Process automation in the insurance industry
The insurance industry, like many others, is one which is burdened by manual processes and repetitive administrative tasks which can be extremely time-consuming and can easily develop into a large backlog of work. Manual processes around claims processing, underwriting, new customer applications and customer service regularly eat up valuable employee time and take precedence over higher value work.
With intelligent automation, insurers can find repeatable solutions which can streamline and automate these processes. Using ‘intelligent document processing’ (software technology which enables organisations to automate the processing of unstructured data) insurers can negate the need for employees to undertake manual data extraction and admin intensive tasks.
Here are two key examples of processes which can easily by automated:
1. Faster Claims Processing
Challenge
The verification of claims settlements is often carried out manually by reviewing large volumes of transactional data across multiple documents and sources. Documents often arrive in an unstructured format, requiring extensive work to extract meaningful information.
Market conditions and the volume of claims can often change rapidly in the insurance industry and insurers are challenged to meet these flexing requirements and respond to varying claim volumes.There is a requirement to accelerate claim processing, communication, and payment of claims to customers.
Solution
Using intelligent automation can streamline operations and automate slow manual processes, increasing insurers’ ability to respond to increased claim volumes with a minimal impact to their employees.
Enabling a digital worker (software designed to model and emulate human job roles by performing end-to-end job activities using automation) to extract key information, input customer data, create new claim files and verify claim coverage. This will allow the insurance team to focus on high value tasks such as claim adjudication and customer satisfaction.
This automated solution allows insurers to easily extract data from emails and submission forms into claims processing systems. It also enables the verification of coverage in policy administration systems and supplies claim status updates to customers. By automating these previously manual tasks insurers can decrease the overall manual admin workload, while also reducing customer delays.
2. Improved Customer Service
Challenge
Insurance companies must regularly deal with unexpected high enquiry volumes due to various external factors. This on top of potential staffing shortages can put significant strain on operations. This can mean slower responses, longer wait-times on enquiries including quotes and renewals, as well as delays in resolving claims.
Solution
Implementing Intelligent Automation can enable any-demand ability by automating processes to streamline customer service support. The digital worker can then receive emails, detect sentiment and extract required data. Emails can be prioritised and processed based on this.
This can speed up processes like enquiries, quotes, renewals and claims, providing automated updates and improving response times. This improves customer experience due to increased responsiveness and employee satisfaction as they can focus on value-add work.
Intelligent Automation is fast becoming a crucial tool for insurers. The combination of process mining, AI and RPA goes further than removing manual processes. Automation can decrease response times, improve productivity, lower operational costs, improve the experience of employees and customers alike.
Get started with intelligent automation for insurance
At Kainos we can rapidly guide you towards intelligent operations delivering the savings, efficiencies and service improvements that your business needs.