Few industries have been impacted as greatly by recent technological innovations as the insurance industry. Many incumbent insurers-and their CIOs, CTOs and other IT leaders-still struggle to adapt to radical changes in how their customers research products and services, make purchases, and seek support.
Given the ever-increasing demands from customers and internal stakeholders, the pressure placed upon insurance IT professionals face can be enormous.
For instance, customers now have always-on access to the Internet, and an unprecedented ability to find product and pricing information from competing insurers in mere minutes. (Insurers must adapt to this.) More than ever, customers and prospects are using smartphones and tablets to access sites and services. (Insurers' technologies must properly render this content.) They also expect self-service channels, or new support channels such as text and video chats. (All of which may come with technical and security risks.)
Some even expect discounts in exchange for using wearable technologies that track their health and exercise activity.
This state of perpetual disruption is forcing the hands of insurance CIOs, CTOs, managers and more. Adaptation is a must. Those who ignore these changes do so at their company's peril. As one insurance exec recently told Ernst & Young, insurers must "innovate or die."
The pressure many insurance companies face to improve their technologies and further embrace digital capabilities can be intense-especially when they're providing online portals, mobile apps and website-based services to customers. It's not enough to merely "keep the network up" any more.
The industry-wide movement of IT transformation isn’t a passing fad. It’s a must-have for insurers that want to survive in an increasingly digital landscape.
Walking the Tightrope of Opportunity
According to a recent Forrester study, insurance execs are especially concerned about establishing ways to govern and manage these digital evolutions, and assess how digital innovations impact the customer experience.
Executives are also especially interested in expanding the reach of their businesses, and serving brand-new customers. Increasingly, insurers are doing this by serving Spanish-speaking U.S. Hispanic consumers in their language of choice.
Hispanics have been historically underserved by the insurance industry. They currently represent an untapped, ever-growing, and economically powerful new market for insurers.
U.S. Hispanics represent nearly 20% of the U.S. population. The number of Hispanic households—and the average spending within those households—now outpaces the non-Hispanic average. Their buying power hovers at around $1.3 trillion, eclipsing the GPD of countries such as Australia and Spain. Serving these consumers in Spanish is critical. Three out of every four Hispanics speak Spanish at home. Nearly 40% prefer to read online and offline content in “all Spanish” or “mostly Spanish.” They’re also adopters of disruptive consumer technologies: they use smartphones more frequently, and are apt to buy more digital media, than the national average.
But the mandate to serve Hispanics with a robust Spanish website (or other online services) has historically posed challenges for insurance CIOs and other IT leaders. After all, maintaining a website and omni-channel services that preserve HIPAA compliance and SSL security-while also delivering pitch-perfect user experiences-is hard enough to deliver for an insurer's U.S. English website.
Indeed, meticulously replicating this robust and secure enterprise-wide, omni-channel experience in an entirely different language appears so intimidating, most insurers simply won't go there. It's too costly, or slow to deploy, or too risky and complicated from a content-management or security perspective.
Thankfully, solutions now exist to eliminate those technical pain points for insurance CIOs and other stakeholders.
A Beautiful Solution
MotionPoint currently helps seven of the Top 10 U.S. health insurers serve online U.S. Hispanics in Spanish. As we’ve reported in the past, companies that serve U.S. Hispanics in their preferred language experience year-over-year growth in website traffic, conversion rates, revenue and other key metrics.
Ours is a light touch solution that dramatically lowers the cost of managing a website in multiple languages. MotionPoint's platform does this by storing content independent of the webpages where it appears. It dynamically replaces the English content on each webpage with the proper translated content (like Spanish) when it's served to non-English speakers.
Since it operates independently of an insurer's English website, our solution provides HIPAA- and HITECH-compliant security. Any personal data an insurer might collect is completely ignored by MotionPoint's system. It's forwarded securely to the insurer's back-end systems instead.
Our solution was also designed with scalability in mind, so it can effortlessly accommodate the dozens of translated state-, company- and agent-specific websites and portals that insurers must operate to serve customers nationwide. Insurers can also offer state- or region-specific promotions or product offerings with ease; MotionPoint's platform supports such translated localizations.
It even supports content submitted electronically to online exchanges run by third parties—while still complying with all state and federal regulations.
But as every IT pro knows, most translatable online content transcends mere text stored in a CMS. This content can be found in images, PDFs, third-party content, on-site metadata, CSS files, JavaScript, AJAX, JSON, multimedia content and more. Even on-site search and web applications such as Online Quote/Application, Agent Finder, Pay Your Bill, Manage Your Account and Submit a Claim are fully supported by MotionPoint's platform.
If a website browser can render it, MotionPoint can translate it.
An Eye Toward the Future
Insurance IT pros also know that modernizing core technologies and replacing 20- and 30-year-old legacy systems is mission-critical to their company’s success. This often puts technical teams behind the proverbial 8-ball to “streamline their architecture, infrastructure and application portfolios,” analysts for Property Casualty 360° recently wrote, “all as a way to be able to focus more IT resources on the kinds of initiatives that positively affect customers and agents in a direct way.”
MotionPoint's solution accommodates these aging technical architectures, and the ones that will debut in the years to come. No matter how many back-end systems your company has knitted together (to rightly provide a coherent user experience for customers), MotionPoint's future-proof solution can support them. In-house solutions can't do this effectively. Creating multi-lingual support for these systems-and having them play nicely with each other on an ongoing basis-is needlessly complex and expensive for an in-house team.
Finally, it’s clear that insurance companies must adapt to a “channel agnostic” future, in which consumer behaviors (and disruptive technologies and devices) will largely dictate how insurers serve them. MotionPoint’s solution features a powerful and flexible translation memory that can be used enterprise-wide—and leveraged for use in translated mobile experiences and apps, on wearables, and beyond.
And since MotionPoint's technology sits outside an insurer's existing website technologies, databases, and content management systems, we can deploy translated websites in about 40 days. Our platform also easily accommodates website redesigns, and migrations to other content management platforms.
Wrapping Up
Insurance CIOs, CTOs and other IT pros face innumerable pressures as they help their companies pivot into digital-first, customer-centric organizations. The technical challenges are also countless.
But these demands need not be at odds with serving new Spanish-speaking customers online. MotionPoint is a technology company; we understand the "behind the curtain" technical perspective far better than most. That's why our solution was designed to operate so elegantly alongside insurers' websites and digital services.
MotionPoint helps seven of the Top 10 U.S. health insurance companies provide multi-lingual services to the U.S. Hispanic market. Contact us to learn how we can help your grow your brand … while preserving the security, reliability, and online experience your customers know and trust.
Last updated on October 11, 2016
