Retain, retain, retain: How insurers are retaining staff by cutting out repetitive tasks

The Great Resignation has led to what has been dubbed an employee’s market, with one in five UK workers intending to quit their job, showing the need for change for organisations who want to retain and develop their workforce. Retaining staff within the insurance sector is particularly challenging, with several factors leading to a talent shortage in recent years, such as older workers retiring, and younger generations not being attracted to a career in insurance. The battle for top talent means companies must rethink how they work and build a team culture, offering employees a rewarding career where they can focus on adding value, and spend less time using inefficient processes and technology, for long-term success.

To execute mission-critical business procedures, insurers have extensive IT estates and data centres. This is not only expensive, which impacts the company's bottom line, but it can also aggravate staff who must follow cumbersome and inefficient processes. This is a problem that can be solved by modernising or migrating to the cloud in accordance with corporate goals. 

If you’re in the insurance industry, you’re undoubtedly shifting some, if not all, of your operations to the cloud.  While the insurance industry is known for its conservative approach, many businesses are switching to a hybrid work style which is facilitated by public cloud, because they understand that it typically promotes productivity and a happier team. Simply put, people want a seamless experience whether working in the office, remotely, or in a hybrid environment. This further highlights the need for insurers to develop their digital capabilities. 

On the internal side, companies rely more on chatbots and machine learning to assist HR strategies for assessing employee satisfaction, spotting potential risks, and enhancing career support. AI can analyse data to recognise trends, such as work satisfaction, absenteeism, or behavioural intention, and forecast future movement. 

 According to research, administrative tasks take up around 73% of a HR professional's time. Yet, the McKinsey Global Institute asserts that 56% of all human resources work can be automated using technology including intelligent automation. These duties eat up time that human resources staff members should be utilising to improve their organisation, in turn increasing employee satisfaction. 

Repetitive tasks are a crucial reason why people give up their jobs, according to Martin Weis, EMEIA Robotics Leader, EY, which leads to 30% of hiring annually just to renew the workforce. A State of Workplace Survey reported that employees spend an average of 520 hours each year on repetitive services and tasks that could be automated. The employee retention rate should increase by removing dull, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks from employees’ to-do lists.  

As those in the insurance industry know, a lot of work core to the business’ success is admin heavy and can be labour intensive. Using technology such as intelligent document processing (IDP), insurers can extract data from documents, emails and forms to improve efficiencies for employees. Using a combination of AI and automation, IDP creates a self-learning system that contextually understands data and processes documents at high speed. This has multiple use cases in insurance from enabling claims processing, customer service and beyond.  

Insurance companies have the means to increase the effectiveness of filing and paying claims thanks to machine learning. It benefits the client by speeding up the decision-making process and helps the insurer’s employees who are responsible for the task handle claims more precisely and save time.  

Intelligent automation can also be used to automate slow manual processes, increasing insurers’ ability to respond to increased claim volumes with a minimal impact to their employees. This could include 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, reducing the burden on employees. 

Customer service is a core focus for insurers and their employees. Implementing intelligent automation can enable any-demand ability for customer service, by automating processes to streamline support. A digital worker can receive emails, detect sentiment, extract required data and prioritise based on this. There is also a huge opportunity for automation in contact centres, enabling a self-serve model for customers which reduces call volumes for employees to manage. 

The combination of process mining, AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) removes manual processes and improves the experience for customers and employees alike. By automating manual customer service processes, employees can concentrate on tasks that require a human touch, increasing both job, and customer satisfaction. 

Digital transformation capabilities, AI and IA can optimise not only your workforce but the entire organisation. By implementing the right technology, insurers can open new dimensions of employee insight and customer experience, leading to a significant improvement in employee retention and the ability to hire your future workforce.