Every day, many insurance companies face the monotonous and overflowing clerical jobs, unwanted and random challenges that ultimately lead to customer dissatisfaction and severe time sinks. And not only this. But the insurers have to go through a routine process, repetitive and operational tasks, in order to handle day-to-day insurance operations, for instance, underwriting, claims to process, policies to serve, and more. This has resulted in an increase in costs and stalled growth in the insurance process. Almost the entire insurance sector is immersed with back-office forms as the documentation process is mostly paper-based.
But not to worry anymore, we have RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to the rescue now. Coupled with AI solutions, RPA automates the business process rapidly. The RPA, by using intelligent robots, it can seamlessly interact with the business software apps such as ERP software, service desks, databases, and other business-related applications.
The RPA, combined with AI, can quickly analyze a large amount of data and can translate them into insights to take action. These can go beyond the cost reduction as well as increase the efficiency by adding significant value to the insurance businesses and offer personalization and best in class self-services. The RPAs have the ability to accomplish repetitive tasks as well; this results in saving a lot of time and effort, which in turn lets the companies focus on the work that requires human attention such as reasoning, judgment, and emotional intelligence.
Thus, not only the insurance sectors but other businesses from all over the world are leveraging the benefits of RPA to streamline their business processes and increase interaction with their customers. So let’s find out the areas of the insurance sector where the RPA can be implemented.
1. Claims Registration and Processing
The claims process is a document or data-intensive, which highly depends upon the collection of the essential data from varied sources. This makes the process lengthy, time-consuming, and hectic. And this directly affects customer service and competitive advantage.
Here the RPA comes in as a fully-integrated and end-to-end automation solution that can easily overcome these obstacles. The RPA, combined with AI, brings transparency and efficiency in the claim processes. It can capture claims from any channel and notifies the insurers about those who are responsible for losses and easily hand over the tasks to the claim handlers. Additionally, the RPAs are entirely scalable and work according to the necessities of the company. This speeds up the operations, enhances customer experiences, and ultimately increases ROI.
2. Policy Admin and Servicing
Policy administration is a crucial activity, and this involves policy maintenance and servicing and includes matching policy holder’s details while adhering to the set rules while processing the information. It comprises data processing and validation among varied applications. Put simply, the administration brings all the functions of the insurance provider together, such as the quoting rating, underwriting, and conducting the customer services.
Moreover, the cost of policy administration systems is high and requires timely and high maintenance. And the worst part is they are not scalable enough to quickly adapt to the changes in the company and growing customer demands.
The solution here is customer-facing chatbots, as these have answers for everything, right from policy status to payments. The RPA bots can notify the customers in case of pre-loss warnings based on the data gathered and ultimately provide preventative measures. However, the customer experience would automatically be enhanced since the chatbots provide 24/7 customer service without rest.
3. Underwriting and Pricing
Nowadays, insurers are looking forward to the ways to improve underwriting results, identify the insurance needs, price, sell policies, enhance customer experience, manage the risks, recognize the frauds, and more. Moreover, underwriting requires the collection of information from varied sources. It analyzes the risk associated with the policies, and this data collection takes months to oversee a large amount of data, analyzing and foreseeing the risks. The RPAs reads the data, organizes it, and gathers the data in one place as per the underwriters’ convenience.
By using the set rules, the RPAs can provide recommendations about accepting the risk by proving an acceptability score, which can further be used in decision making and pricing. The implementation of RPAs can minimize operational costs and increase the efficiency of insurance underwriting. Hence, the RPAs fills the void left in the insurance process through issuing policies and updating the existing for future events in the company.
4. Regulatory Compliance
The RPA has now reached the reflection point since companies from all over the world have recognized the power of software robots. Undoubtedly the RPA bots have empowered many organizations to create standardized, fast-moving workflows that have increased the value of human resources by completely eliminating repetitive manual tasks.
As things stand, the companies require devoted staff resources with specialized skills, to conduct operations manually, and track and enforce regulatory compliance. This doesn’t just affect the working hours but also the entire team working continuously in inefficient ways.
The RPAs are immediately attractive because they automate many tasks associated with regulatory compliance that are to be done manually. The projects have shown the results:
- The productivity increases by 50% for regulatory processes that are affected by RPA systems.
- Helped in changing the work availability as the RPA bots can be deployed as and when required according to the demand and work.
- The bots can minimize the errors to null.
In short, an effective RPA strategy helps in establishing an efficient regulatory compliance work environment.
Also Read- Choosing the Right Robotic Process Automation Software for Your Business
5. Scalability
The insurance companies can quickly achieve scalability with RPA. The RPA robots can be scaled up or down depending on the number of claims and quotes processed during the year in the company. We can also achieve temporary scaling with RPA software bots in the short term, and the RPA bots can be increased to meet the long term growth of an organization as well.
6. Sales and Distribution
The insurance companies can leverage the RPA for their sales and distribution processes. Put, it eases the sales and distribution tasks by preparing the automated and customizable scoreboards that read the sales figures. This shows a clear picture of the budget to the sales team, especially when it comes to specific lines of the business. It also provides better prospect data based on models built internally by putting a clear propensity index.
7. Policy Cancellation
The policy cancellation process requires a lot of hard work, as it involves many transactional tasks such as tallying the cancellation dates, lengthy policy procedures, terms, and conditions, etc. The RPA systems make policy cancellation procedures a lot easier, effortless, and saves a lot of time.
8. The Non-Invasive Compatibility
There are still many insurers who still rely upon the traditional systems and disparate applications. Hence the RPAs non-invasive nature can easily streamline the business processes. The commendable feature of RPA is that it can imitate human keystroke and mouse clicks, interacting with the presentation layer in the computer programs. The RPAs are implemented in sync with the existing systems, without the need to replace their current IT setup.
The RPAs require minimum team support as it’s not necessary for the team members to have programming knowledge.
Conclusion
Insurance is a highly regulated industry, and with this increasing competition, it is not all easy to keep up with the latest technologies. The companies need to stand out, and for that, the insurers need to move at the pace of their customers using RPA as it facilitates the easy collection of policyholder’s details, collecting essential information from previous years’ claims documents, etc., therefore allowing the insurers to settle insurance claims seamlessly.
