Fast and accurate data movement is becoming a key requirement for Insurance agencies to complete business processes more efficiently, allowing them to remain competitive. It is vital that insurance agencies begin building time-sensitive integrations between their various line of business (LOB) applications in order to create a seamless flow of information that empowers them to begin intelligently orchestrating data and automating a number of business processes. The only issue is that the scale and scope of such an endeavor makes the entire idea of harmonious data orchestration overwhelming.
There are several integration tools available to agencies, designed to move data between systems and gain greater insight from data. However, many tools lack the ability to perform time-sensitive integration. This implies that an agent still needs to be involved in the integration process by clicking buttons to instruct when and how the enriched data needs to move between systems. With agents still playing an integral role in moving data between systems, the risk still exists for business processes to fail if an integration is not instructed to run.
Successfully integrating data is the first step to fully operationalizing it, but there is a further step to take to get data to work for the agency. Insurance agencies struggle to push integrated data, with its greater insight value, back into their core applications so it can be utilized when performing operational activities, like quoting. Accessing that information and operationalizing it is something that needs to be done as the time comes, or when triggered by a specific activity, rather than on a manual basis. This is the next step in the integration journey. As the volume of data being integrated from disparate systems grows, it becomes more time-consuming and labor-intensive to manually perform integrations from each system. The manual process of pulling data from one system and pushing it into another makes an agent’s job more difficult, and too time consuming. What insurance agencies need is a way for them to automate the integration processes and remove the need for human intervention.
The process of ETL — Extracting data from one system, Transforming it into a different structure, and Loading it into another system — is a fundamental part of data integration. Part of that process is aggregating the data from the different LOB applications into a data store. Typically, data is stored in a data lake which stores any data in its original form. The final step is a process called orchestration which controls when and how the data in the data store needs to move. This allows for rapid, uninterrupted, time-sensitive, data transfer across different systems whenever it is needed. Orchestration automates each step of the ETL process, allowing it to be completed with minimal human intervention. The end goal of every data orchestration process is to make useful data available for all business requirements, autonomously.
A recent survey found that 80 percent of the work associated with using data was spent preparing and managing this data. With data orchestration, data sorting, preparation and organization is automated, minimizing time spent on data acquisition and preparation.
Data orchestration reduces the cost of paying teams and virtual assistants to process data manually. It enables insurance agencies to automate the integration steps in their existing processes, allowing agents to focus on more value-adding work. It also allows agencies to provide better information and service to customers, and gives agents access to the information they need as quickly as possible without requiring them to be manually involved in each data-driven task.
Through orchestration allows organizations to scale data use and enables data to be extracted and processed when it is needed. It streamlines data workflows to provide faster actionable insights.
A common insurance process that can be completely automated through data orchestration is the end-to-end rate-quote-bind process. Data orchestration allows agents to extract client data from their CRM system (such as Salesforce), push that data into a rate quote bind engine, and then send the client rating and the quote back into Salesforce. What’s more, agents can simultaneously get the bind once the customer has signed off on the policy and push that information into the agency’s AMS. Without intelligent data orchestration agents would still have to spend valuable time moving data between these systems.
The Synatic Data Integration Hub can manage all the integrations across an agency. Synatic handles how the data is integrated, aggregated, and orchestrated between multiple insurance systems, making it easier for agencies to automate daily operational processes. The Data Integration Hub has a built-in data warehouse that allows any amount and any type of data to be stored. With the built-in warehouse there is no need to go hunting for data in different systems. Synatic orchestrates data by setting up triggers to instruct a specific integration to run. These triggers enable multiple systems to communicate with each other in a time-sensitive manner.
As agencies start to understand how their data is a product that can offer a competitive advantage, they can use the Synatic Data Integration Hub to ensure they can consolidate data from their disparate systems and push the enriched data back into various LOB applications. This allows agencies to use the data to provide added value for operational activities. Through the use of Synatic, agencies can begin orchestrating data to get the right data, to the right person, at the right time. To learn more about how orchestration can be used to help give your agency a competitive advantage, contact Synatic today
