Over the years, insurers have been accustomed to marketing realities of relatively low premium growth & 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 & drive them in an opportunity, insurers, agents, & brokers are turning to Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Insurance has no shortage of time-consuming, manual processes like data entry, report generation, & legacy applications like Life Asia that can’t integrate.
This eventually leads to error, slow processing, & deterred customer relationships.
As per Mckinsey & 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.
Here are the top 10 use cases for RPA in the insurance industry–
- Claims Processing
Claims processing is document-intensive, details oriented & time-consuming process. On top of that collecting data in multiple formats from various channels and processing claims on time require undivided attention & 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 & OCR to extract data & input, claims errors, & 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. - Underwriting process
Insurance underwriters have to evaluate & analyze the risk involved in insuring people & assets.
This whole underwriting process involves collecting information regarding insurable people or assets’ backgrounds.
By including AI & 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.
- Regulatory compliance
To standardize the documentation & 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 & customer data validations
- Compliance report generation
- Data security operations
- Account closure notification
- Sales & distribution
Sales & 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, & credit standing through the whole process. This manual process is error-prone, expensive, & 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 & rumbling tasks of sales & distribution in insurance. RPA can automate tasks like-- Legal & 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.
- Finance & 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 & keystrokes, copy/paste, autofill templates, and generate reports & push notifications with minimal human intervention.
Besides, RPA can also minimize the insurance policy cost footprint & financial transaction and also generate alerts on suspicious claims. - Policy administration
Policy administration in the insurance industry includes rating, quoting, binding, issuing, renewing, & 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 & 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. - Business & process analytics
As an insurance service provider, you must want to provide the best to your customers.
But the vast number of operational & 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 & 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 & streamline the business processes with a customer-centric approach. - 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 & customer experience. - 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 & so on.
However, with RPA 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. - 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, & 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 The Art of Automation for Insurance Industry].
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.
With RPA in the heart of the insurance industry, insurance carriers can not only reduce the cost of operations & workload but also give the customer fast, personalized, and empathetic service they need.