Automation is more critical for insurers than ever before. Nearly two years into the pandemic, insurers are managing historical volumes of claims and customer calls while struggling to meet modern demands for speed and accuracy. Customers today expect insurers to conduct business digitally, and they’ll walk away from providers that don’t deliver. In a PWC survey, fifteen percent of consumers said they felt frustrated with their insurers’ capabilities, and 41% said they’d switch providers as a result.
Insurers who want to remain competitive must consider automating customer relations and claims processing to meet the market where it’sat today–and prepare for the future.
Benefits of Intelligent Automation in the Insurance Industry
Intelligent automation can radically optimize insurance operations in the following areas:
Claims Processing
Claims processing is critical to insurance companies’success, yet it’stime-consuming, highly manual andfrustrating forpolicyholders. Claim processing can take several days as insurance agents carefullyextract document data and verify the information from multiple sources, including police reports, medical reports, licenses, photographs, etc.
However, by implementing automation, insurers can optimize claims processing workflows, including claims intake, assessment, and settlements, minimizing frustration with minimal efforts.
Let’s look at paper claims intake, for example. Paper intake is an outdated and unnecessarily error-prone process. In a paper claims scenario, insurance agents must receive, scan and manually enter the information they receive. Then they must double-check for mistakes such as spelling, dates, and duplicate data before beginning the investigative phase. This simply won’t cut it for today’s claims load. Insurers need another way to reduce manual work and process twice the claims with the same number of employees.
qBotica’s DoqumentAI can help by automatically scanning paper claims, classifying them into types, extracting key data points, and pushing the data into the core claims systems. With this data capture software, insurers can reduce processing time from days to hours or even minutes while preventing mistakes and improving customer satisfaction.
Underwriting
Underwriting, or assessing whether to provide coverage, is another critical insurance operation that involves copious data crunching and analysis. When determining coverage eligibility, insurers must consider multiple risk factors, including.
- Health risks: Height, weight, age, and health conditions.
- Driving records: Accidents and speeding tickets.
- Housing risks: Location of the house, age of the house, and claims history.
- Occupation risks: Profession and work environment.
By automating this weeks-long process, insurers can significantly speed up data collection, internal system updates, loss run analysis, customer claims history review and other critical activities. Bots, for example, can instantly read relevant emails, categorize and extract the required information, cross-reference external data enrichment sources for additional data, and validate the application for completeness using custom business rules.
Regulatory Compliance
Staying current with ever-changing regulatory requirements is one of the most challenging issues facing insurance companies today. And failure to remain compliant with the latest rules can lead to enormous financial and operational losses.
In the health sector, US insurance companies must adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s(HIPAA) strict privacy rules when handling people’s personal healthcare information. While necessary to protect patients, HIPPA present a significant complexity for insurance companies to manage. Intelligent automation can help by streamlining the process of identifying and classifying private information and automatically encrypting and securing it. This ensures compliance while freeing employees’ time to focus on higher-level risk prevention measures.
Improving Customer Interaction
Post-pandemic, customers have become even more impatient with insurance companies. In 2019, 12% of callers disconnected before getting routed to another agent. In 2020, that number increased to 15%. Another survey found that some people won’t even wait seconds to speak to an agent, let alone the time it takes to resolve their inquiry.
Fortunately, advanced automation software reduces the average call duration without impairing communication quality. Advanced software allows insurance companies to leverage chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice recognition technologies to dramatically raise service levels. Automated bots can either solve customer issues independently or immediately route the caller to an agent for personalized support.
Automation software can also optimize workflows and decrease response times in other ways. By extracting data from multiple systems into one platform, automation saves employees time going back and forth between portals to collect customer data.
Is your Organization Ready for Automation?
With very little technical expertise, you can begin implementing advanced data capture software today. However, to completely automate workflows, you must first understand your current processes and goals before implementing a strategy. You’ll also need to consider your roadmap to automation, the processes you can enhance, and your team’s capabilities to support such technology. Then, once you understand your current state automation goals, it’s time to choose a service provider to support your team and ensure smooth implementation.
At qBotica, we have extensive experience helping organizations with Intelligent Automation. We can help you assess your readiness, formulate a plan, and implement Intelligent Automation in your organization. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you transform your customer relations through Intelligent Automation.
