Insight

SSA & Company Notebook: Digital Tools to Get Ahead During Constant Change

< BACK TO INSIGHTS

Insight

SSA & Company Notebook: Digital Tools to Get Ahead During Constant Change

Note From Our CEO:

The impact of COVID-19 continues to shift priorities for businesses, employees, and customers, and the acceleration of cultural and generational trends has been relentless. As the challenges of the new environment evolve across all industries, leaders continue to look to digital transformation to position their organizations for ongoing success in the future. Inside this newsletter, you’ll find the most recent insights from SSA & Company industry experts on how to navigate new realities. Below, a “deep dive” roadmap in Digital Transformation, a series of thought pieces focused on the insurance industry, and a host of perspectives from our retail experts.

SSA & Company is growing! As the needs of our industries evolve, so do we. Get to know our newest hires and recently promoted team members here.

SSA & Company Deep Dive

When a Digital Transformation Is Nearly Grounded at Takeoff

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our financial services team was working to roll out a multi-million-dollar digital transformation for a leading re-insurance organization. The goal was to work with the organization to digitize its global operating model to expedite transaction execution, reduce cost, enhance overall service delivery, and grow its competitive advantage. Despite obstacles, our team successfully developed the business case for digitization, drove consensus and adoption of global standards, and oversaw execution.

Read the full deep dive into our team’s work here.

Our Latest Thought Leadership

1. Post-COVID Customer Service: Where AI Can Help

COVID-19 drastically altered customer expectations relating to every aspect of the retail experience. As we enter a new environment, shoppers will no longer tolerate pandemic-era excuses from retailers and are back operating under the mindset that the customer is always right. AI can be the solution for retailers trying to meet evolving customer service needs, as many have come to embrace new technologies during the pandemic. AI-driven tech can fuel predictive personalization, helping supercharge even the most intuitive and knowledgeable customer service agents.

Read the full article here. 

2. How Insurers Can Attract the New Talent They Desperately Need

  • The Insurance Industry Can Reposition to Appeal to Digitally Savvy Youth – The insurance industry finds itself facing a crisis of talent as technology and digital enablement are rapidly shifting both internal processes and customer interaction models and experience. This has led to the need for a realignment of resources, governance, and infrastructure to accommodate employees in these new working environments- and strongly affects talent acquisition, from recruiting to managing that talent.
  • Talent Crisis Will Drive Change in Insurance – Insurance companies must reach out to a non-traditional pool of applicants to attain the diversified talent they need. The talent crisis, coupled with other market forces, will require a massive shift within insurance recruiting, talent management, and digital adoption techniques. Successful firms will embrace challenges and deploy teams to serve their customers in more nimble ways, to attract, nurture, and keep the talent they need to sustain their business.

3. Commercial Insurance Brokers – Disrupters Are Headed for You

The commercial insurance brokerage space is ripe for disruption unless legacy brokerages can get there first. By investing in digital transformation, incumbents can become more agile, fend off new entrants, and disrupt the disruptors. Brokers must recognize the urgency to amplify the digital journey to protect the business not only from outside disruptors but also from system obsolescence and operational risk from within. Digital transformation will result in efficiency gains, improved customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, back-office empowerment to gain market share.

Read the full article here. 

4. Digital is Fueling an Insurance Evolution

  • Part I: Why Insurers Should Prioritize Multi-Channel Engagement – The emergence of insurtechs and parallel trends in other consumer-facing industries has insurance customers demanding a higher standard of digital engagement. Players that use data to better understand target segments, shift towards a user-first mindset, embrace the opportunity to build their organization’s capabilities, and offer more simple, customized, user-friendly solutions will be able to remain competitive.
  • Part II: How Tech is Evolving Insurance Risk Analysis – In insurance, risk – and the tools used to evaluate risk – are evolving into a divided model. This change will ultimately reward carriers that can adapt and match its business model and cost structure to the characteristics of their portfolio. Successful carriers will bridge risk segments and see client engagement grow.

Retail Perspective in the Press

  1. Retail TouchPoints: Making the Most of BNPL: How Education and Total Cost Transparency Can Lead to Bigger Baskets
  2. ​​​​Sourcing Journal: DTC, Drop Shipping and the New Normal
  3. CNN Business: Amazon Helped Crush Department Stores. Now it Reportedly Wants to Be One
  4. Insider: 5 E-Commerce Technology Trends Brands Are Thinking About Right Now, According to Experts
  5. New York Times: Brandon Blackwood Blows Up
  6. Retail TouchPoints: Customer Service Can Be Retailer’s Secret Weapon in Building Customer Loyalty
  7. The Robin Report: Sak’s Bold Move

Interested in having insights like these sent directly to your inbox? Sign up for our newsletter here.

LinkedIn

Recommended Insights

Insight

Three Important Operational Priorities for Life Insurance in 2024

Featured Thought Leadership

In life insurance and annuities, the promise has always been unwavering stability and resilience. Insurance companies have adapted to the times by being measured and purposeful, living their commitment to providing long-term security. The last decade challenged this paradigm, having introduced a relentless wave of innovation, including contactless underwriting, consumer demand for digital-centric interactions, the office impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the entry of private equity, and rapid fluctuations in interest rates, with the looming threat of declining asset values already requiring another round of new investment strategies, product revisions, and balance sheet optimizations. 

Learn More

Insight

A Painful Year Looms for Issuers of Middle-Market Consumer Credit Cards

Featured News

Pierre Buhler was featured in this American Banker article outlining strategies for credit card issuers operating in an increasingly complex environment. 

Learn More

Insight

Weighing Risk and Reward with Gen AI Vendor Selection

Featured News

Nick Kramer was quoted in this CIO article about things to consider when choosing a gen AI vendor. 

Learn More
View All Insights

Stay up-to-date with our latest news

Name(Required)