How to Protect Mission-Critical Insurance Operations to Reduce Network and Service Disruptions

Much like nearly every other business sector, the insurance industry is undergoing a transformation. As the introduction of digital technologies heralds greater efficiencies for sales agents, brokers, adjusters, and administrators, new advancements also hold tremendous promise for better quality customer experiences.

New digital tools and strategies are introducing the potential for more efficient services that offer increasingly seamless interactions between employees, partners, and customers, ultimately driving greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. As insurers introduce next-gen technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), predictive systems, and automated processes, achieving and maintaining peak network and application performance will spell the difference between success and failure—which will impact revenue and growth potential for the business.

Whether in contact centers, on the internet or on an ecommerce app or a mobile application, every touchpoint with the customer has to be flawless. This greater reliance on digital services will require end-through-end observability—from the data center to the cloud to the individual user—to enable IT to boost performance, reduce downtime, and keep everything running smoothly.

The Things That Keep IT Professionals Awake at Night

For insurance industry IT professionals, the thought of network disruptions or slowdowns is enough to keep them awake at night. Problems that IT wrestles with daily can range from slowdowns on web portals for sales quotes (which can impact sales agents), to disruptions or failures of ecommerce and mobile apps used by customers who are attempting to file claims.

When networks and applications fail, adjusters are unable to pull up property damage photos uploaded by customers in claims software, and contact centers experience unexpected dropped calls and poor call quality, creating lengthy wait times and longer calls—all requiring more agents to handle the backlog of customers. IT may also face voice and video quality issues with cloud-based collaboration tools used for connecting employees in regional offices. Adding to the challenges, IT is tasked with troubleshooting and pinpointing the cause of slowdowns reported by employees in custom apps.

Observability Across the Business—including Remote Locations—Is Essential

To ensure that networks and applications can meet the needs of the evolving insurance marketplace and deliver the best customer experience, IT needs a proactive visibility strategy. With so many aspects of the business operating from remote locations, such as claims adjustors working in the field, remote call center employees, brokers in dispersed locations, and customers on the go, being able to see communications all the way through to the end application source is essential. Observability at these remote locations is key to troubleshooting problems when they occur.

NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution offers the observability that IT needs. By integrating detailed packet-level analysis with synthetic business transaction testing, this solution addresses the complexities of the insurance industry ecosystems, including remote operations and multivendor, hybrid-cloud environments.

By effectively monitoring at the packet level, NETSCOUT delivers the critical visibility needed for IT to make proactive decisions. Essentially, armed with this intelligence, IT can reduce mean time to knowledge (MTTK), thus shortening mean time to repair (MTTR). NETSCOUT has found that IT spends 90 percent of its time trying to understand the problem. In other words, it typically takes longer to get a handle on the problem than to fix it. NETSCOUT solutions have been independently proven to reduce the MTTR of performance incidents by as much as 80 percent. In one recent case, MTTR was sliced to 15 minutes via NETSCOUT observability (watch our webinar “Observability for Improved Performance and Reduced Downtime in Insurance Networks” to learn more).

For insurance industry IT professionals, comprehensive observability can enable them to achieve early detection of issues, reducing troubleshooting time and preventing operational disruptions. This makes it possible to maintain network and application performance, ensuring the highest level of user experience around essential services such as claims processing, underwriting, and customer service.

The good news is that by speeding up MTTR, IT has an opportunity to improve efficiency and productivity, which delivers cost savings and a positive impact on the bottom line. End-through-end observability is tantamount to purchasing the best insurance policy money can buy.

Learn how observability with NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution helps IT improve customer service, protect performance, and ensure business continuity across insurance operations for employees and customers.