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The impact of COVID-19 on insurance companies & customers: How can automation help?

April 27, 2020 - Vishal Swami Product Manager, EdgeVerve

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The world is going through an unprecedented situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. None of the regions have remained unaffected by this disease. It is an unforeseen situation in which most of the world population is under a lockdown or restriction of movement. This leads to new challenges for all the industries and businesses on how they continue to service their existing and new customers with a reduced workforce.

The situation created by COVID-19 being a health emergency is generating plenty of work for insurance companies, where customers are looking for answers and faster turnaround on insurance claims. It has led to many customers trying to get in touch with customer support teams of insurance firms across the world. With strict restrictions in place across all the major countries on the movement of people, it has led to a dramatic reduction in the availability of employees and support staff, as remote working is a challenge. In this situation, Robotics Process Automation (RPA) and Chatbots powered by Machine Learning capabilities can help in bridging the gap.

Automation can help insurance companies in below areas to sail through this situation:

  • Claims Automation:
    1. Registering Claims: RPA, coupled with intelligent document processing skills, can help in reducing the human intervention when it comes to registering insurance claims, thus reducing the burden on insurance customer advisors. RPA can pick up the claim requests along with supporting documents submitted though emails or company portal by customers, automatically from a queue. The robot can then perform the basic due diligence by comparing the claim information against the internal data available with the company before forwarding the claim to the concerned investigation department with all the relevant information to make a quick decision. Once the process is completed from the robot side, it will send the notification to the customer keeping him updated about the status of his claim. This way, automation can help insurance companies save a great deal of time and effort apart from increasing customer satisfaction, especially at a time when managing operations with reduced manpower is crucial.
    2. Claim Processing: First Notice of Loss (FNOL) whenever triggered, still needs action within the pre-defined SLAs. Nevertheless, it will be a challenge considering the COVID-19 scenario where organizations are working with minimal manpower. RPA can help in managing the processing of simple claim requests, as bots can easily connect with multiple applications and process the data required to honor the claim. For any complex claim request, they can present the information to a back-office advisor in requisite format to help him make a quick and informed decision. This way, automation will reduce the burden on a limited workforce that is working by taking away the mundane tasks of data collation and processing.
  • Customer Support:
    1. Chatbots with attended automation can help in shouldering the burden of customer queries in these testing times for insurance companies. Chatbots keeps a log of the most frequently asked customer questions, and with the help of natural language processing capabilities, it can also build suitable responses. Chatbots can efficiently handle many routine requests, such as policy information, new product details, among others, without human intervention. By handling these routine and mundane tasks, they can free up skilled customer support advisors to manage more complex customer requests.
    2. Attended automation can come in handy for customer support advisors as it helps them by fetching a 360-degree view of the customer while interacting and can also perform a lot of actions by single-click automation on multiple systems like KYC update. All this helps in making the customer support staff more productive with limited supervision. Another area where automation can help is the cross-sell or upsell of insurance products based on a 360-degree view presented to a customer support advisor.

AssistEdge provides a cohesive automation platform through its products like AssistEdge RPA 18.0 and AssistEdge Engage 1.0. AssistEdge RPA 18.0 provides the capabilities to build and run both “Unattended” and “Attended” intelligent automations. AssistEdge Engage 1.0 brings in AI-driven automation in the area of customer support services, which helps you in making transformational changes through its capability of providing 360-degree customer view, guided assistance for agents, and one-click smart automations.

What we discussed above are only few areas from insurance industry, but automation can play a big role in other processes also like underwriting, policy management or regulatory compliance. Automation can not only help insurance companies in managing the current crisis successfully but also helps them build capabilities for the future.

Vishal Swami

Product Manager, EdgeVerve

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