Introduction

Over the years, insurers have been accustomed to marketing realities of relatively low premium growth and rising loss costs. But now the insurance industry is facing an inflection point where the growth of emerging technologies is driving an outcome-focused operations agenda. Unfortunately, not all insurers have the culture or capacity to embrace change. The reason insurers struggle with digitalization vary, some common barriers include-

  • Accumulated legacy systems
  • Complex business models
  • Lack of vision
  • Impact of organizational silos

To address these challenges and drive them in an opportunity, insurers, agents, and brokers are turning to Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Insurance has no shortage of time-consuming, manual processes like data entry, report generation, and legacy applications like Life Asia that can’t integrate. This eventually leads to error, slow processing, and deterred customer relationships.

As per Mckinsey and Company insurance industry is capable of automating 25% of its process by 2025.

With RPA use cases in insurance, insurance carriers and agent can boost operational efficiency, explore new avenues for innovation and provide an empathetic customer experience.

What is Robotic Process Automation in Insurance?

In the insurance industry, RPA refers to the use of software bots to automate rule-based repetitive processes such as policy creation, collecting deposits, performing background verification, and a lot more. Moreover, leveraging the hyperautomation approach also enables insurers to perform a process that requires decision-making with bots. Overall, using RPA in insurance enables organizations to be more competitive and enhance their customer satisfaction score.
RPA Use Cases in Insurance Industry

Top 10 Use Cases for RPA in the Insurance Industry–

  1. Claims Processing

    Claims processing is document-intensive, details oriented and time-consuming process. On top of that collecting data in multiple formats from various channels and processing claims on time require undivided attention and excessive manual intervention. But with RPA, claims can be processed 75% faster than humans.

    Jose Guerrero, an evangelist for marine claims handling improvement believes that with intelligent automation small claims processing time can be reduced to less than 3 minutes.     RPA enables organizations to overcome legacy application silos by allowing them to integrate all the claims processing data from various sources.

    Systems can use NLP and OCR to extract data and input, claims errors, and verify fraudulent claims. By limiting the human intervention in the insurance claims process. RPA reduces multiple touchpoints and accelerates the timely payout with a customer-centric approach.

  1. Underwriting process

    Insurance underwriters have to evaluate and analyze the risk involved in insuring people and assets. This whole underwriting process involves collecting information regarding insurable people or assets’ backgrounds.

    By including AI and machine learning RPA bots can:

    • Fill required data field in the internal system
    • Access data from internal & external locations
    • Evaluate loss runs
    • Analyze customer’s history & provide pricing options
    • Trigger system at risk & fraudulent cases

    This eventually streamlines the underwriting process in the insurance sector so that customers receive decisions quickly and underwriters can free up to handle more complex tasks.

  1. Regulatory compliance

    To standardize the documentation and audit trails, the insurance industry is regulated by strict laws. With manual control compliance comes the risk of human error and regulatory breaches. Additionally, with high volume record maintenance involved, compliance can be tricky. But, RPA can automate the process & ensure that data is accurate by following your pre-defined instructions without errors. It also maintains a complete log of changes. By accessing log files insurers can easily monitor compliance regularly via internal review.

    RPA bot can automate –

    • Client research and customer data validations
    • Compliance report generation
    • Data security operations
    • Account closure notification

  1. Sales and distribution

    Sales and distribution is a highly iterative activity that includes the creation of sales records and funnels reports to push notifications for agents. Insurance agents oversee the compliance, legal, and credit standing through the whole process. This manual process is error-prone, expensive, and requires high maintenance. Also, insurance agents have to get a quotation from multiple insurance carriers, losing precious time in manually requesting a quote, is losing a business.

    Ed Tignor, who owns the Main Street Title and Insurance agency in Tennessee (USA) said in the Insurance Round Table on Accelerating Operational Efficiency with Intelligent Automation that he is able to bring down the time to request home insurance quotes from days to 6 minutes using AutomationEdge intelligent automation.

    RPA can simplify the intimidating and rumbling tasks of sales and distribution in insurance. RPA can automate tasks like-

    • Legal and credit checks
    • Create sales records
    • Conducting compliance

    This way, robotic process automation helps enterprises in chalking out a workflow that ensures customer satisfaction through timely deliveries.

  1. Finance and accounts

    Processing invoices, payroll management, and handling other financial transactions is a regular task for insurance agents. With high volume data processing, insurance agents often struggle to provide error-free customer service. Instead of manual labor, RPA bots can easily perform clicks and keystrokes, copy/paste, autofill templates, and generate reports and push notifications with minimal human intervention. Besides, RPA can also minimize the insurance policy cost footprint and financial transaction and also generate alerts on suspicious claims.

  1. Policy administration

    Policy administration in the insurance industry includes rating, quoting, binding, issuing, renewing, and endorsing. And if you are relying on a policy administration software system you must have known the cost involved in keeping it up. With these challenges, the insurance industry often struggles to scale up when its customer base grows up. RPA can automate transactional and administrative activities like credit control, tax, regulatory compliances, and accounting settlements. Also, RPA navigates across multiple applications and saves significant time in the whole process.

  1. Business and process analytics

    As an insurance service provider, you must want to provide the best to your customers. But the vast number of operational and paper-intensive processes makes it difficult for insurers’ agents to track or measure the operational efficiency and identify the areas of improvement.

    With RPA in place, tasks can be easily performed and tracked by RPA bots with efficiency. AI bots audit trails help in regulatory compliance which further supports the process improvement. That’s how RPA improves the customer response time and streamlines the business processes with a customer-centric approach.

  1. Usage of Legacy Applications

    Many insurance providers still rely on legacy applications to execute their business processes. With this reliance comes the obstacle of communication with another system. When the new ERP or BPM solutions are implemented, the insurance industry often struggles to integrate them with legacy systems.

    RPA can work as a bridge to connect the otherwise incompatible legacy applications and new ERP or BPM solutions using UI Automation. RPA can easily fit into your existing workflows and make the business process smoother. It can comply with any type of system to improve the back-office efficiency and customer experience.

  1. Policy Cancellation

    The manual process of policy cancellation is a time-consuming and repetitive activity for insurance agents. To process policy cancellation requests, insurance agents must interact with email, CRM, Excel, and PDFs to access data. Also, policy cancellation involves many transactional tasks like cancellation date tally, inception date, policy term, and so on. However, with Automation in insurance, policy cancellation can be carried out in just one-third of the time. RPA can seamlessly switch through all the interactions and provide faster resolution to the customers.

  1. Query Resolution

    Unlike other industries, the insurance industry also receives high-volume customer queries for resolution. Providing on-time resolution is a cumbersome task for insurance agents with high volume requests. But, RPA can enable insurance agents to respond faster with bots. By using a predefined set of rules and natural language processing technology, AutomationEdge RPA bots can easily interpret incoming calls, emails, and resolve simple queries without human intervention. And in case the RPA bot detects complex queries, it seamlessly redirects the same to insurers’ agents.

    [Also Read eBook AI Service Desk and Automation Guide].

Conclusion

To maintain the competitive edge among the competitors, insurance carriers must embrace the change. RPA is capable of streamlining the insurance process and integrating the legacy applications with modern solutions at ease. By deploying RPA in insurance industry, insurers can not only reduce costs and workload, but also provide fast, personalized, and empathetic customer fast, personalized, and empathetic service they need.

With many success stories and client testimonials, AutomationEdge with its RPA capabilities has been enabling insurance providers to modernize their business operations and enhance productivity. To know more about what RPA brings to your insurance business and how you can customize RPA offerings to match your business goals, request a demo here or visit website

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