Today’s insurance companies are in a difficult spot.

A rash of catastrophe incidents has forced CAT savings budgets upwards, putting new pressure on cost management.

The e-commerce success of a number of direct writers has upended the traditional independent and captive agent channels alike.

And the agency channel as a demographic continues to age — making continuity a concern.

Costs rising. Workforce aging. Brands muddled by political red tape. In the face of all that, insurance carriers need a tool they can use to gain an edge — to create an advantage in a market designed to make it hard to set one’s self apart.

And for a growing number of insurers, video is that tool that can support knowledge management, communications, and overall operations.

Here’s How Insurance Carriers Are Using Video To Improve Operations

 

1. Documenting Claims

Why rely on static images or text descriptions when a rich, detailed video can be shot with the phone in almost anyone’s pocket? Already insurers are exploring the options for capturing claims information via video, either directly from the claimant through a new wave of smartphone apps, or directly from the adjuster. Often even simple point-of-view video from a tablet, smartphone, or wearable camera like Google Glass provides a more complete summary of a claim activity than even the most detailed notes.

2. Preserving Employee Expertise

In an industry with an aging workforce, capturing institutional expertise is quickly becoming essential to continued operations. Video makes it easy for insurers to document the expertise of their veteran employees — sharing how a ratings engine works, what factors are included in a coverage matrix, the standard workflow for the claims organizations, or virtually any other subject. Preserving that wisdom helps to ensure it will always be accessible to anyone else in the organization, even after the expert retires or leaves.

3. Scaling Training — Efficiently

Training is an essential part of keeping a business competitive — and its people up to date in a changing marketplace. Yet when expense ratios are a constant concern, corporate learning and development budgets are often a target for cost-cutting. Video provides a means to scale training activities. Recording traditional classroom training events and sharing them online reduces the need to repeat those sessions time and again at multiple locations — and can help carriers save 40% or more on their annual training budgets.

4. Social Knowledge Sharing

Most insurance organizations are traditionally structured, with claims, service, product, and operations working as separate business units. It’s efficient — but can make collaboration difficult. That’s why many insurers are turning to video — to document the day-to-day working operations and strategic business decision rationales, to better give teams all across the organization instant access to better understand how others work, and how everyone can work together.

5. Consistent Channel Communications

Whether your agents are independent, under contract, or all in your call center, the need to ensure every message to your sales force be delivered consistently and professionally is paramount. Panopto makes it simple to broadcast any message to a large number of agents at once, with live streaming webcasts that can be viewed live by tens of thousands of people worldwide — and can instantly be made shareable on-demand the moment they are finished.

6. Memorable Marketing Communications

Today’s insurance carriers have proven no amateur when it comes to video advertising — but ads are just scratching the surface of how savvy insurance marketing teams can use video. From explainer videos and FAQs to customer welcoming and onboarding, video has become a reliable tool that helps carriers standing out from the competition — at every point in the customer lifecycle.

7. Commanding Corporate Communications

Many of today’s insurance carriers are big companies — with big communications needs. Video can help internal communications messages break through, in an engaging format that employees will notice. Forrester Research reports that employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read a message in text. And with analytics included, Panopto makes it a snap to see exactly who has or hasn’t watched a given recording, as well as whether each viewer watched the video in full or stopped short.

8. Facilitating Legal eDiscovery

With Panopto, eDiscovery is easy again — even for video content. Panopto’s Smart Search video content search capability means legal teams can easily search the actual content inside every video in their organization’s entire video library — every word spoken, every word that appears on-screen, and every word that is included in presentation slides, even speaker’s notes.

9. A Secure, Searchable Video Library

No matter how any insurance carrier uses video most often, in the end, nearly every one creates a robust library of video files in the process. Panopto is the only video platform that integrates best-of-breed recording and webcasting with a secure video library and a unique video search engine that makes finding information inside your videos as easy as searching for content in an email or document.

 

Download the Whitepaper 

In our latest white paper, 9 Ways Insurance Carriers Are Driving Down Combined Ratios — with Video, we’ll take a deeper look into some of today’s most common video strategies that insurance carriers are leveraging to scale training and communications, preserve the knowledge of retiring experts, and better engage both their customers and their channel partners in order to create a stronger competitive advantage.