Organizations within the insurance industry are struggling to meet the requirement demands for automation, with legacy systems, complex operating structures, interoperability, and siloed business functions and teams weighing them down. And all these issues are exacerbated by budgetary restraints and tightening regulatory restrictions in the industry.

While these issues are often seen as roadblocks for those wishing to implement or improve intelligent automation (IA) and robotic process automation (RPA) in their processes, there is a way through it – and we’re here to tell you how you can achieve that business growth without sacrificing the quality and value of your work.

What is RPA?

RPA uses software bots to perform routine tasks, reducing errors and freeing employees to do more interesting work.

What is intelligent automation? 

IA uses artificial intelligence (AI), RPA and machine learning (ML), among other cognitive technologies, to streamline end-to-end processes. IA’s digital workers have decision-making capabilities to improve workflows faster.

Many organizations have difficulty embracing new technologies. There’s fear in the unknown. But with help from SS&C Blue Prism, we’ll help you figure out a clear and successful path through your automation journey.

Why are IA and RPA Important in Insurance?

The insurance business is a tightly regulated industry requiring high standards of compliance and governance. Automation can help insurance providers with those checks and balances, and ensure any issues are flagged immediately to avoid cost leakages.

Intelligent Automation gives insurers the tools they need to evolve with the rapidly changing industry. With better risk control and reduced human errors, you’ll achieve valuable output with a better return on investment (ROI).

Plus, with your people focused on higher-value tasks, you’ll find new ways to generate revenue and improve customer satisfaction.

How are IA and RPA Used in Insurance? 

IA and RPA offer huge advantages to the insurance industry, helping you stand out against the competition.

Automation eliminates time-consuming tasks to drive operational efficiency and can automate all sorts of insurance processes, from underwriting to claims processing, ultimately improving customer satisfaction with better accuracy in processing audits and claims.

Due to the high standardization and heavy administration of insurance data, there are huge opportunities in bringing IA as a solution.

Automation opportunities in insurance

There are tons of repeatable tasks in insurance that could be reassigned to a digital worker, from health insurance claims processing to property coverage assessments. And with a digital worker handling these areas, your employees are freed to work on tasks such as customer-facing interactions and high-level strategical thinking.

Digital workers can be deployed to perform the following tasks, as an example:

• Opening emails and gathering relevant data, which is then moved into the applicable core system
• Accessing customer portals for better data administration and protection
• Copying data between different applications
• Calculating and constructing profitability reports
• Migrating data for claims processing
• Compliance mitigation with background checks, name screening, client research and validation

Insurance Use Cases 

Like every market in this technology-driven age, the demands on the insurance market require faster cycle times without increasing expenses – and all this with the expectation of improving customer experience. IA and RPA offer a solution to routine back-office work at every level.

Let’s look at some uses cases and see how automation can help across the insurance industry, from claims processing and policy administration to regulatory compliance and underwriting. 

• Underwriting
• Claims process automation and Policy Management
• Customer experience
• Business complexity
• Financial sustainability
• Regulatory compliance and fraud detection
• Midterm adjustments
• Renewal
• Call center support

Underwriting

Whether you’re selling directly to customers or going through brokers, a digital workforce can help you with frontline ‘quote and buy’ processes, plus the more complex underwriting processes. This will help you generate accurate, on-demand quotes and policy documents faster.

Typically, insurance underwriters analyze internal and external sources to determine risks before offering their clients a set of suitable rates and policies. This process can take weeks of manual effort.

Digital workers can automatically collect unstructured data from multiple or disconnected sources and send relevant notifications to agents to help speed up the claims decisions process.

Claims processing and policy management

Digital workers can automate the entire claims journey from First Notice of Loss (FNOL) to adjustments, settlement and renewal. Insurers are often bombarded with high-volume claims filing processes, and trying to manage that work manually can be extremely overwhelming, causing employee burnout and leaving these tasks vulnerable to human error.

Standard claims can be handled in minutes with IA, freeing your employees to focus on the customer-facing aspects of their job. Plus, digital workers can also flag and resolve issues and exceptions in the claims management process, ensuring nothing gets missed.

Meanwhile, existing policyholders can easily submit update requests such as address changes. Digital workers verify that information and using ML, extract it and submit it to all relevant documents across your internal systems.

So, IA doesn’t just help with onboarding more members into your customer base. It helps you retain current ones by giving them a streamlined and simple experience.

Example of how IA can help in auto insurance claims:

• Checking auto insurance coverage for repair quote approval
• Compiling photos of damages with police reports
• Streamlining the collection process for shorter wait times

Customer experience

IA ensures system efficiency, connecting channels, standardizing customer data and completing process documentation faster. This, in turn, reduces the volume and length of calls to customer service agents – meaning shorter wait times for customers and resulting in higher customer satisfaction.

Business complexity

Standardize processes globally, break down business silos, streamline complex insurance operations and work efficiently with third parties: Digital workers utilize AI technologies to extract data, update disparate systems, interact with users and send out confirmations.

Financial sustainability

Reduce operating costs, increase productivity, transform systems at your pace and build a foundation for the future.

Regulatory compliance and fraud detection

Detect and prevent fraud earlier, comply with new and changing regulations, and reduce void claims and policies. Traditionally, claims processing is labor-intensive, requiring insurers to collect data from multiple sources. For example, gathering historical medical records for writing life insurance policy terms.

Digital workers can extract information from multiple points, integrate related sources, input data into your system, verify client identity and flag any potential fraudulent claims.

Midterm adjustments

However you service midterm adjustments, a digital workforce can help you standardize the process. Your digital workers bring your data into a single source of truth, processing policy changes faster and ultimately providing the customer with a seamless (and painless) experience.

Renewal

The insurance renewal process is especially taxing as a manual task, with all the time-consuming elements of pricing and policy documentation. Digital workers can streamline all these business operations so your employees can focus on customer retention.

Call center support

Digital workers act as digital colleagues to your customer support agents. With chatbots and other similar AI technologies, customer queries can be answered in real-time, from basic FAQs to referencing product information or escalating more complex issues to a human agent.

Benefits of IA and RPA in Insurance

Still not convinced? All right, let’s talk about the key benefits you’ll get from intelligent automation in insurance:

Working in legacy systems

Intelligent automation uses AI technologies to work within your existing, legacy applications or systems. This means lower overhead implementation costs for you and allows your staff the time to transform your systems on a realistic timescale.

Cost savings 

With IA streamlining business processes, your overall organization benefits. IA lowers overhead costs by reallocating resources to higher-value tasks. Plus, with digital workers flagging issues before they interrupt the workflow, there’s less time wasted trying to sort out mistakes.

Better product reception

Digital workers can monitor your customers’ needs, suggesting only those products that are relevant to individual customers, such as customizable life insurance for someone needing a special policy regarding extenuating circumstances.

With IA, you can create frictionless product experiences. Plus, with your employees spending less time on repetitive tasks, they can focus on developing new customer-centric product lines.

Along with this are opportunities for more cross-selling. AI-powered tools such as natural language processing (NLP) chatbots can communicate with customers and deliver customized experiences through product suggestions and on-demand coverage opportunities.

Faster and more accurate insurance claims processing

In traditional claims processing, data is gathered manually from various documents and keyed into other systems. This can be extremely dull and time-consuming work for your employees.

With IA, digital workers can move large amounts of claims data easily – giving customers a much faster response when they file a claim.

Better data accuracy 

Manual processes are prone to error, but by bringing in digital workers, insurance companies know their data is safe. Digital workers follow regulatory requirements, moving data securely and accurately between systems as prescribed.

Improved customer satisfaction

Create faster, more positive customer transactions, free more time for those needing help, settle claims faster and communicate better. By focusing on streamlining your customer’s journey with intelligent automation, you can make a real impact on your bottom line while also providing better experiences for your customers and staff.

With IA, insurers can speed up end-to-end processes, from customer onboarding to simplifying the policy cancellation procedure.

Improved employee satisfaction

With IA technologies such as intelligent document processing (IDP) and optical character recognition (OCR), customer data can be digitized automatically, freeing employees from manual data entry tasks. With more interesting work available to your staff, their job satisfaction should show markable improvements.

Other benefits

As you can see, there are a lot of ways intelligent automation can help the insurance sector. But just in case you’re still not sure if IA can help you, we’ve listed a few more benefits:

• Scalability for end-to-end process automation, standardizing work across the business
• Huge accuracy improvements for higher-quality work output
• Thousands of hours returned back to the business every year
• Increased productivity and profitability
• 100% accuracy and compliance

Deploying Your Automation Program

We’ve shown you all the ways intelligent automation can improve your insurance organization, but how do you actually implement it?

If you’re looking for a detailed approach, our SS&C | Blue Prism® Robotic Operating Model (ROM™2) is your step-by-step guide to building and maintaining your automation program.

ROM: a summary

Here, we’ll give you the basics of our automation methodology: If you want your IA program to succeed, you first want to analyze and identify your existing processes to see where IA will benefit most. The thing with automation is that, if you put it in the right processes to start, you’ll see much quicker scalability across the enterprise.

But how do you figure out which processes are best?

It’s actually pretty easy. With process and task mining, you can find which processes are ideal candidates for automation – and even find those bottlenecks keeping those processes from performing better and focus your efforts on those. That will ensure you’re getting the best return on investment (ROI) and gives you the capacity to scale your automations as you get your processes running at peak performance.

With SS&C | Blue Prism® Process Intelligence (BPPI), you get the combined automation capabilities of process mining, task mining and business intelligence. BPPI helps you transform your processes through process discovery, analysis and optimization.

The key to any automation success is in continuously monitoring and improving, making tweaks as your automation maturity increases.

IA and RPA in insurance

Intelligent automation and robotic process automation solve a lot of the issues facing the insurance sector today: increasing client expectations, higher costs, pressures to innovate, searches for revenue-generating solutions and the drive to stand out from the competition.

Don’t wait for your organization to fall behind – take the challenges head-on with intelligent automation.