Data silos are a concern within companies – because of duplicate entries, inefficient insurance agent management, and human errors persisting due to legacy systems. To rise above legacy models, using an agent portal can help avoid data silos empowering your company to function uninterruptedly.
This article introduces you to the impacts of using an agent portal to avoid data silos to enable improved governance, collaboration, and communication across the insurance industry.
A data silo is a collection of unstructured data that is accessible by one department but isolated from the rest of the company. This creates a lack of transparency, trust, and reduced efficiencies across business functions.
Data silos often occur due to the voluminous data collected by a business application that is isolated from the rest of your intranet architecture. They are more common in large companies as separate departments and teams usually have their own goals and priorities.
Knowing how to avoid data silos is important to mitigate risks that otherwise would hinder organizational performance in the future.
Data silos hinder decision-making in the organization, often slowing business growth and affecting the quality of information used in insurance.
In the insurance sector, data silos result in many more problems as mentioned below.
Data doesn’t easily get transferred between departments at your insurance company when the technology infrastructure is lacking key components. Companies must deploy intuitive applications that enable quick transfer of data and generate insights simultaneously to avoid data silos.
When insurance companies scale up rapidly, they run the risk of managing large sums of data without a planned communication strategy. This leads to a lot of inconsistencies in the company’s data architecture, creating rifts between departments and making it chaotic to govern.
Decentralized IT services allow departments within an insurance company to buy their own software and tech stacks. This leads to the introduction of incompatible or disconnected systems within the organization, increasing costs and impacting administrative functions. These data silos emerge due to what’s referred to as disparate systems.
As insurance companies grow, insurance agent management becomes tougher since employees tend to get more competitive with colleagues, especially in other departments. This may result in those with access to data, not sharing the data to maintain control. Such inconsistencies in access management result in ineffective work, low employee morale and more.
Data silos impact insurance operations in terms of communication, collaboration, governance and other processes supporting your insurance agent management. It makes it tough for administrators to manage scattered data that creates gaps in company databases.
To ensure process control and efficiency, insurers are required to refactor existing systems for better availability and governance.
Listed below are data silos that hinder insurance agent management.
Trying to manage business with isolated data is much like putting a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to direct your efforts. Data silos create isolated and incohesive information which affects agent performance.
Creating limited access to company assets, data silos in insurance lead to inconsistencies in collaboration patterns among employees. Managers cannot make decisions based on agent-generated data because the information collected is isolated from the processes handled by agents.
Most businesses have multiple touchpoints. If the data collected at multiple touchpoints is isolated from each department handling customer concerns, there will be many inefficiencies that impact the operational outcomes and credibility of your insurance services.
Wasting time and resources to rectify and refactor data silos rather than implementing an agent and customer portal can cost you in capital and time. Teams must wait for data rather than finding the information they need to do their job incisively.
If employees store company assets like documents, spreadsheets, and other data on individual devices without clear governance protocols, it causes insurers many security concerns. Data silos make it difficult to comply with governance policies that impact organizational performance, employee productivity and overall morale.
Duplicate records, unstructured raw data and disparate systems are a waste of storage space. The poor data quality becomes a burden on your corporate budget and slows down native app performance.Instead, if you were to utilize one single platform by using an Agent Portal for insurance, it would consume less space, require less resources, and streamline business functions almost imminently.
Data is valuable to the insurance practice. Having several tools to collect customer data, manage partnerships, operations and logistics can be hectic without a plan. When data is outdated, missing a value, or using an incomplete entry, cannot derive any value from your own company assets.Hence, to avoid data silos, every team may have access to the same data for themselves rather than on disparate systems. To enable such transparency, the use of Agent Portals in Insurance is gaining massive applause and industry-wide adoption.
Having several tools collecting information about your prospects, customers, employees, and partners increases your company’s operational process value. However, when data is outdated, incomplete or missing, inaccessible or unusable or sometimes inaccurate, the value that you could get from company operations goes down significantly.
Data is one of the most valuable assets of your business and requires a centralized platform to manage company assets. While integrating user-friendly apps and workflows to maximize utility of data gathered, an Insurance Agent Portal can prevent data silos.
Some major concerns arising among insurance agents lacking inefficient data management tools in 2022 are,
Being tedious work for insurers to manage data and oversee the performance of agents and other employees, data silos can be prevented by using Agent Portals for insurance.
Since data silos occur when companies maintain different databases isolated from each other, many leaders think it’s just about importing and exporting these databases. The issue is that this data isn’t static data.
Here are the top emerging insurance trends in 2022, all a result of digital transformation enabling agile change management for leading insurers.
Because data is continuously changing, manually extracting data from various databases to execute certain business activities, impacts agent performance and hinders process output. It would take a lot of time, sometimes even months for large insurance companies to make use of their data due to disparate systems being used to manage agent and customer operations.
Avoiding data silos can help improve insurance agent management, and the solution is to be using an Agent Portal for insurance. Using Agent Portals equips insurers with better Insurance Agent Management and digital asset governance by eliminating data silos, preventing data threats and maximizing operational outcomes.
Here’s how using an Agent Portal helps avoid data silos.
Integrating disparate systems using an Agent Portal to manage all data makes it easier for insurers to create new products, resolve customer concerns and optimize business functions.
All-in-one Agent Portals in insurance are software suites designed to make internal and external communications easier. Having access to all relevant and updated data in one place enables operational control and efficiency.
Developing specific business apps to perform a certain function is easier now than ever before due to low-code tech. Making sure your people build and use native apps to integrate with their workflows helps avoid data silos.
Using an Agent Portal intuitive workflows can be created to streamline insurance functions. Making it easier for employees to share data among each other enables better collaboration and productivity at work.
By gaining improved governance and visibility into the quality of data being used, Agent Portals creates transparent workflows. This helps data professionals sort through redundant or outdated data to update quality data policies for the agents.
Using gamification techniques like rewards systems or user-generated insights, Agent Portals in insurance can help organizations track agent productivity. Users also gain an edge over competitors in the industry as work becomes more fulfilling to perform using engaging software.
Data like customer phone numbers, and emails change as prospects become customers and agents leave companies later. Being able to consolidate the agent functions using intelligent applications becomes important in ensuring that data silos are avoided, and everybody onboard maintains access to the latest data, cleaned and processed for optimal utility.
An Agent Portal for insurance thus enables dynamic reporting which helps agents perform tasks better and empowers management with insights to improve existing systems and processes. By reducing the time spent on tasks and making quality data available to agents, an agent-customer portal has numerous other business benefits.
With full access to agent performance data, the insurers can make changes to augment workflows that will translate to front-line efficiencies. Enabling effective data integration using an Agent Portal steers your digital transformation efforts towards more resourceful and profitable endeavours.
Build your Insurance Agent Portal to unlock process efficiencies and numerous administrative privileges.
Using an Agent Portal for insurance, insurance companies can avoid data silos and introduce refined ways to manage data. A people-centric approach to innovation, Technovert builds digital solutions for insurers.
Specializing in native and cross-functional app development, our expertise with cloud and AI is sure to bring the best of your Agent Portals and other InsurTech applications you need to scale your digital initiatives.
If you are interested in building your own Agent Portal for Insurance, contact our insurance innovation team for insurers, and let’s get started.
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