This post is part of a series sponsored by CoreLogic.
The property insurance industry’s first event of the year, CoreLogic’s second annual INTRConnect, was held in Austin, Texas, and brought together more than 1,200 passionate professionals from across the property insurance and restoration industry. The event was a hub of excitement, with underwriters, claims professionals, InsurTech providers, property restorers, and many others gathering to explore the latest advancements in the field. Expert speakers, educational sessions, eye-opening exhibitions, collaborative role-based breakout sessions, and unmissable networking opportunities were just a few of the highlights of this truly unforgettable event!
We’ve distilled the top five takeaways from this year’s INTRConnect. From inspiring talks on the main stage to illuminating discussions in the breakout sessions, read on to discover the Insights from the event.
1. Focus on the lives beyond the buildings first and foremost.
Customer-centricity is the best way to future-proof your business – regardless of your role in the property insurance ecosphere. At the end of the day, your business is about helping people – whether you are managing the claims process from the carrier side of the business or are part of the property restoration projects that enable individuals to settle back into their homes following a disaster. Focusing on customer satisfaction and providing empathetic, personalized experiences will keep peoples’ trust – and their business – within your company.
When you focus on the lives beyond the buildings over the processes, everything else falls into place. For instance, delivering excellent customer experiences demands leveraging sophisticated technologies to get work done more quickly and accurately. It also requires businesses to prioritize employee retention and opportunities for internal growth to ensure customers are consistently dealing with their best, most experienced, empathetic professionals.
Customer-centricity is especially important today when people pay higher premiums for their insurance policies than ever. They expect to be able to take certain actions digitally, and they expect fast turnaround times when they have questions and requests. This demands insurance carriers and restoration providers to approach customers with empathy and do as much as they can virtually. Incorporating innovative technologies into workflows is a must today to operate a customer-centric business.
When you boil down the functions across the property insurance and restoration industries, it is “people helping people,” which was one of the themes of INTRConnect 2024. When organizations take this to heart, they will be the best businesses they can be.
2. Collaboration is key to pushing your business – and the industry – forward.
The overarching theme of INTRConnect 2024 was “Building Tomorrow Together.” As President of CoreLogic Insurance Solutions Garret Gray said in his opening keynote, “it takes us all to drive our industry forward. Collaborating across the industry enables idea-sharing and sparks innovation about how to help people.”
Collaborating with people outside of your organization, including competitors, can help spread your good ideas and positively impact your customer base. This can lead to a ripple effect that ultimately benefits a larger number of policyholders. Additionally, seeking advice and adopting tried-and-true methods from others in your industry can also help your own company succeed.
Collaboration is also crucial in your company’s day-to-day logistics. Working within a connected, collaborative ecosystem allows customers to come first. In such an ecosystem, everyone who touches a claim – underwriters, claims professionals, property restoration contractors, and everyone else involved – all work from the same set of data and have the tools to communicate consistently through the lifecycle of a claim. This allows all stakeholders to keep customers in the loop with consistent, accurate information in their greatest times of need.
Different stakeholders must function as partners, approaching every business case as a shared investment from which there will be a shared reward. Partnerships rely on regular communication to establish these objectives.
Instead of trying to do it all, it is important for organizations to know what they do well, and when they need to rely on partners to provide. For example, a great insurance company is not typically going to simultaneously be a great technology company. Service providers must collaborate with technology vendor partners to implement sophisticated technologies so they can better serve their customers.
As phenomena like climate change and new levels of digital transformation continue to change the world, collaboration is necessary both on macro and micro levels.
3. Embrace AI; it is here to stay – and grow.
Last year, AI – Artificial Intelligence – exploded into public consciousness. As Garret said in his keynote, AI is “two small letters with a huge impact.” And it isn’t going anywhere. Its presence will only continue to grow and have greater impacts on the way we live, work, and play. Do not be afraid of AI. Instead, embrace it. Explore how it can transform your organization.
There are a lot of benefits that AI can bring to the property insurance ecosphere – from underwriters to claims professionals, to property restorers, and everyone else in between. With AI algorithms processing vast amounts of data, AI enables insurance and reconstruction professionals to efficiently make accurate, objective, data-driven decisions and create strategies considering all relevant factors.
AI is central to CoreLogic’s product vision. Over the coming years, AI will transform processes across the industry. It will drive more accurate risk assessments for better rate-making for underwriters. AI technologies will streamline claims processing and allow for the determination of repair costs via assessment of property damage photos. AI can also analyze data to predict certain weather risks so insurers can better prepare their policyholders. With AI-driven insights from customer data analysis, insurers can develop personalized products. Organizations will also be able to use AI capabilities to understand the emotional context of customer conversations to help employees better guide their responses to policyholders.
Speakers throughout the event emphasized that AI will create opportunities for people. Instead of displacing employees, it will transform their jobs – allowing them to do more of what makes them uniquely human. It will allow people to focus more on the human side of the business.
4. You need good data to have good AI.
There’s no question that AI will transform the property insurance industry. And you need good quality data for AI to operate as intended .
It is data that trains the AI models to perform certain tasks for us, so it is crucial that these models learn from a complete set of high-quality data. Data isn’t objective unless it is part of a complete and accurate set, so you must have good data sources and a good data footprint for AI to be successful in your organization.
When you work with a technology solutions provider to implement AI into your workflows, be sure you are working with a company with access to excellent property data. CoreLogic AI solutions, for example, are trained on the industry’s most comprehensive set of property data. CoreLogic has, on average, about 3,700 data points, on average, for each individual residential property in the United States.
5. When implementing new technology, you need an organizational change management strategy.
From the Great Resignation to inflation – all alongside the increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, every year continues to bring new phenomena that require carriers and contractors to do more with fewer resources. Integrating data and technology solutions to streamline workflows become imperative for organizations that must meet growing demands amid workforce challenges and higher volumes of work.
To succeed with new technologies, organizations must have a plan for widespread implementation and successful use of new solutions. In other words, they must have a strategy for organizational change management, which is “the process of guiding organizational change to a successful resolution… [typically involving] three major phases: preparation, implementation, and follow-through.”[1]
A major component of organizational change management is achieving company-wide buy-in. For instance, new technology will not yield the anticipated results unless people throughout the organization leverage it accordingly. Speakers at INTRConnect talked about different ways they incentivize their workers to embrace change with new platforms and solutions.
Organizational change management will be increasingly important amid a growing need for organizations to leverage advanced technologies, including Artificial Intelligence. Technology won’t magically transform your organization; success with new platforms and applications involves planning and getting everyone on board and comfortable with the changes.
Focusing on the Future
INTRConnect 2024 focused on the future – what is to come for the property insurance ecosphere and how all industry players can position themselves for success with their colleagues and peers.
We hope our takeaways have shed some more light on what was an overwhelmingly successful event. Also, be sure to register for next year’s INTRConnect, which will take place January 13-16, 2025, in Los Angeles, California. To register, and to get more information on becoming a sponsor, click here.
[1] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/organizational-change-management
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