The insurance industry has been slow to adopt automation technologies due to the many barriers to entry. These include high regulations and dependence on legacy systems. These barriers keep insurance industries from experiencing cost savings or refitting their manual processes. Repetitive tasks also become laborious for human representatives, with huge time losses for the companies.
Insurance companies that have undergone a digital transformation and taken advantage of automation technologies have seen dramatic improvements in the efficiency of their operations. People First has found that 90 % of insurance carriers in 15 countries were certain that technology will advance rapidly between 2016 and 2019, at higher-than-anticipated rates. They were ultimately proven right about automation. Immediate.io hypothesizes that modern technology may even replace the entire industry; if that disruption happens, entire companies will fall due to inefficient operating costs.
Challenges of Operating in the Insurance Industry
Insurance requires data to operate, in various formats. These range from paper trails to digital files, including electronic data interchange, or EDI files. The problem comes with streamlining, extracting and consolidating all this data. Manual consolidation can lead to significant problems and costs.
EDI is very costly to implement and requires a lot of time as well. The standards also vary because formats will vary. Businesses sometimes fail to recognize that EDI is a system that measures the impact of external data on the internal workings.
Larger companies also have complicated IT systems, with legacy applications that don’t necessarily mesh. As a result, operational costs become too high to justify. Companies would deal with this by outsourcing the main processes, which is also a viable solution. Even so, having more options can streamline your daily operations.
Many processes are manually intensive on the backend. They also take up a lot of time and human employees are prone to making errors. These include underwriting claims, policy quotes & servicing, premium management, compliance issues, credit checks, and more. With claims, both customers and users are the most concerned about settling them.
The Automation Journey For Insurance Companies
Automation improves various departments within the insurance industry and other businesses. They reduce some of the tasks within each process, to identify areas for operational efficiency.
Human Resources
Human Resources and automation go hand in hand; many representatives waste time due to the amount of paperwork that is required. The people in charge of onboarding, pay raises, and termination can use some assistance to reduce the time and cost investment.
Smart forms are one such example. Instead of having one potential employee fill out pages of hard copies, they can type their information into a simple form that can be shared across departments, automatically sorted, stored and shared if needed.
Back Office Processes
Back office processes such as underwriting are tedious, repetitive and a drain of resources. You can conduct audits easily when the information is stored in a universal format and in an organized fashion.
With service desks and compliance checking, automation can help employees handle the regulations and requests. Certain requests are common and can receive the same answer. This also improves to provide consistency along business services.
Vendor Credentialing
Automation makes vendor management very simple. You can enter vendors into a system to streamline purchase requests, check for credentials and organize documents accordingly. You can also create associated workflows and streamline related processes.
Claim Management
Claim management is the most important task for insurance companies. The problem is that it takes a high amount of time, and customers would rather a quick solution. RPA, or robotic process automation, can take out the tedious repetitive tasks and reduce them. Chatbots can assist customer service. While DPA can take care of streamlining the process end-to-end with humans stepping in when needed.
Using rule-based machine learning and artificial intelligence, complex claims can be processed rapidly with minimal manual effort. That way customers see their questions answered in a shorter amount of time.
Case Management Automation
In line with claims, case management is also important. There are many processes that are not rule-based, with operators not having all of the tools or information they need. To add insult to injury, it becomes harder to track an individual’s productivity.
Case Management Software centralizes data to give you a complete view of your info and gives you everything you need to resolve cases quickly. The automation allows you to organize important paperwork and notarized documents. Attorneys involved can receive and share the knowledge relevant to their cases, and thus receive answers faster. In addition, you could automate new cases requests, asking all the required information and documentation you need before starting to work on it. Which will be automatically passed to the person in charge of the first step in the process.
Customer Support
The customer experience is essential to various businesses. People want answers and fast solutions to their problems. In the case of insurance, many want the company to honor a claim. The company wants to verify the proper procedure for handling that older claim.
Insurance brokers can deal with hundreds of calls and customer inquiries on a daily business. Representatives may find themselves swamped with these calls, and it can generate long hold times. This frustrates both the customers and the internal users, who would rather save time.
Automating your customer support can answer basic inquiries for customers, such as checking the status of a claim. You can make sure that calls that do require a support agent are directed appropriately to the correct person. You could also digitize all transactions for which a human is not needed. If needed customers could submit the request and the system will automatically assign it to a representative in charge.
Harness Emerging Technologies with Virtus Flow
Virtus Flow wants to educate business leaders about intelligent automation, and how to overcome the various operational bottlenecks. Our digital workflows are created to simplify the learning, so that you can implement automation with minimal training.
Reach out to us today to schedule your first demo. The insurance business can drastically improve with automated processes, ensuring that customers don’t leave at the drop of a hat and internal users receive more support. Refine your case and claims management!
