Analytics-to-Value: Power BI for Insurance Business

Insurance providers are not an exception in the data-thriving universe, and they have loads of data from claims processes, customer interactions, agents/partner sales. A McKinsey report says that the pace of technology evolution in the insurance industry seems rapid, with agents, customers, and insurers being data-driven for enhanced decision making, optimizing operations, and customer experience.

Insurance providers have different data stacks for each policy, service area, and SBU. Each operates in silos, and the resulting insurance business intelligence takes a long time to reach the decision-makers. Adopting advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and a unified view of data from different data sources and structures is daunting for insurers. Let me walk you through some internal details to learn about the adoption of best insurance business intelligence practices.

• Insurers have created multiple communication channels in recent years – e-mail, call centers, numerous online and offline forms, mobile apps, self-service portals, and conversational chatbots. Most of the business intelligence teams face challenges regarding standard practices for data classification, management, and retrieval.
• Though the analytical models are evolving rapidly in insurance, many processes still enter data manually into their systems, leading to inconsistencies.
• Every product in insurance has an independent data management process, and at times, it is tough to drill the details about the customer with multiple products. There is a considerable time lag between data retrieval, reconciliation, and analysis.

The above factors create certain obstacles for rapid business intelligence in insurance. An end-to-end data and analytics services provider can effectively manage every data management process to enable swift decision intelligence. Now let us talk about how Power BI, a rapidly evolving business intelligence solution, can help you resolve these challenges.

Why Microsoft Power BI for Insurance Business Intelligence?

Power BI is a holistic solution that can address the day-to-day operations and analyzes data rapidly to provide real-time data visualizations for easy consumption to everyone in your insurance business. Microsoft’s Common Data Model enables the proper structuring of data commonly used for various applications in the entire suite. The Common Data Model can be leveraged for data preparation in Microsoft Power BI data flows to minimize the complexities, inconsistencies, and data lags.

The optimal use of DAX can also help insurers control the data inputs for various dashboards and the necessary realignment. The new Microsoft Power Query and AI Builder feature also enable insurers to adopt the latest AI and ML models in no time. The pre-built customer 360-degree analysis, sentiment analysis, NLP, and interactive dashboards add insurance business intelligence. A few areas where insurers can leverage Microsoft Power BI for compelling insights:

• Enabling a holistic view to better understand claims processing times, policy costs, premiums, insurance coverage, and most importantly, the risk associated with each insurance product
• Customer 360-degree analysis, needs, and triggers for policy purchase, demographics, and retention practices
• Cross-sell and upselling opportunities across the customer lifecycle
• Business KPIs with agent performance and specific operational costs that can trigger the change in real-time
• BI can enable AI for insurers precisely to estimate underwriting risk, estimate financials, and predict claims value and processing times

Benefits with Power BI for Insurance Business Intelligence

Every business is now data-driven and gaining insights from every business process is the priority across industries. Business intelligence in insurance is not an exception and most insurers are trying to improve their productivity, automate processes and optimize the customer experience. Let us look at a few benefits with insurance business intelligence:

1. Minimizing insurance fraud

Insurance fraud costs a bigger dent for US families; the average premiums increase the range between $400-$700 per year per family as per the FBI. The 2020 Friss Insurance Fraud Report says that 75% of the insurance professionals believe that 10% or more or all insurance claims involve some fraud. During the pandemic, this fraud has doubled with minimal personnel site investigations and inspections from insurance professionals. With rising expenses and complex claims handling processes, managing fraud is the number one challenge for most insurers.

Insurance business intelligence software like Power BI can aid professionals with fraud management by early detection and predictive analytics. Insurers can leverage Microsoft Power BI’s pre-built AI and ML models or customize them accordingly for effective fraud management. Identifying fraudulent claims earlier in the claims processing cycles and presenting them visually to the needed stakeholders to set up automatic actions and alerts.

2. Enable Efficient Claims Management process

A longer claims management process increases costs and has a significant impact on the customer experience. Usually, a claim follows after a traumatic event – health, property damage, car damage, etc. and customers will be delighted to witness a hassle-free process and shorter claims processing times.

A holistic insurance business intelligence solution like Power BI can help insurance professionals visualize the open claims and their processing stages with each department. In addition, the client information can be verified and analyzed for the previous history of the claims. Collaborating all this information and communicating the necessary actions with customers can simplify the process and enhance customer satisfaction.

3. Risk Management and optimizing the underwriting process

Analyzing risks is crucial for the sustainability of any insurance business. By leveraging analytics models and visualizing claims data, policy expenses, and other unforeseen macro circumstances can help insurers predict the risk near to business terms. If the analysis offers the right direction, a proper action plan can be designed for effective risk management.

Underwriting is a complex process where you can leverage insurance business intelligence to visualize the comprehensive processing stages and the steps taken at each stage. Power BI makes it easier by closely monitoring the process, identifying any challenges and opportunities for change.

4. Profitability and Sales Opportunities for Agents and Partners

Insurance business intelligence is not just about processes but drilling deep into the revenue, costs, and agents’ performance per the product type, location, and SBU. These stunning visualization in Power BI can help insurers manage their performance of various products and improve the utilization of existing agents for more productivity benefits. Strategic business decisions like growth prospects and cost optimization can be effectively visualized with stunning dashboards.

It is not about profitability only, but insurers can prioritize their customer personas and identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities. A detailed customer 360-degree analysis provides more opportunities to interact with the customer and understand their needs over some time.

5. Centralized data access for adopting AI

With Power BI, insurers can rely on the integrated data and information from disparate data sources for further analysis. The CDM and Azure data lake enables centralized information access and collation across the available data sets. Compliance according to the changing regulations landscape is also crucial for insurers. With centralized data access, data governance and faster insights can be enabled for insurers in no time. Our experts’ team has a detailed understanding of your evolving data needs and an in-depth understanding of semantic layers of Power BI to help you with scalable insights and visualizations. Talk to our experts for more information.