Seven Ways It Should Be Easier To Buy An Annuity
July 9, 2019 by Matt Carey
Insurers still aren’t doing enough to modernize the process of buying an annuity. This creates a vicious cycle — longer time spent by agents on a time consuming process that yields an inadequate customer experience, which leads to lower conversion-to-sales rates, which lead to the need for higher compensation in order for agents to justify offering annuities, which leads to lower value products for consumers, which in turn make the products harder to sell and pushes conversion-to-sales rates lower.
Although there’s finally more attention being paid to this issue, it seems like the lion’s share of insurance company spending is being dedicated to improving legacy systems, rather than building modern quoting, application processing, and policy administration systems from the ground up.
In some sense, it’s easy to understand the insurers’ hesitation — the cost of addressing these issues is immediate and direct, but their benefits are mostly deferred and indirect. But the alternatives are far less attractive — do nothing and fall even further behind, or pursue an incremental approach that kicks the can down the road and will eventually necessitate the same “rip it up and start over” approach that could be done today.
Click HERE to read the full story via Forbes.
