Insurance Industry Trends: 4 Tips to Improve Productivity

Key takeaways

• OKRs eliminate all unnecessary things and focus on what truly matters.
• If you’re planning on introducing new insurance products, Scrum is what you need.
• Let technology help you automate policies, claims and reporting.

Have you ever dreamed of being in two places at once, having more time in a day or increased capacity? We feel you.

Hence in this article, we’ll share the best recipes to help you and your team improve productivity and stay ahead of the insurance game.

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1. Incorporate OKRs into your insurance operations

OKRs is the famous framework from the 70s focused on smart planning and execution. The abbreviation stands for objectives and key results, and you can plan those on a quarterly or annual basis. OKRs are more critical than KPIs; they make you think about ambitious goals to reach first of all on a company level, and only then on the level of departments and individuals.

Many famous companies like Intel and Google incorporated OKRs, they also perfectly suit other organisational types, including startups or SMEs. At Cloud Insurance, we also use this framework. It helps to eliminate all unnecessary things and focus on what truly matters.

So start with the company objectives first. Make them aspirational, qualitative and time-bound. Maybe you want to grow your insurance business globally or improve customer satisfaction in 2021? Those are good objectives! And each of those will have several key results (ideally 3-4) to measure. Thus your key results must be quantitative and value-based.

Examples of the key results for the geography-related goal:

• Hit company global sales target of $10 Million in Sales
• Achieve 90% year-to-year sales growth in the EMEA
• Increase the company average deal size by 40%
• Reduce churn to less than 6% annually

Examples of the key results for the customer-related goal:

• Get feedback from 20 customers per month
• Achieve an NPS of 10 from our customers
• Increase customer retention to 98%

Once you have company OKRs in place, ask your team to define those on the department levels. It’s essential to have company OKRs as a basis, then everyone is aligned and has a clear understanding of their impact on the overall performance. Next step is defining what needs to happen to achieve OKRs (activities) and review the progress (insights).

2. Apply Scrum principles and process flow

If you’re planning on introducing new insurance products, Scrum is what you need. The framework focuses on increasing the productivity of teams while reducing wastes and redundant activities.

New insurance product launch requires successful collaboration of multiple teams – Underwriting, New Business, Marketing, Compliance, Distribution, etc. Hence in Scrum, these teams work in parallel and according to the principles of Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect, Openness.

In the SCRUM framework, all activities to implement the requirements of the new insurance product happen during Sprints. Those are always short, usually between 2 to 4 weeks.

Prominent roles in Scrum:

• Scrum Master, comfortable in both Insurance and IT, facilitates the formation of the team, guides them during the planning phase, helps them during issue resolution, coordinates inter Scrum team dependencies and provides any other support needed.
• Product Owner represents a business. He provides the prioritised requirements to the Scrum Team and helps them with any issue resolution related to business.
• Scrum Team: 5-7 member cross-functional team which is responsible for delivering the solution. A robust and self-managing team is the core of the success of a Scrum project.

There are five Scrum events:

• Scrum Backlog Refinement Meeting to manage and prioritise all of the known requirements of a new insurance project.

• Sprint Planning Meeting to determine all the tasks the team is going to implement until the end of this Sprint.

• Daily Scrum Meeting happens every day at the same time in the same place. The goal of this meeting is the alignment of all the Scrum Team members. Scrum Team members can also ask help from the Scrum Master to remove any impediments which may potentially slow down or block the progress of a Sprint.

• Sprint Review Meeting enables the Scrum Product Owner to review and control the work results the Scrum Team has created during the Sprint.

• Sprint Retrospective Meeting for the Scrum Team to reflect the way they work together, how they use the Scrum Framework, and how they can improve.

3. Use productivity tools

Productivity tools can help you decrease your time. Those include communication systems, like Slack, task management systems (ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Monday.com, etc.), integration systems (Zapier), time tracking systems (Harvest, Toggl, etc.).

It’s also easier to explain things with video, so consider recording video messages instead of typing them. Loom or Quicktimer can help with that. And in case you can’t avoid typing, do check your writing with Grammarly.

4. Automate your insurance processes

Last but not least, automate. Let technology help you automate policies, claims and reporting. Leverage automation for document management, customer data management, invoicing and instalment management, customer communication (email, SMS, mail integration), rating (dynamic premium based on policy declarations and data enrichment) and much more.

And in case you’d have any questions – you can always contact our Cloud Insurance team. We’ll be happy to answer all your questions!