There are 28.8 million small businesses in the United States, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), with 56.8 million employees. There are 10 essential types of business insurance, three of them mandatory: Workman’s Comp, Unemployment, and Disability. The other seven include: General Liability, Commercial Property, Professional Liability, Product Liability, Employment Practices Liability, Key Person, and Business Interruption. To the top 15 small business insurance carriers, this information represents a tremendous opportunity to expand the footprint with existing customers and potential prospects. Additionally, those 56.8 million employees also have personal insurance needs for themselves and their families, creating even greater opportunity.
Carriers’ internal data sources, assuming they are all conformed in a data warehouse, may provide the intelligence needed to understand the portfolio, e.g. who is insured, policies per customer, industry segments, the products each customer sells, as well as the associated risks. However, an array of intelligence is needed to upsell and cross sell to the existing customers as well as to ensure the right product for each target customer. This additional intelligence most likely will come from external sources, such as social media, trade publications, business associations, etc.
Understanding the customer is no small task
For instance, consider that 82% of small businesses fail because of cash flow, and only one-third of the small businesses survive 10 years. To control risk and mitigate loss–including from fraud, waste and abuse–a carrier must understand the challenges faced by its customer portfolio as well as the prospects, in ongoing fashion. These include the impacts of economic uncertainty which lead to spending decline by the small business customers as well as healthcare benefits cost, among others. Such intelligence enables:
A continuous understanding of current and potential portfolios’ risk
Better product bundling and/or product selection for the target customers
Expedited underwriting
Positioning the carrier as a trusted partner hence expanding the opportunity to up/cross-sell individual line products to the small business employees
The unfortunate reality is that for most companies, even internal data is difficult to access–it is not neatly conformed in a well-organized and continually updated warehouse. If analyzing internal data isn’t difficult enough, add to that the prospect of integrating the kind of external data sources we’ve been discussing, and the prospect of gathering the intelligence needed to upsell and cross sell to existing partners becomes dim–with standard tools, that is. Enter Promethium.
Promethium bridges all the gaps to customer insight with NLP-driven technology
To facilitate this near real-time understanding of the insurer’s customers and prospects, carriers are using Promethium to ask the questions from their preferred query tool in any format, even in natural language. Using advanced AI, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Promethium eliminates the current pain and cost of BI and Analytics solutions. As Promethium enables the answers in near real time from disorderly internal and external sources that may lack a conformed database source, sales & distribution will be able to call on clients with the right product mix.
The benefits of using Promethium to gather near-real time intelligence are even more significant if one considers that on-going intelligence acquisition may enable the understanding of risk as well as the opportunity for product bundling and product innovation. Leveraging Promethium, carriers and brokers can grow their business among the top one third of small businesses by 20% year-over-year, notwithstanding the opportunity to explore individual products for the small businesses employees.
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