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The Insurance sector had to undergo tremendous changes over the last few years, perhaps more than any other industry. The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns had forced Insurance organizations to rethink how they run their businesses, as they simply cannot operate as they have in the past.
According to an Ernst & Young report, the long, slow decline of the traditional insurance agency model will continue. China, which is already among the most digitally advanced markets, will see rapid innovation and sophisticated hybrid insurance strategies. Laggards in the industry, however, will remain product-centric in their thinking and approach. For example, they will be most vulnerable to losing customers to the financial offerings of tech giants or InsurTechs, which are poised to lead the charge in the subscription revolution by offering more flexible insurance products and enabling frequent and effective customer interactions
Insurance executives are now recognizing the power of innovation to accelerate the pace of organizational change. They appreciate the role innovation will play in delivering long-term value. Data from a McKinsey survey shows that while insurance executive teams focused on short-term cash management and the welfare of their workforce at the peak of the pandemic, innovation now ranks as one of their top two priorities.
Fig. 1 Innovation outcomes through crisis
As per McKinsey research, the innovation performance curve depicted below shows, companies that master the innovation essentials enjoy a substantial improvement in economic-profit performance. To put this in perspective, the Insurance Market size was valued at USD 4.47 Trillion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 224.34 Trillion by 2028 , growing at a CAGR of 63.13% from 2021 to 2028.
Fig.2: Innovation Potential
Innovation can be as simple as changing a form to check out a customer five minutes faster or as complex as deploying Artificial Intelligence algorithms for processing customer claims at scale . Any development, simple or complex, that lead to improvements in business outcomes and customer experiences are insurance innovations.
The history of insurance product innovation is a history of human trade and development. The earliest policies largely covered losses by merchants going through foreign lands, enabling them to share the risk of trade. Life insurance, accident, and health insurance, and now everything from business interruption insurance to cyber insurance, reflect innovations developed by insurers.
Yet for innovation to deliver long-term value, it must become embedded in the organizations’ DNA!
While billions of dollars can be invested on innovation, an employees’ innovative work behavior plays a key role in generating innovation. Organizational climate affects employees’ innovative work behavior both directly and indirectly through the organization’s openness to innovation.
Fig 3: The Innovation Process
The innovation process depicted above (source: Deloitte) shows how ideation is the very foundation for realizing the innovation goals. While leadership involvement is essential for creation of the vison and strategy, the involvement of all down the ranks is of utmost importance.
Therefore, empowerment of Insurance workers to engage in innovation behavior is desired as it is regarded as a way of getting more for less money.
Empowering the employees to encourage innovation:
With the advent of digital technologies, Insurance organizations can now access better tools to empower their employees, particularly for permeating the culture of innovation. One of the essential criteria for this empowerment is to have a platform that is democratic and encourages every employee to contribute to this culture of innovation.
In comes the TCS iON Digital Learning platform! A platform that has the capability to not only accelerate the innovation culture through its holistic offering, but also to build the skills of the Insurance employees that will make this culture self-sustainable.
Imagine a platform that every Insurance employee can have access to, anytime, anywhere and can share, post, like, vote, discuss and learn anything! With the right motivation and incentivization through the learning services of TCS iON, this can potentially transform the work that they do. A frontline employee is closer to the moment of truth that a customer experiences and every idea of improving this experience must be captured. If an organization can leverage this power of bottom-up innovation, it surely can multiply its economic performance.
About TCS iON Digital Learning Platform.
The TCS iON Digital Learning platform combines the power of Collaboration and Communication with the Learning Management System (LMS) to facilitate social and experiential learning for improved learner outcome. The learning services support a collaborative and holistic model to enrich participatory learning and sharing by offering content gamification, course delivery, assessment, reports, and other learning opportunities in a secure, community delivery mode.
Community based Idea generation and Learning: According to the 70:20:10 principle of learning, 20% of total learning in an ecosystem happens through peer learning.
The platform provides a collaborative layer called Communities on top of the Learning platform to promote peer powered learning and sharing. The key idea behind the proposed technology is to promote idea generation through collaboration and communication among peers, mentors, supervisors and experts. Communities in other words can be defined as a cohort of users interacting for a defined purpose using different enablers and tools like –
1. Blogposts, Bytes (microblog) and Idea sharing features
2. File sharing
3. Questions/answers
4. Debates and Polls
5. Surveys
6. Video Casts, Pod Casts, Notice boards – community wise, Email and SMS broad cast, Announcements
7. Live Conference
8. Cross Talk (Live Chat functionality)
These community-based features and enablers can be used by the insurance employees to log every idea that they may stumble upon.
Learning Services to drive innovation agenda: Value added consulting and learning services provided by TCS iON Talent Development Center will be help in driving employee engagement and better innovation outcomes. These services include:
• The platform with multiple learning modalities for diverse learner needs
• Content services that include curation, creation and gamification
• Advisory services to craft solutions using design thinking and real time analytics
The TDC team can work with the insurance organization’s team and enable the innovation agenda and objectives that it has set for itself.
One-stop-Shop: TCS iON iDL follows an Open Architecture. The platform enables APIs for reading/writing of data, and SSO support for SAML2. Which means that it can be easily integrated with multiple platforms, thereby allowing users to log into one platform to access all the relevant content needed for on-the-job support and skilling needs. What’s more, through gamification and game based learning experiences we can make the platform more engaging than usual learning systems. Hence an organization can use this both as an innovation hub and as a skilling hub.
Fig 4 : Sample theme-based communities
Fig 5 : Ideas posted on communities
Innovation Hub: Insurance organizations can use this platform as an Innovation Hub for its employees. The Platform Admin can create user-based communities to run initiatives like Ideathon which can be theme based, department based, region based or for any other categories that may be necessary. Users can interact with each other, share queries, ideas, etc. by using all the features and enablers listed above. The community feature can be used to meet any type of Virtual Collaboration like conducting virtual events, conferences etc. The TDC Consultants can stitch all this together as services, to create the ecosystem for the Innovation Hub
Ideathon as a service:
TCS iON platform allows for modular features and solutions, therefore the Ideathon platform can be deployed as an independent module. To ensure the Ideathon initiatives are a success, the following services can be supported by the TCS iON TDC Consultants.
Fig 6 : Ideas posted on communities
- Event Design: Conceptualizing the entire initiative and sub-themes. Connecting with stakeholders and users to understand organizational culture, preferences, challenges and customizing the design
- Creation of communication collaterals: Banners for branding, mailers, theme-based artefacts to ensure clarity and high user engagement
- Creation of communities: : Independent communities on the platform will be created for departments, geographies or programs depending upon the requirements. These communities will have its own branding, access controls, membership etc.
- Moderation of discussion threads: To ensure cadence, consultants along with the SMEs/Leaders can moderate discussion threads. This may include query resolution, networking guidance, privacy and compliance related review
- Participation tracking and cadence: To ensure engagement and high participation by all, leaderboards, reminder mailers, nudges will be rolled out regularly
- Reports and governance : Customization of status reports based on themes, geographies or business units will be done and circulated to all stakeholders as per agreed frequency. Brainstorming and course corrections to be done as per feedback received for better governance
- Gamification: The GAMELab offering of this platform enables immersive, engaging and interactive learning experience for the user by allowing the administrators to create game based and gamified learning content very quickly by providing easy to use game cartridges. This is the most preferred form of engagement and learning in this industry as close to life simulations are important for success.
The ideathon interface can be customized as per the requirements and dashboards and analytics can be enabled to track and measure cadence.
Fig 7: A sample user journey for a theme based Ideathon
Analytics & Insights: It is important for any organization to have good data inputs to ensure that the ideas generated can be administered, reviewed or analyzed at any point of time. The Report and Communication module of the platform enables on demand reports so that organizations can get the slices and dices of data they need to take decisions.
Fig 8: Sample Reports that can capture the ideas shared by an employee
Fig 9: Sample Reports that can be customized to specific activities
Anywhere, anytime access: : In the current environment employees are looking for a flexible platform which is device agnostic and easy to access. In addition, offline access and learning is also a requirement in some locations. The iDL platform provides the benefits of being available on any device and also has an offline access and learning feature. So, when a insurance employee is out in the field and decides to share an innovative idea, she just has to use her mobile to access the platform and share. She can also use any idle time available to review others posts or learn something new.
Help & Support: The platform comes with a Help Desk and Chatbot which enable Instant help for any query. This enables better experience of using the platform with 24*7 available assistant, especially relevant for the insurance sector where learning may not happen in usual working hours.
Fig 10: Smart Chatbot in iDL
While the insurance industry as a whole has delivered pockets of innovation, few carriers have pursued innovation in a systemic way.
Right now, the Insurance sector is facing many large challenges, such as stringent regulations, privacy concerns, steeply rising costs, and talent churn. Insurance organizations and professionals are turning to new technologies and informatics that will lead to innovation and develop smarter types of Insurance delivery. For sustainable growth, they are embedding innovation in the company’s growth models and organization’s culture.
A platform like TCS iON Digital learning platform can help Insurance organizations infuse a culture of innovation among its employees and gain the competitive edge that is necessary today!!