In today’s competitive era, consumers are looking for Insurers that can speedily, efficiently, and reliably offer them the most suitable policy and seamless policy servicing. Insurance industry has a multitude of tasks both pre and post-policy booking that can be categorized as operational, data-driven, and repetitive. This is where automation comes into play to enable Insurers to automate their current processes to deliver an enhanced Customer Experience while not putting an additional burden on the bottomlines. Insurance companies that have implemented RPA (Robotic Process Automation) are likely to have improved bottomlines.
Robotic Process Automation, in general, is the process where the human workload is replicated by machines or technologies by following logical and structural patterns. RPA has been there for quite some time – earlier use cases of screen scraping, data-load generation would fall in this category. But the technology of yesteryears made some of these processes difficult to implement and maintain.
With the advent of a new generation of more simple and efficient-to-use RPA technologies, this word has caught the attention of a lot of businesses and is already being used to free up critical human resources, reduce human errors, improve profit margins, and transform customer experience significantly in the Insurance sector.
Benefits of RPA in Insurance Underwriting
Underwriting is the initial stage in which the Insurance companies analyze the personal data of an individual and corporates to determine if they can bear the risk to insure them. And if they can, at what price and premium.
Not more than a decade ago, the process of Insurance underwriting was mostly human-driven. While now, many Insurance companies are utilizing automated underwriting in various capacities to gather & analyze customer data, flag errors, automate and parallelize routine manual steps, and evaluate the accuracy of work accomplished.
The benefit of automation in Insurance underwriting is that the bulk of applications can be evaluated and put on an STP route (straight-through processing). Low-risk or zero-risk applications are approved while those having high risks are rejected. The ones that have mid-range risk are forwarded to the underwriters for evaluation.
Automation in underwriting holds the promise of improved process flow, better agency communication, elevated customer service levels, better process tracking, faster throughput, and consistent underwriting decisions.
Reduced Paper Flow
With an e-application knitted to an automated underwriting rules engine, handwriting cannot be misread, fields cannot be misspelled or left blank as it reduces the manual failures in the process. Removing or reducing paperwork from the underwriting process saves the Insurance companies a lot of manual rework, human errors, improves collaboration & speed of decision making and brings down the process costs considerably.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
A sound RPA framework incorporating a comprehensive set of tools keeps the process moving. Once the process enters the pipeline, automated alerts, queuing logic, SLA tracking makes it unlikely for the process to break. It is simple to hand over the case from one stakeholder to another which enhances internal productivity and reduces overall TAT to the customer. RPA helps Insurers gather information from disparate internal and external sources in parallel and feed them to decision-making systems and this saves considerable time and effort. And instead of requiring a lot of changes in the systems and processes, it leverages existing systems and processes and automates them.
RPA in Insurance minimizes the policy booking TAT, reduces average claims settlement time, closes cases faster, improves customer & employee satisfaction, and reduces undesirable and repetitive tasks and human errors to handle.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Underwriting or process rules when applied using automation create uniformity and steadiness in the decision-making process and reliably & consistently implements the company’s underwriting philosophy. An established automated system applies Insurer’s guidelines while enforcing rules that trigger alerts and escalation actions for events where exceptions are to be made.
Makes Scaling Business Operations Easier
With RPA bots handling the majority of process work, scaling up the business operations would mean RPA active bots to be scaled up according to the work requirements and this offers a greater level of scalability to Insurance companies. It does not create the dependency of scaling up on human resources which are costly as well as time-consuming to arrange.
Wrapping Up!
Leveraging automation is not just keeping up the pace with technology but improving internal processes to be able to serve the customers better. Robotic Process Automation is important for Insurance companies to remain competitive. Those who have not implemented should strategize to make it a priority while those who are planning to adopt automation should keep in mind the selection of right processes for automation during the evaluation process.
In today’s world, Information is the backbone of every business, and a business’s ability to gather, structure, & analyze information and to meaningfully convert this information into actionable intelligence to enable decision making makes the difference between a growing organization and a just-surviving organization.
At Qualtech, we help you get started with your RPA journey. Feel free to reach out to us if you are thinking of starting or scaling up your RPA journey.