Info Jam
How do you find the needle when the haystack keeps getting bigger? Agents and brokers are battling information overload, but clients want answers now. ProNavigator provides an AI-based solution that answers insurance queries within seconds—with the right information—so agents, brokers and other client-facing workers can quickly respond to customer questions. CEO Joseph D’Souza founded the company in 2016.
How quickly staff can find various pieces of information varies by skill level and tenure. We see this specifically when working with learning and development teams who see firsthand what it takes for new hires to get onboarded, ramped up and productive. From our internal benchmarking, the average time a staff member spends searching for information equates to roughly $66 per day per staff member. Extrapolate this number, and it represents a significant expense for large and growing organizations.
It’s harder to quantify the opportunity cost of customers experiencing long initial wait times, being placed on hold while staff search for and consume information, and scheduling call backs. For instance, we know that small business commercial insurance companies are more likely to get the business, irrespective of price, if they can be among the first quotes returned. We also know that one negative or delayed interaction with their insurance provider can encourage customers to shop around upon renewal.
What’s valuable to the company and what’s valuable to the front-line knowledge worker can be separate things and highly variable depending on the active task. We focus on serving up internal documents for quick reference—underwriting manuals, policy wordings, procedure manuals, job aids, and even internal communications like product bulletins or newsletters.
The company aims to promote consistency and accuracy by ensuring everyone is viewing the most complete, up-to-date versions. Since knowledge workers sift through a huge amount of documentation, they want to quickly modify and sort through the results based on the specifics of their task at hand, allowing them to deliver a quick resolution.
Insurance knowledge workers—by this I mean the brokers, agents, and underwriters who are servicing demand—are required to be experts on a variety of ever-changing products and coverage offerings. Because of that, they reference a large volume of complex documents daily. Most organizations struggle with having multiple sources of information. It usually means multiple silos are created from the different sites and systems all with various pieces of information that they find and reference. All these locations, even if they are in the same system, are inconsistent in how they disseminate, label and organize information, which restricts access to the documents and makes general discoverability almost impossible. The volume of information continuing to increase and the rate of change being the highest it’s ever been only makes the problem more complex.
Off-the-shelf or homegrown systems also have a part to play. For insurance specifically, they usually require a large amount of customization and continual optimizations to have any lasting benefit. Given the lack of resources organizations constantly face, these systems quickly become disjointed and fragmented with limited ownership on the overall health of the system and ultimate value to the end user. What worked for knowledge management 10 and even five years ago doesn’t work well in today’s environment.
Our industry has a retiring workforce that’s creating challenges in staffing, recruiting and training across the industry. Finding qualified workers, onboarding them and keeping them is a top priority for many of our customers. Looking at investments in technology to ensure that employees have access to what they need when they need it is a critical piece of insurtech innovation.
Ramp-up time for new staff is a big investment of both time and money. We work very closely with learning-development teams to reduce the learning curve by pairing their expertise with the right tools. Today, a lot of the training is about how you use the system to find a piece of information, including using link farms and breadcrumb trails to navigate directories, where with the product we offer, the focus shifts to learning about the actual products and offerings they will be selling and servicing. A system like this, that’s intuitive and easy to use, builds confidence in staff and enables them to meet performance expectations sooner.