11th Annual Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conference
“The Engaged Insurance Environment: Agile, Mobile, Analytic, Collaborative”
Sheraton Centre Hotel, Toronto – March 18-19, 2013
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2013 Conference Overview |
ICTC2013 Photos |
ICTC 2013 was held Monday and Tuesday, March 18-19, 2013.
ICTC 2014 will be held March 17-18, 2014.
Logo and Theme
The 2013 conference theme is “The Engaged Insurance Environment,” whose key components are represented in our conference logo. Our faculty will address the elements of the theme in their presentations.
Whether they are customers (policyholders, insured, claimants) or prospects, or figures within the industry (employees, partners, distributors, providers), people who are engaged – that is, who are communicating on their terms and with their own set of expectations – are more focused, productive, innovative and loyal.
As the digital information age has evolved from computers to the Internet to the latest social developments, people have learned to use new tools in new ways. We are now in an age which is more social than ever before, and consequently organizations and individuals are striving to come to grips with the ongoing upheaval that affects much of what we do and how we do it. To serve customers well and to be productive, people must be engaged.
We all use data in our jobs to support what we do, and we all have our own needs while we strive to support the needs of others. Similarly, to accomplish our tasks, we use products provided by others even while developing or servicing products being used by others. At a fundamental level, to fulfill our roles, we must communicate.
In striving to be agile (adaptive, dynamic, responsive), we have become increasingly mobile, with the option to work anywhere. The accessible and useful data demands that we be increasingly analytic in order to be competitive. Finally, we must be closer to our customers – which is to say we must be social – while at the same time sharing or collaborating much more within our professional space.
In a very short time, the emphasis on the use of technology has changed. This is a fascinating time!
Components of the Logo
1. Social: Other than call centres, face-to-face discussions, and email, communications (in the marketing and sales sense) has traditionally been a one-way street out to the prospect or customer. There was little interaction. The new social media world changes all that: listening and responding, participating, reaching out – bring a whole new dimension to customer contact and the community you serve.
2. Data: Everything the insurance industry does for a customer rests on a foundation of information about the customer and about all aspects of servicing the customer – their communications, their preferences, their coverages.
3. Communications: Communication enables relationships, whether in a collaborative sense among industry participants or simply in terms of listening to and speaking with the customer.
4. Product: Presenting and servicing the customer with the most suitable product captures opportunity and improves retention.
5. Engagement: An engaged insurance professional will support his or her peers and customers at the same time.
6. Agile: As the technological and social upheaval continues, the characteristic of agility – on the part of an organization and all the individual people and processes, the technology, capital, and other elements that make it up – is what enables businesses to respond. Cloud and SaaS are reshaping the computing and supporting infrastructure and represent both the evolution and use of technology as well as a potential avenue to improve agility.
7. Mobile is increasingly essential to efficient and effective productivity, especially as we move into the collaborative, social world.
8. Analytic becomes a staple of the insurance environment from marketing to pricing and underwriting and finally claims while the leaders move into predictive and advanced analytics.
9. Collaborative: As important as the social media space is to listening to and speaking with customers and prospects, the potential leverage from work group collaboration within the extended insurance industry may be as large or even larger.
Each of our presentation sessions will address one or more of the elements above, to help meet objectives, drive better results, and illuminate the challenges and issues we all face together.
