For underwriters, staying on top of the vast number of tasks associated with managing policies can be overwhelming. Finding a digital solution to streamline your workflow can be extremely difficult, especially because everyone’s job is so unique. The day-to-day business of a claims manager and an underwriter, for instance, may involve vastly different tasks.
Some tasks could be handled by the customer, but they don’t have the tools to do so. Ensuring the data they enter integrates with your system poses other challenges.
But the right policy management solution can check off all of these boxes in a single stroke. Here’s what policy management involves, how you can use an insurance policy administration system to organize and streamline your workflows, and even provide self-service options for clients.
What Is Policy Management?
Policy management involves administering and overseeing an insurance policy throughout its entire lifecycle. In other words, from when it’s issued to when it’s either renewed or terminated, you can use policy management to simplify and automate policy details, changes, and analysis.
What Can You Do with Policy Management Software?
Using a policy management solution, you can put policy details and data at your fingertips, make adjustments, and better serve customers. At the same time, you give customers a portal they can use to make changes and get policy info on their own.
Manage the Policy Lifecycle
With policy management software, you can initiate new policies, make adjustments, process renewals, and show clients different pricing and coverage options.
For example, you can combine different kinds of coverage and instantly see how these impact the premium a new client may have to pay. You also have tools that make it easier to consider the client's unique risk factors, cutting down on the time it takes to provide them with an accurate quote that doesn’t over-expose your organization to excess risk.
For instance, let’s say you’re processing a renewal. With our policy solution, on a single screen you can see:
- How long a policy has been active
- The difference between the premium the client would be paying this time around in comparison to what they paid in the previous year
- The total renewal premium
- Policy data, such as name, policy number, status, effective and termination dates, limits, and more
If, for example, a client has expressed a concern over how much they’ll have to pay in premiums, you can make adjustments to their coverage to demonstrate a few different scenarios. In a conversation about their coverage options, you instantly see how each package impacts their premiums.
You can also, in a few clicks, generate reports that present the options they have and how they would impact their premium payments.
Provide a Self-service Portal for Clients
Those you insure may already be using digitized, transparent, straightforward processes when it comes to banking, shopping, and other daily activities. The best insurance policy administration systems enable clients to access and adjust their policy information quickly and easily.
An insurance policy admin system also makes it far easier for you to collect important data from customers by giving you customizable questionnaires you can have them fill out. The data they enter is then automatically integrated into your system.
To illustrate, suppose a construction company is bidding on a large project where they would add a new wing to the city’s administration building. The city, eager to limit its risk requires each bidder to present the following information:
- The name of their insurance company
- Certificates proving the kind of coverage they have
- Their policy limits
- The length of time they’d had coverage
- The name of an agent they can contact for verification
Traditionally, getting this information and the documents to prove it may take several phone calls or emails, as well as considerable work on your end to provide the data the town needs to see. All the while, the bid deadline is approaching.
But with a policy management solution, the company can simply log in and grab all of this information themselves. What may have taken a few days takes just a few minutes.
Enable Simple Reporting and Analysis
An insurance policy administration system also makes it easier to run reports and analyze policy data to make more informed decisions.
For example, suppose you’re trying to evaluate your profitability over the previous year as you strategize your premium amounts for the upcoming year. To do this, you need to identify the kinds of clients that have the biggest impact—positive or negative—on your profit margin.
Using your policy administration software, you can run reports on the loss ratios of all of your clients. You could then organize the reports according to industry, geographical region, or other factors, to see how they compare. Walking into a meeting about your premium adjustment strategy, you have all the data you need to explain what you think the best strategy would be. You can also digitally distribute your data to other stakeholders, making it easier for them to understand your analysis.
With Ventiv Policy, you get a fully integrated administration solution and customer-facing portal. You can use it to gather and analyze data, make better decisions, and save time and money. Clients can see and adjust their policy info and also track the status of pending tasks. Chat with an expert to see how is right for your organization.
