Insurance & Technology: Cognizant Business Consulting Experts Explain how Marketing Analytics can Help Insurers Bridge the Divide Between IT and Marketing

“As marketing assumes a critical role in differentiating insurers, marketing analytics provides a platform for CMOs and CIOs to work collaboratively,” write Michael Kim, Vice-President of Insurance Consulting, and Agil Francis, Senior Manager of Insurance Consulting at Cognizant. “In most insurance companies, there’s a struggle between the Marketing and IT departments. Marketing believes IT to be slow, glacial even. The reality is that IT is answering to other areas within the organization, and thus has to prioritize. The twin programming behemoths within insurance companies that have taken most of IT’s time are Underwriting and Claims.”

According to Kim and Francis, marketing is taking on an increasingly critical role within the company. “In the world of insurance, the capabilities of Underwriting and Claims have become largely similar across insurance companies,” they write. “In terms of one insurer differentiating itself from another, therefore, what this means is that Marketing is going to be increasingly important in creating that perception (or even help the company move toward the reality) of a differentiated company with differentiated products. In other words, Marketing could be the critical function that becomes IT’s next priority to support with new capabilities.”

The authors say that marketing analytics may help to break the ice. “While a robust marketing analytics function is going to require expertise to build, between the database, the reporting layers over it, the user interface and its navigation, it is not as heavy or complex as a policy administration system or a claims system, nor does it have big processes that have to be coded. Hence, it affords IT the opportunity to build it and get it up and running quickly,” they aver. “What Marketing gets out of this is a program that will answer the questions pointing to key performance indicators for marketing effectiveness and efficiency, such as average marketing spend for each new lead, customer, and referral—and what it puts into it is data obtained from both within and outside the company.”

Once Marketing and IT are talking, the authors note, other good things may start to happen. “It might become clear that their collaboration is actually gaining the company a lot of new, low-risk customers—the kinds of customers the company really wants—and the ability to better understand, through the analytics function, what special product features and services customers want. The reality is that although Marketing and IT may seem to be functionally quite different in an insurance company, what they share is much greater than what divides them.”

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