As Total Expert doubles down on enhancing its offering for insurance agencies and brokerages, one of the most fundamental needs is bridging the gap between legacy back-end systems and the Total Expert platform. That’s where partnerships like that with Cogneesol, a leading business process management (BPM) platform, make the tremendous value of the Total Expert platform more readily and rapidly accessible for insurance organizations—providing proven, repeatable processes and technologies for integrating back-end data streams to drive Total Expert insights and journeys.
We sat down with Ashim Khurana, COO at Cogneesol, and our General Manager of Insurance, Ilya Filipov, to discuss how the Total Expert + Cogneesol partnership helps to address the latest trends impacting insurance agencies, brokers, and MGAs.
What are the key trends and dynamics impacting insurance agencies and brokerages today?
Ashim Khurana, Cogneesol: Insurance agencies and brokerages are increasingly finding that siloed technologies and fragmented processes manifest as broken operations that limit their ability to innovate. A major shift in customer needs is what’s pushing these problems to the breaking point. Clients now demand more personalized and convenient services, and agencies need to harness data-driven insights to deliver on those expectations. On top of that, the rise of Insurtech has intensified global competition and fostered these higher expectations, compelling agencies to innovate and digitize. To stay competitive, agencies must adopt advanced technologies and leverage customer insights, focusing on enhancing workflow efficiency, exploring new distribution channels, and seeking alternative funding options for growth.
Ilya Filipov, Total Expert: A key trend we’ve observed is a race toward digital transformation, where leaders are telling us that the shift toward digital platforms is crucial for future growth and stability. Customers expect seamless online experiences across various mediums. They also want more personalization—and agencies are looking to use data analytics to offer personalized insurance solutions and engagement. Agencies are also taking a broader look at how to improve overall customer engagement. Customers want informative content, responsive support, and interactive experiences. This is making social media and content marketing more important, but agencies are figuring out how to deliver personalized engagement at scale to build trust and loyalty. Lastly, leaders are looking for digital support to help them get on top of (and stay ahead of) an evolving regulatory compliance landscape. They want digital tools that help them keep sales and marketing strategies compliant with evolving regulations—ensuring transparency, protecting customer data, and boosting confidence in the brokerage’s services—while still enabling them to adapt and act on real-time opportunities.
How is the insurance industry adapting to changing customer demands?
Ashim: Customers’ expectations around technology intervention and innovation are much different than even a few years ago. This shift is primarily toward having a modern and predictable user experience, with personalized and seamless client experiences facilitated by digital solutions. The changeover to Insurtech in the business has pushed insurers to invest in digital platforms and automate capabilities that can provide greater accessibility and convenience to their customers. Moreover, integrating advanced analytics and real-time data processing has enabled insurers to offer more tailored services, catering to the needs and preferences. The insurance industry is rapidly moving towards a fully digital end-to-end operations model, with most, if not all, processes being automated or seamlessly fulfilled over digital channels.
Ilya: Agencies need to be able to engage the customer or prospect in the moments that matter and through the mediums they prefer. They also need to engage clients in an informed way. For that, they need to use their own customer—and complement it with external insights that help them understand intent. More broadly, insurance agencies need to have an agile approach to their customer engagement strategy. We live in very dynamic times. Customer engagement strategies that worked a few years ago won’t be effective today. Insurance agencies need to be able to adjust their approach as market conditions change, and they need to adjust it at scale for every customer and prospect individually.
How Cogneesol is helping insurance agencies?
Ashim: Cogneesol helps insurance agencies and brokers navigate and unravel the complexities of today’s market. Our expertise in digital transformation and process optimization powers solutions that allow agencies and brokers to streamline their underwriting processes, which directly enhances operational efficiency. Because of our deep understanding of client operations, our solutions are built to allow agencies to embrace agile operations while infusing advanced analytics and AI tools into their ecosystem. Agencies are leaning on Cogneesol’s domain knowledge, data management expertise, and technological innovation to build future-ready infrastructure and strategies to meet and exceed evolving client needs. Rather than taking a blanket approach, we work with each client to introduce these transformations and provide them with the right levers to drive value for their operations.
How does the partnership between Total Expert and Cogneesol provide added value to agencies today?
Ilya: We’ve seen 300% growth in our insurance customer base because the Total Expert value proposition clearly speaks to insurance agencies: We help them engage their customers and prospects in the moments that matter.
The best part is that insurance agencies already have the raw customer data and intelligence that they need to improve the customer journey. But that data is often unstructured, and it resides in back-end systems that are dated, complex to use, and difficult for modern platforms to integrate with. Cogneesol helps Total Expert build and maintain near-real-time data orchestration middleware that seamlessly connects the Total Expert platform to insurance agency management systems like Applied Epic and AMS360—the core systems that drive a large portion of the P&C insurance market. Cogneesol will help Total Expert onboard insurance clients that use these systems faster, with fewer resources, and ensure that customer data doesn’t fall through the gaps. The middleware is designed to provide complete flexibility in defining the translation rules for the entities across these platforms and will support bi-directional data at customizable frequencies. That’s the technical detail, but the high-level story is that as Cogneesol drives customized, seamless integration between Total Expert and these core back-end systems, we can more effectively and more rapidly help our insurance agency customers improve their customers’ experiences.
Looking towards the future, what are you excited about by partnering with Total Expert?
Ashim: Partnering with Total Expert allows Cogneesol to showcase its technology prowess and deep insurance domain expertise to help insurance agencies create new-age, real-time user experiences and redefine the services and solutions they deliver to their customers. Cogneesol is excited to tap into the expertise and skill sets at Total Expert to create more personalized and bespoke solutions for the insurance market participants.
Ilya: Almost any digital transformation or technology initiative hinges on the ability to utilize data and insights from back-end systems. That challenge can get complicated, time-consuming, and expensive in a hurry. Total Expert is a back-end system agnostic company. Working with a market leader like Cogneesol lets us make it even easier for our insurance customers to leverage the full strength of the Total Expert platform to build out the ideal customer journey, regardless of the insurer’s legacy technology infrastructure, in a very economical and efficient way.
Learn more about the Total Expert + Cogneesol partnership:
