Maximizing QMT’s Potential: Enhancing Insurance Products and Customer Satisfaction

In today’s competitive insurance industry, providing exceptional customer experience is not just a goal; it is a necessity for long-term success. Insurance companies are adopting digital transformation to meet evolving customer expectations and offering specialized digital solutions to streamline and automate various insurance processes. However, success pivots on ensuring the reliability, functionality, and security of the underlying software to perform different tasks.  In this context, Quality Assurance (QA) emerges as a critical factor.

In the insurance industry’s digital landscape, QA is paramount to prevent customer dissatisfaction and financial losses. The inadequacies of traditional testing methods in meeting the demands of the new digital age have sparked the development of QMT, a QA software for insurance. This innovative approach accelerates test cycles and ensures comprehensive coverage to identify potential defects. This article explores how QMT empowers insurers to align with evolving customer expectations and elevate their overall experience.

Customer Experience: A Direct Link to Value Creation

In the complex landscape of insurance processes, the customer journey often involves multiple touchpoints, from the initial website visit to the purchasing of a policy, from filing a claim to renewing a policy. Each interaction with a touchpoint plays a pivotal role in shaping the overall customer experience. These touchpoints are an opportunity to help brokers, carriers, agents, and others to form strong, long-lasting relationships. Insurance policyholders expect simple, seamless, and positive interactions with their insurers through the touchpoints, just as they receive with every other aspect of their life.

A failure to meet those expectations will quickly result in them leaving. According to Adoreboard research on 59 major US insurers, policyholders are more likely to switch insurance providers because of the poor customer experience rather than traditional factors like pricing. Therefore, customer experience is no longer a luxury in the insurance industry where seven to nine times more money is spent on acquiring new customers than on retaining existing ones. Carriers must differentiate themselves to meet customer expectations and create a strong bond with their customers. When customers have a pleasant experience with an insurance carrier, they are more likely to remain loyal to that provider and even recommend the carrier to others, facilitating market expansions.

Insurance Customer Experience Challenges

Several trends in the insurance industry relate to customer experience, including personalization, omnichannel customer support, self-service options, simplified communication, streamlined claims, and an emphasis on risk prevention. To consistently deliver a distinctive experience in the digital landscape, insurance companies face unique challenges that advanced QA practices can help them overcome.

• Creating an Omnichannel Ecosystem: Creating an omnichannel customer experience is crucial to retaining customers. Customers use various channels to research, explore, purchase, and renew their insurance policies online, speak to a call center advisor, and expect immediate responses when facing problems while making claims or troubleshooting. The biggest challenge for insurance companies in creating an omnichannel environment is uniting various channels into one ecosystem, providing a seamless and cohesive experience. To ensure a seamless customer experience, insurance companies must meticulously test end-to-end digital processes, ensuring that every step of the insurance process, from the initial electronic application (eApp) to client communication, is rigorously tested. 

• Ensuring Data Security: Insurance customers are increasingly concerned about the security and privacy of their data. Ensuring privacy and data security in an omnichannel environment is a big challenge. Insurers must take robust security measures to ensure that their applications are capable of handling such a large amount of sensitive data. To ensure compliance with data protection laws, consumer privacy regulations, and policy guidelines, product QA is crucial.  

• Developing Highly Customized Products: Customers possess diverse preferences. By providing tailored messaging, offers, and pricing to customers at the right time, the insurer can make them feel valued and demonstrate that they understand their needs and are committed to providing the best possible solution. Developing highly customized products, however, requires integrating data from multiple sources, ensuring its accuracy, and performing rigorous QA processes to verify and validate applications and generate corresponding quotes and premiums for them.

• Modernizing Legacy Systems: Most insurers continue to rely on legacy systems, posing another challenge. The integration of the existing legacy system with innovative technologies and third-party platforms presents significant technical challenges. Customers may experience delays, errors, or temporary unavailability of services during the integration process. Testing the compatibility, interoperability, and data synchronization between legacy systems and new components is essential to ensure seamless functionality and a consistent user experience.  

Leveraging the Power of QMT to Enhance Customer Experience

In today’s fast-paced digital world, insurance companies must prioritize the customer experience to build brand image, trust, and retention. Testing the functionality, reliability, or security of the underlying software of digital interfaces and online applications is crucial to enhancing customer experience. Additionally, as insurance companies undergo digital transformation, testing the end-to-end digital processes, including online policy issuance, claims filing, and customer service, becomes critical for a seamless and satisfying customer experience. At the same time, reducing product development and testing cycles, and reaching customers at the right time with the right offerings and products becomes increasingly necessary. Therefore, when it comes to assuring QA throughout the customer journey in insurance processes, a wide range of parameters and a set of fresh expectations need to be taken into consideration. Failure to meet these expectations can result in a significant impact on the product and brand.

Here, QMT is a game-changer. QMT was designed to address the pain points of slow product release cycles and large numbers of undetected bugs of the underlying software in the insurance processes when using manual testing and existing testing approaches. QMT accelerates test cycles and features Full, End-to-End Test Coverage, ensuring that every step of the insurance process, from the initial electronic application (eApp) to client communication, is rigorously tested. By testing the end-to-end process of life insurance systems, and the integrations between them, carriers can validate every interaction and process flow within the system and eliminate embarrassing errors experienced by distributors and customers post-launch. To meet diverse testing requirements and tailor the QA process, QMT offers robust automated Test Case Generation Methodologies:  Maximum Resolution and Minimum Resolution and Test Selection feature.

Here is how QMT helps carriers meet evolving customer expectations and support a positive brand image:

• Improve Product Launches: QMT’s high-throughput, knowledge graph model-based approach enables shift-left allowing the entire QA cycle to be reduced to a few hours instead of weeks or months. By using a high-performance knowledge graph of the business logic, which provides a deep understanding of the relationships, QMT discovers all defects early, delivering the level of quality needed to meet product launch dates. Using a knowledge graph model removes manual testing and human error and extends the visibility of QA for new products to well-informed, technical business analysts.

• Full Coverage at a Fraction of the Cost: QMT features full, end-to-end test coverage combined with automated test cases and data generation, providing a low code method for testing business logic and workflow. The model automates the generation of all test cases by traversing the knowledge graph model which produces all permutations of the business logic. These test cases are then executed in an automation framework. Testing the end-to-end process of life insurance systems and their integrations can help carriers ensure the quality of product launches and prevent embarrassing errors experienced by distributors and customers post-launch.

• Eliminate Quality-Related Day 2 Issues: QMT drastically reduces test cycle times via powerful variance analysis that detects and only tests changes since the last execution. QMT enables IT (Information Technology) executives to get more value from the dollars they are already spending and reach full test coverage eliminating quality-related Day 2 Issues, or to choose to deploy fewer people to support existing coverage.

• Shift Left, All the Way: QMT dramatically reduces test cycle execution time, from weeks or months to hours, enabling earlier and more frequent testing in the agile development process. QMT is designed to work seamlessly with existing systems and integrate into CI/CD processes and automation systems such as Jenkins and Jira.

• Secure and Control the Environment: QMT implements security measures to create a controlled environment that supports SOC 2 attestation and HIPAA compliance. This includes access controls and a secure model relational database, which helps reduce the carrier’s risk and exposure.

• Speed up Product Customization: QMT enables the complete business process flow of the insurance policy life cycle to be built within a visual, interconnected model. Abstracting the business processes simplifies change management and readily supports making changes to an application under test, by only requiring an update to the affected nodes in the model. Updated test cases are generated automatically, consequently, only what has changed needs to be tested, which reduces time and eliminates human error.

• Extend the Architecture: QMT’s extensible architecture includes a library of common function calls that support testing of the entire ecosystem and the integrations between them, such as underwriting, policy status, issuance, and claims. Additionally, it allows for the direct integration of carriers’ existing testing function calls into a model node, which can speed up test time by up to 4x.

• Provide Insightful Test Report: QMT generates a comprehensive test report that provides an overview of test coverage and outcomes as well as a description of defects found during the testing. QMT supports taking the snapshot of each test step and embedding the snapshot into the test report corresponding to each test step, facilitating root cause analysis. Through this, the QA team can prioritize defects, track their resolution, and communicate their findings to relevant stakeholders.

The Way Forward

Positive customer experience is vital for insurance carriers, as it is linked directly to customer loyalty, retention, and brand perception. Insurance companies are striving to enhance their customer experience by adopting digital transformation. Yet, to achieve business success with a high ROI (return on investment), robust QA of underlying software is essential to ensure optimal outcomes from digital transformation efforts. The adoption of Emtech QMT has led to significant successes in the insurance industry, streamlining the QA process and enabling insurers to deliver high-quality products and services efficiently to exceed customer expectations. QMT’s Full end-to-end Test Coverage features enable insurers to validate the entire customer journey from the moment an insurance application is submitted to the final stages of client communication and policy management. By leveraging Minimum Resolution and Maximum Resolution approaches, along with the Test Selection feature, insurers can tailor their QA processes to meet evolving customer expectations. For example, embracing QMT, a century-old Life Insurance Carrier saw a 30-fold surge in automated test coverage, slashing manual testing hours from around 2,500 to 30 and diminishing the need for Full-Time Employees (FTE) in QA by 80%.