities and also determine which campaigns work well using BI. Such reporting helps companies make decisions on budget allocation, and plan sales pitches and campaigns to achieve higher sales and increase revenue.
7. Upgraded customer experience: To ensure that the customers have an improved experience, the data that is collected from different sources like user behavior, purchase history, customer surveys, chat histories etc. is used to gain an understanding of the requirements of the customer. The insights given by the visual representation of such data can help an organization provide better service while improving and upgrading the customer experience.
8. Performance and revenue: Companies focus on increasing their performance to generate higher revenue. Business intelligence can be used to further this goal and it gives organizations the tool to increase their revenue through performance. BI gives critical insights into customers’ behavior which helps in determining marketing strategy for increasing sales. It also helps in identifying areas where costs can be pared. By collating different data streams and reducing data redundancy, BI reduces costly inefficiencies and increases productivity helping translate data for optimizing profits.
9. Removing guesswork: Earlier companies did not have access to complete data and collating data sometimes led to human error and resulted in some guesswork or approximation for making decisions. The use of BI eliminates these issues by collating the big data to generate reports that help eliminate the guesswork or approximation in decision making while increasing the competitive advantage.
Data management is tricky and has to be extrapolated in the right way to extract meaningful, usable & actionable reports. Software firms having an operational understanding of the insurance business can be used for developing BI in insurance which can include dashboard development, data visualization, data migration, etc to give the insurance company complete insights for better business management and generating more business.
