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Insurance carriers rarely lose a customer over one bad claim. They lose them over one bad call — a dropped line during a claims dispute, an agent who can’t see why a transfer failed, a channel that quietly stopped working weeks ago. As unified communications and collaboration (UCC) becomes the backbone of how insurers sell, service, and settle, the carriers pulling ahead are the ones who can see exactly what’s happening across that infrastructure in real time — not the ones who find out from an angry policyholder.
The scale of that shift shows up in the numbers: the global cloud monitoring market is projected to grow from an estimated USD 3.56 billion in 2025 to USD 17.06 billion by 2033, at a compound annual growth rate of 21.8% (Grand View Research), with financial services named alongside IT, telecom, and healthcare as one of the sectors driving that demand.
IR partnered with IDC Research to explore how UCC is reshaping global banking, finance, and insurance — including where the insurance industry in particular is leaning into new channels and modes of customer engagement.
WATCH: Associate VP, IDC Financial Insights, Michael Araneta, and IR's Chief Marketing and Product Officer, Kevin Ryder, discuss UCC trends in BFSI.
How UC and CC are reshaping insurance
Same regulatory pressure, new channels, less room for blind spots.
UCC is driving real change in insurance — streamlining operations, helping meet new regulatory guidelines, and giving institutions better end-to-end visibility, control, and business agility. But the path here has been slower than in banking. Insurers have tended to treat legacy systems as a sunk cost rather than a liability, and structural inefficiencies compound the reluctance to move. The diversity of products on offer — home, auto, business, and life insurance — and how customized each policy is makes a single, wholesale digital transition harder to pull off than in a more uniform category. So what actually moves the needle? For more on how the wider sector is navigating this shift, see UC&C: The Future of the Banking and Finance Industry.
Elevating customer experience
Insurance is inherently personal: every policyholder’s circumstances, risk profile, and claims history differ, and they expect advice that reflects that. The payoff for getting this right is measurable — a McKinsey study of US auto insurers found that carriers delivering consistently strong customer experience generated two to four times more new-business growth and roughly 30% higher profitability than carriers with an inconsistent customer focus (McKinsey, 2017).
Developing multichannel communications
Customers want to research and compare coverage across phones, tablets, and laptops, and still have the option to talk to someone when a decision gets complicated. The channel mix has to be digital-first without becoming digital-only — and it has to feel like one conversation, not five disconnected ones.
Automating routine work
Repetitive tasks — policy renewals, status updates, routine data processing — are strong candidates for automation, freeing people for the interactions that actually need a human.
What insurers need from UCC right now
- Real-time monitoring and automated alerts
So issues surface before a customer feels them. - One view across the whole UCC estate
Instead of stitching together data from separate tools. - Scalability that tracks policyholder growth
Not just call volume. - Clear visibility into communication flows
To fix the root cause, not just the symptom. - Strategic control of the communications environment
Even as more of it shifts to the cloud.
Driving growth: the contact center
It’s not a cost center anymore — it’s a growth lever.
The contact center still drives sales and growth for insurers, and its importance keeps climbing as multi-channel, multi-device demand increases and coverage products become more commoditized. Done well, it lowers risk, cuts cost, and lifts profitability all at once. That’s especially true as compliance pressure builds around call recording and communication capture — see Contact center management: The cost of non-compliance for what’s at stake.
“Creating experiences that deeply engage customers through natural interfaces and integrated processes and devices will differentiate leading organizations and businesses from the rest,” says Scott Reiter, Managing Director, Accenture User Experience.
With face-to-face interaction reduced and more of the relationship happening digitally, insurers need real data and insight into that experience — not just an assumption that it’s working.
How IR Collaborate can help
Visibility across the whole UCC environment — not just the parts you can already see.
IR Collaborate gives insurance and financial services teams real-time visibility into call quality and performance across the UCC environment, so issues get caught and addressed before they reach the policyholder. It’s built to work across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments — which matters for insurers mid-migration, not just those who’ve already moved everything to the cloud. And because financial institutions operate under strict regulatory expectations, that same visibility helps support the compliance and operational-risk requirements insurers are already accountable for. Learn more about IR Collaborate for financial services.
Conclusion
UCC is now foundational to how insurance gets sold, serviced, and settled — and none of it holds up without the visibility to know what’s actually happening across it. The insurers who close that gap won’t just avoid the next outage. They’ll be the ones customers trust to pick up the phone in the first place.
See how IR Collaborate can give your team that visibility, or request a demo.
