left many personal and commercial lines to compete primarily on price rather than coverage differentiation or customer service. For example, an insurer might use IoT technology to directly augment profitability by transforming the income statement’s loss component. IoT-based data, carefully gathered and analyzed, might help insurers evolve from a defensive posture—spreading risk among policyholders and compensating them for losses— to an offensive posture: helping policyholders prevent losses and insurers avoid claims in the first place. And by avoiding claims, insurers could not only reap the rewards of increased profitability, but also reduce premiums and aim to improve customer retention rates. Several examples, both speculative and reallife, include:
- Sensors embedded in commercial infrastructure can monitor safety breaches such as smoke, mold, or toxic fumes, allowing for adjustments to the environment to head off or at least mitigate a potentially hazardous event.
- Wearable sensors could monitor employee movements in high-risk areas and transmit data to employers in real time to warn the wearer of potential danger as well as decrease fraud related to workplace accidents.
- Smart home sensors could detect moisture in a wall from pipe leakage and alert a homeowner to the issue prior to the pipe bursting. This might save the insurer from a large claim and the homeowner from both considerable inconvenience and losing irreplaceable valuables. The same can be said for placing IoT sensors in business properties and commercial machinery, mitigating property damage and injuries to workers and customers, as well as business interruption losses.
- Socks and shoes that can alert diabetics early on to potential foot ulcers, odd joint angles, excessive pressure, and how well blood is pumping through capillaries are now entering the market, helping to avoid costly medical and disability claims as well as potentially life-altering amputations.
Beyond minimizing losses, IoT applications could also potentially help insurers resolve the dilemma with which many have long wrestled: how to improve the customer experience, and therefore loyalty and retention, while still satisfying the unrelenting market demand for lower pricing. Until now, insurers have generally struggled to cultivate strong client relationships, both personal and commercial, given the infrequency of interactions throughout the insurance life cycle from policy sale to renewal—and the fact that most of those interactions entail unpleasant circumstances: either deductible payments or, worse, claims. This dynamic is even more pronounced in the independent agency model, in which the intermediary, not the carrier, usually dominates the relationship with the client.
The emerging technology intrinsic to the IoT that can potentially monitor and measure each insured’s behavioral and property footprint across an array of activities could turn out to be an insurer’s holy grail, as IoT applications can offer tangible benefits for valueconscious consumers while allowing carriers to remain connected to their policyholders’ everyday lives. While currently, people likely want as few associations with their insurers as possible, the IoT can potentially make insurers a desirable point of contact. The IoT’s true staying power will be manifested in the technology’s ability to create value for both the insurer and the policyholder, thereby strengthening their bond. And while thefrequency of engagement shifts to the carrier, the independent agency channel will still likely remain relevant through the traditional client touchpoints.
By harnessing continuously streaming “quantified self ” data, using advanced sensor connectivity devices, insurers could theoretically capture a vast variety of personal data and use it to analyze a policyholder’s movement, environment, location, health, and psychological and physical state. This could provide innovative opportunities for insurersto better understand, serve, and connect with policyholders—as well as insulate companies against client attrition to lower-priced competitors. Indeed, if an insurer can demonstrate how repurposing data collected for insurance considerations might help a carrier offer valuable ancillary non-insurance services, customers may be more likely to opt in to share further data, more closely binding insurer and customer.
Leveraging IoT technologies may also have the peripheral advantage of resuscitating the industry’s brand, making insurance more enticing to the relatively small pool of skilled professionals needed to put these strategies in play. And such a shift would be welcome, considering that Deloitte’s Talent in Insurance Survey revealed that the tech-savvy Millennial generation generally considers a career in the insurance industry “boring.”4 Such a reputational challenge clearly creates a daunting obstacle for insurance executives and HR professionals, particularly given the dearth of employees with necessary skill sets to successfully enable and systematize IoT strategies, set against a backdrop of intense competition from many other industries. Implementing cuttingedge IoT strategies could boost the “hip factor” that the industry currently lacks.
Referance : Deloitte University Press
