How Life Carriers Are Wasting Tech Spend: The Agent Adoption Imperative

Carriers today are spending millions on digitization projects. But many of those good faith efforts at badly needed innovation often fail to gain traction and scale. This is because they don’t prioritize a vital part of the new business food chain: agents. 

The Problem: Incremental / Siloed Modernization

Here’s how modernization typically starts: 

• Carriers miss a business objective (“My sales are down!”) 
• The team identifies the most challenging portion of the value chain (“It’s because underwriting is too slow!”) 
• An initiative is spun up and prioritized to solve the bottleneck (“Let’s go get a new rules engine”) 

Fast forward a few quarters, and carriers still don’t see results: 

• The bottleneck has moved to a new portion of the experience (e.g., issuance, payment, or application) 
• As a result, agents don’t have a meaningfully better experience 
• Adoption stalls and business outcomes don’t improve 

This incremental approach is what leads to $7B of annual tech spending in life insurance, but slow improvement to agent and consumer perceptions of the quality of carrier technology. 

The Solution: A Two-Pronged Approach

A User-Centered Strategy

The consequences of low adoption are significant: wasted tech investments, flat sales growth, and weakened advisor relationships. To maximize adoption, a user-centered approach is required.

• Phase 1: Research - Start with the agent. What works? What doesn’t? Where are the friction points? 

• Phase 2: Build & Test - Use prototypes and pilots to move quickly. Test ideas, challenge assumptions, and build consensus. 

• Phase 3: Launch & Scale -  Drive adoption with training and incentives, and reinforce value with support from sales, marketing, and ops teams.

Integrated Technology Solutions

The best user-centered design can still fail without a cohesive technology strategy that brings it together. Here’s what works: 

🧩Avoid a patchwork - cut out coordination and user experience challenges consolidating your solutions within a holistic solution provider 

🔌Double-check “pre-integrations” - many software companies claim they’re a fully integrated suite, but lack critical interoperability of their components. Trust but verify!

User centricity and high-quality integrations are at the center of solving the life insurance industry’s historical technology challenges. 

The Results 

At Bestow, the agent experience is foundational to our product development process, and our platform is purpose-built to deliver the kind of experience agents can’t wait to use. Here’s what you can expect:

⚡ Accelerated launches to meet urgent product needs

💸 Frictionless experiences that boost sales

🤝 Ongoing innovations that drive enhancements

A major life carrier used our platform to launch a digital agent-led product. The results speak for themselves:

🚀 Over 2x increase in sales to date (volume and premium)

👍 61% agent trial/adoption in first quarter post-launch

⚡ 100% instant decision

High agent adoption, boosted sales, happy customers. This is what a sustainable tech launch should look like today.

🔍 [Download the full white paper - Prioritizing Agent Adoption: The Secret to Accelerating The Success of New Life Insurance Tech]