Six Reasons why Insurance Providers need RPA

It is projected that RPA platform revenue from insurance companies is expected to reach $634 million by 2024: a 245% growth in five years.¹ This shows the exponential value that robotic process automation (RPA) can deliver for insurance providers.

Insurance, as an industry, like much of financial services, is perfect for implementing RPA because it is already process-driven. Owing to regulatory, compliance, and operational restrictions, insurance providers, have built elaborate and well-defined processes for their every need. However, a significant part of these processes is dependent on legacy systems and performed manually. To compete in the digital age and growing customer needs, insurance providers need technology transformation. The pandemic adds to the pressure to digitize operations, improve efficiencies and optimize costs.

It is here that RPA is adding value — by automating repetitive yet critical processes. Here are the key benefits insurance providers are experiencing with RPA.

Faster processing

Across application review, know your customer (KYC) processing, claims registration, and underwriting, employees spend thousands of person-hours reading documents, updating information across software, verifying and validating data, among others. In the insurance industry, these processes are critical and hence essential to ensure high standards of accuracy. As a result, these processes take inordinate amounts of time.

RPA can accelerate this. Thanks to automation, processes that took days can be completed in minutes. Moreover, software bots can work 24×7, automating a lot more processes on any given day, significantly transforming both employee & customer experience.

Accurate data and document management

The scale of operations of any insurance provider requires them to process vast volumes of data and documents. This presents two specific challenges:

RPA can transform both. Software bots with computer vision capabilities can accurately extract information from customer documents and update applications necessary. You can also automate organizing, processing, copying, and archiving data in a timely and compliant manner with RPA.

Compliance

Due to the onset of COVID-19, financial services have been under increased regulatory scrutiny and pressure. Being compliant in such a scenario is highly cost and time-intensive. Non-compliance can incur significant penalties too.

RPA can help timely compliance in several ways:

For instance, AssistEdge helped dial down the AHT by 60% and achieved 100% SLA compliance in claim settlements for a Fortune 500 healthcare insurance company.

Modernization of legacy systems

Insurance providers are undertaking large-scale application modernization and digital transformation projects. This transition from one set of systems to the other also requires the transfer of data between them. In many cases, such data might be in incompatible formats, needing conversion.

RPA being a platform-agnostic tool, can connect with both legacy and modern applications, making the transfer of data effortless. Software bots can follow step-by-step processes accurately and efficiently enable large-scale data modernization.

Improved customer experience

Not many insurance providers are known for their customer experience. Despite deploying hundreds of call center executives and thousands of hours replying to requests, the experience of both existing and prospective customers is sub-optimal. Leveraging Robotic Process Automation can help enhance customer service that has a direct impact on customer loyalty & retention, thereby creating better customer experiences.

RPA can significantly accelerate claims processing, including document collection and verification. It can scan applications, identify gaps, if any, and collect missing information. It can also automatically send timely reminders and notifications to clients about the status of their applications.

RPA chatbots can save time for contact center agents by handling repetitive questions, freeing them up to handle complex queries. For example, AssistEdge delivered a 30% reduction in response time on customer emails with the effective automation of email management system for a leading insurance player.

Cost savings and better profitability

RPA can deliver all this and more at much lower costs, despite enterprise scale. The cost of deploying software robots is minimal compared to hiring and training teams to complete the same tasks. For one-time initiatives, like data modernization, for instance, it is much more cost-effective to deploy bots, as they can be scaled up and down based on your needs.

On the other hand, end-to-end RPA implementations reduce the overall time insurers spend through the customer lifecycle — from discovery to onboarding to claims processing and beyond. This helps the insurance companies scale their operations faster, improving both the topline and bottom line.

Whichever application you automate with RPA, we know that the business impact is measurable and tangible. By deploying RPA strategically, insurers can gain cost savings, operational efficiencies and expand market reach. That’s just the beginning. With the strategic application of RPA, insurance providers can leverage digital opportunities, pursue new businesses, and build a competitive advantage in the post-pandemic world.

Learn more about how RPA can transform your insurance organization.

1. https://www.juniperresearch.com/press/insurers-to-spend-643m-on-robotic-process-2024