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Overview of Insurance Portals
Features, Integrations, Benefits, Pricing
ScienceSoft combines 19 years of practice in web portal development with 12 years of experience in creating software for insurance companies to introduce effective, secure, and visually appealing insurance portals.
Contributors
ScienceSoft’s Insurance IT Consultant
ScienceSoft’s Head of Web Development
An Insurance Portal: Key Aspects
An insurance portal is aimed to introduce seamless digital experiences for insurers’ clients, employees, agent teams, and suppliers. Insurance portals provide end users with vast self-service options, process automation, prompt and secure access to the required data and documents.
For insurers, portals bring significant improvement in operational efficiency and higher satisfaction and retention rates of their customers, vendors, and employees.
Building an insurance portal may cost around $40,000–$400,000+, depending on the solution's complexity and the chosen development approach. You're welcome to use our free calculator to estimate the cost for your case.
The implementation of custom insurance portal software typically takes 3–6 months. An insurance portal can bring around 190% ROI within three years after deployment.
Main Types of Insurance Portals
A customer portal
Provide your clients with a personalized digital experience and self-service options and drive up to 90% increase in customer engagement and an 80+% improvement in retention.
An agent portal
Equip your agents and MGAs with best-in-class workflow automation and collaboration tools and provide them with instant access to the required data. Achieve 40%+ increase in agent productivity and up to 4x faster policy cycle.
A supplier portal
Build close and transparent relationships with suppliers, eliminate redundant efforts, and unlock mutual financial gains. Securely exchange sensitive insurance data and leverage no-touch claim evaluation and settlement.
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NB! Although a broker portal is sometimes referred to as a separate portal type, its functionality and benefits are basically the same as those of a customer portal. |
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If you want to implement a case-specific corporate portal for improved productivity and streamlined management of your internal teams, feel free to explore ScienceSoft’s dedicated pages
Key Features of an Insurance Customer Portal
With 80%+ of customers trying to solve the issues on their own before asking for help, a customer self-service portal becomes a must rather than a need for insurers looking to provide excellent client experience.
Based on ScienceSoft’s experience in customer portal development projects, we compiled a list of features that lay the foundation for a successful client portal:
Customer onboarding
- Configurable forms for customer self-registration.
- AI-powered processing of customer digital documents.
- Customer digital identity validation.
- Geography-based KYC/AML verification.
- Customers’ e-signature capture and verification.
Account management for customers
- Multi-factor authentication.
- Managing and updating personal or business information and billing details.
- Uploading documents in different formats: PDF, digital image, video, etc.
- Setting up the preferred language, communication channel, billing method, etc.
- Linking the account with social media profiles.
- Overview of the policy portfolio and a history of insurance transactions.
- A sidebar with the “recently viewed” information.
- End-to-end audit trail of account activities.
Customer self-service area
- Template-based generation of:
- Insurance applications.
- Claims.
- Requests for policy updating, cancellation, renewal, termination.
- Instant submission of applications, requests, and claims to the insurer.
- Paying insurance premiums via a selected payment method.
- Real-time monitoring of the application approval, policy issuance, payment processing, claim resolution statuses.
- Notifications on the expiring policies, due payments, personal and billing info that needs updating, etc.
- Instant messaging to communicate with the insurance specialists.
- (optional) A self-service premium calculator.
Premium payment processing
- Support for various payment methods: bank transfer, card, check, digital wallet, etc.
- Multi-currency payments, including cryptocurrency payments.
- Real-time processing of payments via the connected payment gateways.
- Scheduled customer notification and payment retry in case of payment failure.
- Automated payment reconciliation.
Content management
- Uploading, editing, and publishing informational and promotional content: data on new insurance products, discounts, knowledge articles, etc.
- Content versioning.
- Content categorization and segmentation for various customer groups.
- Personalized content recommendations for each customer.
- Creating and managing customer experience surveys and polls.
Customer support
- An AI-powered virtual assistant to address customers’ operational, transactional, security issues 24/7.
- A knowledge base with articles, FAQ, etc.
- A customer forum.
- Scheduling in-person appointments for policyholders.
- Customer profile management with a possibility to view and monitor customer activities on the portal.
Key Features of an Insurance Agent Portal
65%+ of insurance agents state that the availability of proper IT tools affects their employment preferences. ScienceSoft is ready to implement an agent portal with all the required capabilities to help you attract and retain the best talents while driving their max productivity. Below, we list the features that form the core of a comprehensive agent portal:
Agent relationship management
- Configurable workflow for agent self-onboarding.
- Verification of agents’ personal and billing information.
- Agent contract management.
- Calculating and tracking agent performance metrics: new policies per agent, average revenue per agent, quote rate, bind rate, quotas vs. production, etc.
- Monitoring agents’ performance compliance against the internal policies.
Agent e-learning
- Creating and managing a knowledge base for agent self-education.
- An agent onboarding tour with personalized content.
- Detailed tutorials for agent self-training.
- Forums and discussion boards for agents.
- Rule-based assignment of user-defined e-learning programs to particular agents.
- Real-time tracking of agents’ e-learning progress.
Task management
- Automated task assignments to agents based on their qualifications, availability, schedule, location, etc.
- Automated creation and updating of task lists.
- Configurable dashboards providing agents with an overview of scheduled in-person appointments, assigned tasks, their priorities and deadlines.
Workflow automation
- Rule-based lead consolidation and prioritization.
- Automated generation of personalized customer quotes.
- Instant submission of customer insurance applications and supporting documents to the underwriters.
- Live chat to communicate with underwriters, reinsurers, etc.
- Real-time tracking of the underwriting progress.
- Template-based creation of insurance policies, insurance agreements, and customer invoices.
- Sending insurance documents to customers via email, messaging apps, etc. or instantly printing them.
- Automated reporting of granted policies and policy renewals to the insurer.
Insurance data and document management
- Secure real-time access for agents to:
- Insurance product data, policy prices, coverage terms, etc.
- Policyholder data: policies owned, billing history, claim history, and more.
- Sensitive documents, such as customer agreements and premium statements.
- Promotional materials: product presentations, brochures, videos, etc.
- Search engine to query and navigate insurance data and documents.
- Permission-based rights to view, edit, download, and share particular insurance data and documents.
Agent-customer interaction management
- Automated capture and recording of data on omnichannel agent-customer interactions.
- Monitoring clients’ policy-related activities and open claims.
- Notifications to agents on the policies nearing the expiration date to initiate interactions with policyholders on the policy renewal.
- AI-powered analysis of data on policyholders’ behavior, demographics, and current needs and intelligent suggestions on the insurance product cross-selling opportunities.
- AI-based recommendations on the proper follow-ups based on the analysis of customer interactions, e.g., suggesting the appropriate contact persons and steps to guide the policyholder through the claim process.
Key Features of an Insurance Supplier Portal
Insurers have to deal with a complex supplier ecosystem comprising partners like damage inspection and estimation services providers, healthcare institutions, home repair companies, auto repair services providers, etc.
In ScienceSoft’s projects, we create supplier portals with unique functionality bound to each insurer’s specific needs. Below, we list the supplier portal features typically requested by our clients from the insurance domain.
Supplier onboarding and pre-qualification
- Supplier self-registration, managing business and billing information.
- AI-enabled supplier pre-qualification against the internal sourcing requirements (quality standards, sustainability, capacity, etc.) based on data provided by suppliers and data from public data sources (e.g., a credit rating platform).
- Automated supplier categorization by user-defined parameters (service category, location, strategic priority, etc.).
- Configurable supplier approval workflow.
Supplier’s working area
- Real-time monitoring of service requests from insurers and their clients.
- Uploading available customer data (current health state, home property state, auto state, etc.) and damage evaluation results and sharing them with the insurer to initiate claim payouts.
- Uploading details on the due payments.
- Automated invoice generation and submission to the insurer.
- Instant messaging for insurer-supplier communication.
- E-signature workflow.
E-procurement for insurers
- Creating and managing preferred supplier lists (e.g., health claims, home property damage claims, auto damage claims, etc.).
- AI-based suggestions on the best-fitting suppliers to assign to particular claim cases.
- Supplier contact management.
- Template-based creation of service requests and sending them to the relevant suppliers.
- AI-powered processing of supplier invoices.
- Automated payments to suppliers.
Supplier performance monitoring
- Configurable dashboards with real-time supplier activity overview.
- AI-powered analysis of reputational, financial, operational, and other supplier risks based on internal and public data sources.
- Supplier performance monitoring against pre-defined KPIs like the percentage of services delivered on time, the average delay in service execution, the number of policyholder complaints, and more.
- Supplier rating based on supplier performance and the level of engagement.
ScienceSoft’s Clients Say
What stood out was ScienceSoft's proactive suggestions for cost-saving architecture design and tech stack solutions. Their input ensured we stayed within budget without compromising on software quality.
ScienceSoft’s communication was exemplary; unlike our previous experiences with outsourcing, we never had to chase them for updates, and they were always prompt in responding to our queries.
ScienceSoft’s professionalism, expertise, guidance, organization, and timing has been wonderful. They were also very patient with explaining their process and the next steps if we ran into any issues that we did not understand.
Main Integrations for an Insurance Portal
Below, ScienceSoft shares a sample integration architecture for the insurance portal. A real list of integrations will depend on the portal type you want to implement and the specifics of your software ecosystem.
- For automated recording and centralized storage of customer data: policy-related requests, personal info, etc.
- For data-driven planning of marketing activities.
- To keep the customers and agents updated on the new products and personalized offerings.
- For faster processing of insurance applications.
- To instantly communicate insurance-related decisions to customers and agents and speed up policy submission.
- For instant claim aggregation and facilitated claim status reporting to customers.
- To provide agents with easy access to the customers’ claim histories.
- For accurate assignment of optimal suppliers to particular claim cases and data-driven claim settlement.
- For automated recording of payment transactions in the general ledger.
- For streamlined agent payroll.
- For timely payments to suppliers.
- To enable agents promptly upload, access, and share policy-related data and documents.
Agency management system
- For accurate planning of agent workload and streamlined task assignment to the agents.
Internal systems of suppliers
- For faster processing of service requests.
- To promptly share the available customer data with the insurer.
Communication channels
Mail systems, messaging apps, business phone systems, etc.
- To automatically maintain a full history of customer and supplier interactions.
How to Maximize ROI of Insurance Portal Implementation
Vast self-service options for portal users
To minimize internal teams’ involvement in low-value tasks and increase operational efficiency.
Convenient UX and UI
To provide a seamless digital experience for portal users and streamline its adoption.
A mobile version
To enable portal users to easily access the required documents and track current insurance activities on the go.
Easy-to-use APIs
To ensure fast and smooth portal integration with the required corporate and third-party systems.
Robust security
To protect the insurer’s IT ecosystem by employing AI-powered fraud detection, data encryption, role-based access control, authorization controls for APIs, and other cybersecurity mechanisms.
Regulatory compliance
To guarantee that the portal meets the latest legal standards: KYC/AML requirements, CCPA, CPRA, GLBA, SOC1 and SOC2, IA and SAMA regulations (for the KSA), GDPR (for the EU), HIPAA (for health insurance), and more.
An AI-powered virtual assistant can be a strong helping hand for your sales team. Intelligent bots can process 50%+ of omnichannel inquiries with no human involvement when used with an insurance portal.
Building Insurance Portals that Customers Love: Insights from Our Team
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Boosting Customer Experience in Health Insurance: Can You Escape AI?
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Custom vs. Platform-Based Insurance Portals
There are two main approaches to building insurance portals, each having its benefits and limitations. Below, ScienceSoft provides a high-level comparison of the two. Within our insurance portal consulting service, we help define the more feasible approach for your business needs.
Insurance Portal Development Costs
Below, we provide the approximate cost estimations based on ScienceSoft's experience in insurance web portal development.
$40,000–$150,000
An insurance customer or supplier portal of average complexity.
$100,000–$250,000
A custom insurance agent portal with basic functional capabilities.
$250,000–$400,000+
Building a comprehensive insurance agent portal powered with advanced analytics.
Implement Your Insurance Portal with ScienceSoft
In web portal development since 2005 and in insurance software development since 2012, we know how to create a robust insurance portal to meet your unique business needs. We provide:
Insurance portal consulting
We elicit the requirements based on your business and end users’ needs and suggest a best-fitting development approach. You get an optimal feature list, UX and UI design, and tech stack for your portal. Also, we deliver a detailed implementation roadmap with cost & time estimates.
End-to-end insurance portal development
We cover all aspects of portal development, from design to integration and quality assurance. You get a full-featured portal launched within 4 months. Also, we can provide continuous support and evolution of your portal.
What makes ScienceSoft different
We achieve project success no matter what
ScienceSoft does not pass mere project administration off as project management, which, unfortunately, often happens on the market. We practice real project management, achieving project success for our clients no matter what.
About ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft is a global IT consulting and software development company headquartered in McKinney, Texas. Since 2012, we have been helping insurance companies design and build web portals for their clients, employees, and external partners. Being ISO 9001- and ISO 27001-certified, we apply a mature quality management system and guarantee that cooperation with us does not pose any risks to our clients’ data security.