Implementing New Technology The Right Way

In a recent podcast hosted by Chisel AI, Travis MacMillian from Xceedance discussed why finding new ways to do business is critical to the insurance industry and highlighted several tips for adopting new technologies to support those initiatives.

Chisel AI Host: What’s one thing that everybody in the commercial insurance space should start doing today to better serve policyholders throughout the buying process?

Travis: My suggestion would be that you start by understanding what your target demographics are and how has that changed. If you think about the newer buying groups, millennials, Gen “Z”s, and Gen “Alpha” as the next up-and-coming generation – they expect a different experience from people like me in Generation X. I want paper. I want to sit down and have a conversation. My kids, they want to receive a text. They want instant gratification. So, when you apply the buying traits of your target audience you have to change the approach and adopt new tools, because your lens is different. To go a little bit deeper, when we think about the buying characteristics of millennials or members of Gen Z, they want that instant gratification and real-time, instant results on digital tools. They want to transact everything from a mobile device.

So, insurance organizations have to challenge themselves to say, do I need to do things differently if I want to attract that customer base, and why is that attractive to me? Because, you know what? It is an attractive customer base. This is the future of the world, and you have to figure out how you capitalize on that.

Chisel AI Host: That’s right. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be left behind. But people can be afraid of technology, and oftentimes, organizations can be very slow to make decisions. So, what would be your recommendations for people who are trying to get their organizations to implement new technologies and business models, and might be trying to convince the senior leadership to take action?

Travis:  Change management truly is an organizational movement; you can’t do a top-down change management or a bottom-up change management. You must do them both together.

First, you have to have leadership that’s completely on board with a transformational change, and they’re sponsoring it, and they’re aligning it to their strategic direction to say, “Organizationally, here’s where we want to go.”

At the same time, they need to surround a group of folks that are the doers, they’re the workers doing it every day, and get them to embrace the vision, and how they can see the transformation really impacting their roles from a bottom-up standpoint. And when you attack it from both vantage points, the outcome there is successful. If you do one or the other, you have the potential of failing, from my experience. So, it has to be attacked from both ends and I think that when it’s done right, I think that companies will be successful. The other thing that I would lay out there is that you can’t take that journey alone.

The last thing I would share is that a lot of companies talk about doing POCs, and they have these grandiose ideas, “I want to do this large POC,” and really drive something as a proof point. I would encourage them to do something small – dip your toe in, test it, drive it quickly. If you’re going to fail, fail fast, and then learn why you failed and try it again. Traditionally, that’s been one of the major impacts why the insurance industry as a whole has been slow to transform, because you think about, “Oh, I’m going to institute a new policy admin system.” Great. It’s a three to five-year project. Sometimes it’s successful, sometimes it’s not and it’s costing organizations hundreds of millions of dollars to do that.

Chisel AI Host: That’s so true. I love your example about working from both ends, because there’s a couple of similes that come to mind. But the best one… when possible, you actually dig a tunnel from both ends, because it ends up being twice as fast. And that, to me, is the perfect real-world analogy for what you just talked about. Now, the problem with digging a tunnel from both ends simultaneously is you have to be very precise, because if they don’t line up, then you’re going to have a really fun time at the end. So, it might be a little bit more work, but it’s certainly the better way to get it done.

Chisel AI and Xceedance partner to deliver best-in-class, on-demand, AI-powered policy checking and review technology and services for commercial brokers and agents.