Insurance providers, perhaps more than any other industry,struggle to remain relevant in the eyes of consumers.

Customers interact with providers only when they file claims,and when it comes to health insurance, hospitals file on thecustomers’ behalf.

That leaves the industry, much like hotels are with Expedia,ripe for disruption from online aggregators andstartups, which is why carriers should provide competitiveexperiences along with competitive prices.

Experience as a competitive advantage is becoming more prevalentevery day. A Pew Research study, in fact, found that 53 percent of technology stakeholders believegamification will play an important role in business by 2020.

For employers, it encourages the right behavior from teammembers, such as when sales teams hold incentive contests. Withconsumers, there’s a surplus of data available from fitnesstrackers and other technology, so pairing this data with consumerclaims and other available information can help carriersincentivize healthy living and gain brand affinity.

Currently, insurance companies are not set up to compete on theexperience level. When someone has a great experience idea in mindfor an insurance company, the technology gap that keeps such aninitiative from launching presents a major obstacle.

More often than not, carriers spend the majority of theirefforts managing IT complexities rather than delivering the bestuse cases, which is what started the project in the firstplace.

The opportunity insurance companies have is to offer a productthat hides IT complexities and allows the business to buildcontextualized, quick-to-market experiences that engage users anddistinguish providers from their competitors.

Challenges in gamification

It’s important to be a recognizable brand, but how many peopledo you think really know the difference between Aetna andAssurant?

Technology gives these providers an opportunity to stand out inthe eyes of the consumer. Providers have access to proprietaryinformation about claimants who are starting to don wearable healthtrackers. When carriers analyze the information from wearables,they can monitor step counts or heart rates and examine what mighthave affected those outcomes.

Public data like the weather, traffic, or geographic terrain canbe used to provide more personalized experiences. It would be greatto reward consumers for every 10,000 steps they take or inform themof insurance options the instant they walk into a chiropractor'soffice. It’s also helpful to understand how major life events, suchas childbirth, can affect changes in habits or insuranceadd-ons.

Predicting and catering to these situations would be great, butimplementing the solutions takes a massive spend in IT complexitiesalone. Insurance is a traditionally conservative environment thatisn’t designed for immersive real-time interactions with customers.Insurance companies are set up for processing, while their ITdepartments focus on complying with security and privacyrequirements. One misstep could cripple an organization.

But if IT can innovate tools that help marketing and otherdepartments quickly launch use cases for the customer, experiencescan work to make an insurance provider more than just a pipeline orcommodity.

Decreasing time to market in launching new products and servicesis large providers' competitive advantage. Instead of waiting to bedisrupted by the tech companies, they can become completeend-to-end solutions simply by leveraging resources to enhanceimplementation.

Changing the game

IT plays an invaluable role in insurance organizations. Thesedepartments typically work with large data sets, queries, andreports in the backend. Any of the ideas above takes a minimum of12 to 18 months to get to market, and tech disrupters will getthere first.

But these tech disrupters don’t have access to the archives ofdata necessary to truly pull off an experience for consumers. TheIT departments at insurance providers certainly do, and normalizingthese data sets in a secure method with tokenization and syntheticIDs is much easier for insurance providers.

It’s the same technology used in the payments space, so applyingthese techniques to insurance can provide a lot of invaluableinsight, including how to utilize cloud data for greaterflexibility.

The only pieces insurance providers are truly missing to disruptback are the presentation layer and the mentality of creating anexperience quickly and tweaking as they go. It’s all about usecases, and insurance traditionally catered to IT as the end usersin a data-rich environment. That all needs to change and focus onthe consumer.

If insurance providers decouple technology processingresponsibilities from experience creation responsibilities, they’llbecome unbeatable. You just have to decide whether you want to be acommodity that competes on price in the background or a trueend-to-end consumer experience.

One is a data processing center with very little customerinteraction or focus, while the other is the future of business inevery industry. Choose your role wisely, and prepare for an epicquest either way.

Gerti Dervishi is vice president of operations andfinance at Flybits, a cloud-based context-as-a-service solutionwith offices in Toronto; Redwood City, California; London; andSingapore.