Unified Observability Drives Efficiency, Growth, and Sustainability for Insurance Firms

At Riverbed, we have years of experience working with some of the world’s biggest insurance companies, giving us insider knowledge of the industry’s toughest challenges, key drivers, and pain points. We’ve noticed a trend: organizations are striving to enhance efficiency and increase agility, with technology at the core. But with indecision, shrinking budgets, and internal skills shortages, often push these businesses towards outsourcing their network and application management.

However, there’s a simple way to maintain control of and access your infrastructure: unified observability solutions like the portfolio from Riverbed. With its innovative automation and self-healing capabilities, unified observability makes managing your tech in-house easier than ever. The platform pulls together big data from all your digital touchpoints, prioritizing tasks to minimize manual processes, mitigate alert fatigue, and accelerate mean time to repair.

Here’s how it’s empowering insurance firms like yours to achieve their most critical goals, right now:

Revolutionizing the customer experience

Every insurance company wants to be the go-to brand for customers, and front of mind when prospects are choosing who to protect them. To achieve this, it’s crucial to equip your staff the tools they need to understand and connect with the people you serve and understand their behaviors and habits. Essentially, improving the customer experience depends on enhancing the employee experience; allowing staff to do their jobs seamlessly, effectively, and productively, and they’ll be satisfied and better equipped to fulfill the evolving digital preferences of customers.

Perhaps a customer wants to pay less for health insurance, as their smartwatch data proves they live an active lifestyle, or maybe another only drives for work and needs to pause car insurance fees over the weekend.

Whoever your customer is and whatever their unique situation, they’ll also expect perfect uptime and availability of your services–on whichever connected devices they access them, from intelligent home devices to the standard smartphone. And if they have any queries or problems, they’d ideally like to deal with you through a clued-up chatbot rather than hanging around on hold for hours.

The chances are you already have the necessary data to meet these seemingly impossible demands. You just have too much of it, stored in disparate silos, and no way of making sense of it all. Enter Riverbed Unified Observability, which uses AI and machine learning to instantly and automatically show you this information on easily understandable single-pane dashboards. This means you can focus less on manual processes and customer service woes and more on strategy, tailoring your products to real desires rather than your best guess.

One of our global reinsurance customers used Riverbed for exactly that, saying: “Now that we have Riverbed’s Digital Experience Management solution, we have already seen benefits in terms of gaining insights we can act upon to improve delivery of services to our customers.”

Enhancing efficiencies to compete and grow

Today, your competitors aren’t the long-established, tried-and-trusted insurance brokers of old. They’re the snappy FinTech start-ups taking the market by storm–born in the cloud, without legacy tech or the burden of premises holding them back. To keep up, you’ll need to make changes, like moving critical applications to the cloud and reducing your physical footprint (which can also help cut your carbon footprint).

With Riverbed, you can become more streamlined than ever before, putting you not just on the same footing as these responsive newcomers but also ahead of the game. By capturing, analyzing, and giving up-to-the-minute insight on every action taken by employees and customers– then automatically creating shortcuts, remedying issues, and highlighting or even switching off underutilized machines–the platform takes care of the everyday so you can look after what really matters, like planning for your future growth. It also works effortlessly across hybrid environments, supporting you as you transition to the cloud.

The reinsurance customer mentioned earlier also used Riverbed to integrate cloud provider data with endpoint metrics, providing accurate customer experience information and identifying CPU processing issues across 80 locations. They said: “Riverbed’s Digital Experience solution allowed us to identify issues quicker, troubleshoot and validate them. Sometimes, issues seem fixed, but from a customer perspective, the problem persists. With Riverbed’s solutions, we are able to collaborate with other IT departments and vendors to get the issue resolved more effectively.”

Becoming more sustainable

All businesses must become more eco-friendly, not just to protect our planet but to uphold their reputation, too. Customers want to use companies they believe in, support, and trust, especially when it comes to insurance, By proving you care about the environment, you show you care about the people within it, too. It’s about driving genuine, meaningful change–such as leading on climate action, forging lasting community ties, operating sustainably, and reaching that net-zero milestone in the not-too-distant future.

Unified observability can help you reduce the amount of office space and server-room storage you need by supporting your transition to the cloud and hybrid working. It can give insight into unused or underperforming devices, allowing you to sweat the assets–recycling or refurbishing them only when they reach the end of their working life. It can also tell you when staff have stepped away from laptops for a prolonged period without shutting down, nudging them to do so with a notification or powering off remotely. As well as providing undeniable environmental benefits, these actions can save you money. One of our UK-based insurance customers is aiming for cost savings of £750 million by the end of 2024–a reality made possible with Riverbed’s Unified Observability and Acceleration portfolios.

Meanwhile, our global reinsurance customer used this function in Riverbed’s Unified Observability Platform to extend the lifecycle of its machines from three years to four. They said: “Moving forward, Riverbed can help us make decisions on hardware replacement, whether to replace laptops or desktops entirely, or whether to replace individual hardware components. This has the potential to increase the effective use of our finite resources and target customers who really need our assistance.”

To learn how your insurance company can maximize existing investments, delight staff and customers, embrace digital transformation, and remain competitive now and in the future, get in touch with our dedicated team now.