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Forrester Says Insurance Industry Must Focus on "Customer Experience." BPM Software Holds the Key

Ben Farrell
December 14, 2011

Ellen Carney, lead insurance industry analyst at Forrester Research, has just published an insightful report on the changing tide for insurance companies. You can read an excerpt here. "Tech Opportunities in the North American Insurance Industry" details the transition from "business-as-usual" to what Ellen calls a "business-as-unusual" model where the customer experience takes precedence over the products and services an insurer provides. BPM software, particularly Mobile BPM and Social BPM, are key technology enablers for this transition.

The report uses data from a Forrester survey of insurance IT decision makers that highlights revenue growth as the #1 industry priority. Ellen cites that "innovation is viewed as a channel to revenue" because harnessing mobility and social into insurance business models will directly impact the customer experience. She says, "Mobile has changed the way we envision an insurance company...This change means that initiatives to deliver sales and customer service business capabilities must be mobiled. Social media are also maturing into a means to improve collaboration within the insurance ecosystem."

This is precisely what Appian BPM is enabling our insurance customers to do. By putting full-featured process solutions as native apps on all popular mobile platforms, and utilizing a modern social interface, we are helping transform the industry. As Brian Flynn, global CIO at Crawford & Company has said, "The Appian BPM Suite, with its mobile and social capabilities, is truly an enabler that will change the way we work with our business partners and ultimately how we service our clients."

What's more, Appian also helps achieve the persistent objective of cost reduction by delivering those native mobile and social apps with ZERO additional development cost. This is above and beyond BPM's traditional value in delivering, as the report says, "faster and cheaper processing of claims and disbursements, while ensuring that they're paying claims the right way."

Appian BPM precisely fits Ellen's definition of the changing insurance IT landscape, where CIOs are moving from a limited focus on operations and cost containment to one in which "the role of technology is integral to support these new business disruptions."

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications