I am prepared to wager a bet that most CEOs don’t have to, and perhaps wouldn’t want to, use their insurance company policy administration system firsthand themselves. They have teams of people doing that – right? For those front-line operational staff, it is the critical tool for servicing customers and managing day to days business, from customer sign up through to claims and premium billing. But for most CEOs (maybe most executives) there is no need to be using the system on a day-to-day operational basis. You just need to know it works – right?
But what if, as CEO or C-suite executive, you had to use the system? Could you? And more importantly, could you do that with little to no training?
This is a situation that I have personally found myself in. For a range of reasons, some forced by critical business issues and some simply from a desire to get into the trenches with the team and help out, it made sense for me as a CEO to be using our system in real time to undertake policy administration and claims processing tasks.
And even if you don’t have to do it - I’d suggest it’s a really valuable thing to do. Nothing better than seeing things firsthand!
The critical advantage in usability
Having been in this situation myself, the difference between an old-style legacy system and a more modern system, is like night and day.
On the legacy platform my ability to use the system was totally dependent on having a buddy to help me. Not only was the navigation across multiple screens not intuitive, it also required some institutional knowledge; “it says X but in fact you can only enter Y” or “to find that you need to jump forward three screens and then come back” or “you’ll need to calculate that offline then come back to complete”. It would have taken several weeks, if not months, of training to become confident enough to use the system unaccompanied; and time is not something CEO’s have a lot of.
By comparison, modern systems that use intuitive design, simple workflows and are focused on the user experience are a breeze (even for the untrained CEO!). The test should be the same as for a website. You shouldn’t need weeks of training to use a website you’ve never seen or used before; so why should it take several weeks to use an internal facing system?
The truth is of course that you may never be in a situation where the CEO or C-Suite executives need to use the system in an operational way. But my question is this: if you had to – could you?
I have never seen this success criteria specifically written into an insurance platform business case or set of requirements: “make the system so intuitive and easy to use that even the CEO could use it”. But I’m now a big advocate for this being mandatory!
OptiX is a system built on a core principle of intuitive usability – whether your role is in customer services or claims, or you are sitting at the executive table.
Contact us to find out more.