Automated insurance solution – Importance, benefits and use cases

With the insurance industry still reeling under the impact of the pandemic, enterprises are trying to develop new strategies to thrive the challenges, and the competition as these play a significant role in reviving the economies.

Considering that the global health crisis and the market volatility have put immense pressure on the industry, it is focusing on the resurrection, profitability, and improved operational efficiencies. However, some complications can come in the process, including finding enough resources, managing shifting compliance requirements, creating fiercely competitive products, and more. Automated insurance solutions can resolve these challenges.

What is insurance automation?

All insurance processes, including marketing, renewals, and sales, can be streamlined with the help of insurance automation or RPA, one of the most widely used tools in this field.

Traditional software automation is known as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), wherein the robots perform time-consuming, repetitive tasks like extracting crucial data, providing pre-made paperwork to clients, navigating systems, speeding the underwriting process, filtering emails, and automatically updating the customer’s file, similar to actual customer service representatives. Utilizing robots to generate measurable economic benefits has become the new standard across various industries.

Importance of automated insurance solutions

In the last few years, insurance carriers have been able to understand the value of building durable relationships with customers to gain a competitive edge and harvest profitability. Hence, adopting automated insurance solutions is a great way to initiate digital connections with customers.

This can be validated by the fact that automation in insurance can significantly reduce the time around time and enhance data accuracy easily. According to a case study by EdgeVerve, by implementing AssistEdge, a connected automation platform, a leading insurance player attained approximately 95% accuracy in claims processing, thus taking the customer experience to a new level.

However, RPA is only the first primary move in insurance automation, companies also must leverage cognitive capabilities with Artificial Intelligence and analytics to operate efficiently. Cognitive software solutions such as Natural Language Processing can transform insurance businesses from a wholly human-reliant domain into an intelligent business landscape.

Benefits of insurance automation

Fast pre-qualification candidates’ assessment: Insurance automation can analyze candidates quickly and correctly during the pre-qualification process. Additionally, analytical engines and software employed by modern-day insurance carriers produce a unified view of their consumers’ profiles that infers that the robot is improving the insurance businesses smartly.

Enhances claims processing efficiency: Having fast and cost-effective claims processing is critical to an insurance company’s success. Thus, investing in AI-powered RPA insurance services can simplify the claims processing workflow by automating claim intake, assessments, and settlements. Therefore, automation will not only extract data available in a couple of minutes, but it will also process them accurately.

Increases policy management effectiveness: Policy updates and issuance are used throughout the policy management life cycle. Also, services such as pre-underwriting checks, renewing internal systems, and communicating with clients require substantial manual labor. This is where RPA insurance services can come into the picture and automate the steps of policy issuance, thus reducing the time and manual work significantly.

Helps improve regulation compliance: Insurance carriers need to stick to the policies and guidelines of the government. But, modifications to these policies frequently demand re-construction of the business processes to easily adapt to the changes, regardless of the financial and operational losses. Therefore, it becomes mandatory for insurance firms to apply an AI-powered solution to enhance and improve their compliance. Thus, insurance automation removes the requirement for agents to read the operations manually. Instead, it allows them to safeguard their data’s accuracy while examining real-time regulatory compliance.

Lower time-consuming underwriting tasks: Automation in insurance can include some improved features like gathering and analyzing important data from numerous sources to underwrite the risks associated with the opted policies.

Hence, by implementing RPA insurance services, labor-intensive tasks such as evaluating the customers’ claims history, assessing losses, collecting data, and generating recommendations can be accomplished in quick time.

Top use cases of automated insurance solutions

Chatbots for customer service: Chatbots have become more geographically and functionally diverse in recent years, improving customer support services considerably. For example, chatbots in the insurance industry can analyze customer needs, modify product offerings, and even answer questions or provide valuable links to customers.

Solution for automated underwriting: Developing a rule-based system for underwriting processes can boost efficiency and productivity. For example, the automated system can determine whether a submission or renewal is machine-processable or requires human intervention. In the first scenario, predictive models and Machine Learning algorithms can quickly evaluate and price the submission. In the latter case, human intervention would be required in addition to the system’s insights.

Smarter process analytics: Measuring several parameters, such as the number of requests and transactions processed, is one of the fundamentals for improving processes. Failure to measure outcomes in the paper-intensive insurance industry can result in significant losses in operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Organizations can use automation to count the number of transactions and create an audit trail, which is extremely useful for meeting regulatory requirements. In addition, this improves customer satisfaction by streamlining applications, claims, and customer service responses.

Form submission: Form registration is a non-essential but required task in the insurance industry. RPA can automate and assist in process completion 40% of the time, with half the workforce required. It’s a win-win situation for everyone!

Cancellation of insurance policy: Many transactional tasks involve policy cancellation, such as calculating the cancellation date, inception date, policy terms, etc. Insurance automation allows policy cancellation to be completed one-third of the time.

Finance and accounting: RPA systems can perform clicks, keystrokes, button presses, template auto-fill, copy-paste information, field entries, and other tasks, automating many daily bank reconciliations. This reduces both transactional and policy-cost footprint.

Some key technology trends in the insurance industry

Applied Artificial Intelligence: Although several insurance carriers are testing AI, only some have expanded these capabilities across the company. With these, firms will be able to re-engineer core operations more fundamentally, i.e., more predictive as AI spreads and algorithm consequence gets commoditized. In addition, as essential business operations become AI-enabled, distribution, underwriting, claims, and service will be disrupted. This will result in a “person in the loop” paradigm that increases productivity and enables higher-quality customer touchpoints.

Spread-out infrastructure: Insurers have a substantial technology debt worldwide, and extensive on-premises legacy technologies hamper numerous essential operations. When all necessary systems are quickly moved to the cloud as cloud technology develops, insurers will be better able to launch new products and improve customer service. Additionally, the cloud will provide the capacity to entirely understand and operate massive data collections, such as countless data sets for the processing of claims.

Future of connectivity: Customers may more accurately describe their demands when using IoT devices, and insurers can better evaluate risk both at the time of purchase and throughout time by increasing the frequency and specificity of data sharing. In addition, with more people using 5G, this data can be transferred more quickly, enabling insurers to provide customers with real-time services.

Advanced virtualization and process automation: To automate procedures, insurers have engaged in Robotic Process Automation for many years, particularly in back-office operations. However, carriers can rethink their product and service offerings as new technologies emerge. For instance, industrial IoT enables real-time equipment monitoring to promote preventative repair before claims occur.

Conclusion

As the efficiency of back-office processes is critical in the insurance industry, companies are leveraging Robotic Process Automation to automate transactional, routine, rules-based operations. This allows capital and talent to be repurposed for more complex and strategic tasks.

RPA has a massive ROI. Thus, RPA can help insurers increase profits, improve compliance, maintain stable company growth, and provide excellent customer service while lowering costs and customer dropout rates. Moreover, because of the flexibility and benefits that RPA provides, automation in insurance is only expected to become inevitable in the coming years.