Over the past year, we’ve seen an unprecedented investment by small and midsize carriers in policy administration transformation. Carriers that experience successful PAS implementations will be well positioned to leapfrog larger, better-funded competitors thanks to improved product flexibility and timeliness, not to mention lower IT costs.
Executive Summary
PwC's Imran Ilyas shares lessons PwC has learned in helping property/casualty insurance carriers implement new policy administration systems, noting that change management is often considered the soft side of the transformation. Ilyas says that, to the contrary, the process of managing the change—and, in particular, its impact on customers' and employees' expectations and activities—is critical to delivering hard cost reduction and product flexibility benefits.For a transformation of this magnitude, however, it is necessary to define an organizational change management strategy. Organizational change management is key not only to minimize disruption during the change but also to enable adoption and realization of the business benefits.
Moreover, our experience shows us that “soft” stuff like change management is often the hardest. I describe below some key lessons we’ve learned when defining and executing change management strategies for PAS implementations.
Don’t Forget About Your Customers
Most carriers do not go beyond traditional marketing or sales techniques when managing change with their agents. Therefore, they risk lower revenue due to agent dissatisfaction or changes in the agents’ carrier preference and damage to the carrier’s brand.
