Insurance policies protect your assets; metrics protect your business. Continuously reviewing metrics for your insurance business means you’re mitigating risk and taking action to meet your goals.

In that sense, measuring your KPIs is as important as getting an insurance policy for your health, car, home, or any other assets.

But choosing which metrics to include in your KPI insurance dashboard can be tricky because you need financial, sales, and product-related metrics that are specific enough to highlight product issues, but not too granular that become irrelevant to executives.

Well, look no further. We’ve compiled a list of eight key performance metrics that every insurance company should track.

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Protect your business from poor performance. Create unlimited insurance KPI dashboards with Trevor.io. Try it free for 2 weeks!

What are insurance KPI dashboards?

Insurance KPI dashboards are at-a-glance snapshots of your business. There are different types of BI dashboards for insurance companies:

• Claim dashboards  give you visibility of your claim handling process.
• Sales KPI dashboards help you monitor who your best performers are and which providers bring in the most revenue.
• Business or startup KPI dashboards help you review executive insurance key performance indicators and also include claim and sales data. This is the one we’ll be referencing throughout this article. 

Why you should have an insurance KPI dashboard

All three types of insurance dashboards are crucial for the success of your business but they target different audiences. Here are some overall benefits of creating your own insurance KPI dashboard: 

• Gain visibility of your premiums, claims, and revenue in the same place
• Assess and mitigate risky users
• Detect and prevent insurance fraud
• Review historical data in real-time and forecast future scenarios
• Have an overview of your business performance

How to track insurance industry KPIs

The best way to track your KPIs is by using a BI dashboard software solution. 

You should track metrics that are relevant to your target audience to avoid making your insurance KPI dashboard look cluttered. Some BI dashboard examples show how to be specific and granular while also focusing on the bigger picture are talent attraction, financial, or health supply dashboards. 

Which is the best tool for building an insurance KPI dashboard?

There are several business KPI dashboard tools out there that might be great for your business. To choose the right one, you need to define your hosting preference, budget, target audience, and main use. Following this guide to BI dashboards might help you make a decision. 

We recommend any of these three for insurance KPI dashboards: 

1. Trevor.io. This no-code solution will help you create insurance KPI dashboards without any hassle. With its insurance dashboard features, you’ll be able to build your own interactive snapshot of metrics with simple drag and drop, drill-downs, and filtering options. Trevor.io offers cloud and self-hosting options and unlimited access to users and ad-hoc queries. 

Automate alerts and updates to always be on top of your metrics without doing any additional work when using Trevor.io.

2. Apache Superset. This is an open-source BI tool for tech-savvy users. You’ll be able to customise every single aspect of your queries and dashboards by creating SQL scripts. 

The downside is that the learning curve is steep, especially if you don’t have any coding knowledge. Plus, since it’s an open-source solution there’s no customer support available, only an online community. 

3. Geckoboard. This is a very visually appealing BI dashboard tool. It offers white-labelling options that are great for sharing metrics with your insurance brokers or clinics. Also, its multi-device adaptability allows employees to be informed and connected with data on the go. 

The downside is that it can get too expensive, and the integrations might be best suited for a sales insurance dashboard rather than a KPI insurance dashboard.

Protect your business from poor performance. Create unlimited insurance KPI dashboards with Trevor.io. Try it free for 2 weeks!

8 critical metrics for your insurance KPI dashboard

Imagine your insurance KPI dashboard is an MRI scan for your business, it gives you an inner look at your business health. These eight KPIs are the heart, lungs, and liver of your insurance business:

1. Average cost per insurance claim

This metric tells you the average cost incurred per claim. You can segment this by type of claim, age group, gender, and policies. 

To calculate this metric, you should divide the total cost incurred per claim by the total claims made in a particular time period. For example, let’s say you received 100 claims in the past 3 months, and the cost of those claims combined was $50,000. That means that your average claim costs you $500. 

You should pay close attention to this number and compare it against other financial metrics like cash flow. This KPI will also help you understand the value and risk of each policy and adjust prices accordingly.

2. Revenue per policyholders

This is a simple financial key performance metric. It allows you to visualise the revenue generated by each policyholder. For example, let’s say you offer life insurance policies. Premium policies with higher coverage will generate more revenue per policy because you can charge more for the additional inclusions.

To review this metric, you should sum up all the revenue that comes from policyholders on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, and compare it against the previous period. 

Any drops or changes to this number might lead to 

• Poor retention rates
• Higher prices and poor service
• Rising competitors 
• Issues with your insurance agents

3. New and renewed gross written premiums (GWP)

GWS are the total premiums that the insurance company issues during a certain time period before deducting ceding and commissions. This metric allows you to keep track of the number of new and renewed GWP over time.

To calculate this KPI, you should sum the price per new and renewed GWP. You can also segment this metric by type of premium, gender, and age group.

4. Average time to settle an insurance claim

This metric tells you a lot about your response time and customer service. It’s expected that more specific policies take longer to settle claims than less complex requests, but you should try to keep this number in the lower spectrum. 

Managing to keep a low day count in which your company settles customers’ claims will help you increase retention and referrals.

To calculate this number you should calculate the average number of days it takes you to settle a claim and divide it by the number of total claims.

5. New and renewed policies

This one is similar to the new and renewed GWP KPI, but you get a number rather than a dollar amount as the answer. This metric help you have a clear understanding of your customer satisfaction and sales growth rates. 

It’s good to compare this number with the count of the same previous period. You can do month over month, quarter over quarter, or year over year.

You can combine this metric with your policy sales growth to calculate the number of new policies your team has sold over a period of time and check upon expected goals.

6. Average policy size

The average policy size gives you the financial information of your insurance company. This metric calculates the number of collected premiums and divides it by the number of issued policies over a time period.

This metric also is extremely valuable to calculate risk since smaller policies are usually less risky than larger ones.

7. Revenue per product

If you’re an insurance company that offers insurance policies for different services (e.g. life, vehicle, house, health insurance), you can calculate the revenue generated by each one of them. You can also compare this metric against the costs and loss ratio to come up with the following insights:

• Which one performs better
• Which brings the most profit
• Which type of policy is too risky and causes you to lose money

8. Return on equity (ROE)

ROE is used to value insurance companies in terms of the profit it generates for stockholders. To calculate this number, you should divide the net company’s income by the average shareholder’s equity. According to Investopedia, 10% ROE is normal amongst insurance companies.

This metric is most relevant to the insurance companies that have stock and shareholders, which can be publicly or privately traded. 

Will an insurance KPI dashboard cover it?

An insurance KPI dashboard alone is not enough to guarantee the success of your insurance business but it helps you work constantly toward goals and make educated business decisions. 

For your insurance KPI dashboard to be useful, you should include sales, financial, and product-related metrics. You should also choose the right KPI dashboard tool to host it. 

Trevor.io is the best software solution for your KPI dashboard creation since it offers unlimited users and ad-hoc queries, it’s extremely lightweight, and it’s highly scalable. Geckoboard, on the other hand, might be a better-suited dashboard solution for insurance companies with many agents that need access to their metrics on the go.

Protect your business from poor performance. Create unlimited insurance KPI dashboards with Trevor.io. Try it free for 2 weeks!

Related Post: A Simple Guide to Using Non-profit KPI Dashboards for Mission Success

Frequently asked questions about insurance KPI dashboards

What is a KPI dashboard?

KPI dashboards are a visual, colourful, and interactive representation of your business data. KPI dashboards help users have access to the most updated information and make business decisions without having to bother the data engineering team to get access to data.

What are KPIs for insurance? 

KPIs for insurance companies are key metrics that allow C-level executives to analyse the performance of their business. They can include: 

• Average time to settle insurance claims
• Average cost per insurance claim
• New and renewed gross written premiums
• ROE
• Average policy size

What does ROE mean in insurance?

ROE stands for return on equity and it’s important that insurance companies with stock and shareholders measure it. This metric is used to value insurance companies by what income it generates for stockholders. 10% of ROE is normal amongst insurance companies.

How do I create a KPI dashboard in Excel?

Creating an Excel dashboard is doable but requires a certain level of product expertise to make it truly interactive. Also, by having an Excel dashboard, you’ll always need to add the most recent data manually.

The best way to create KPI dashboards is by using a no-code BI tool that’s easy to set up, use, and scale. A great option for teams that need a lightweight dashboard tool is Trevor.io. This KPI dashboard tool also offers unlimited access to ad-hoc queries and users.