Introduction

Over the years, insurers have been accustomed to marketing realities of relatively low premium growth and rising loss costs. But now the insurance industry is facing an inflection point where the growth of emerging technologies is driving an outcome-focused operations agenda. Unfortunately, not all insurers have the culture or capacity to embrace change. The reason insurers struggle with digitalization vary, some common barriers include-

  • Accumulated legacy systems
  • Complex business models
  • Lack of vision
  • Impact of organizational silos

To address these challenges and drive them in an opportunity, insurers, agents, and brokers are turning to Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Insurance has no shortage of time-consuming, manual processes like data entry, report generation, and legacy applications like Life Asia that can’t integrate. This eventually leads to error, slow processing, and deterred customer relationships.

As per Mckinsey and Company insurance industry is capable of automating 25% of its process by 2025.

With RPA use cases in insurance, insurance carriers and agent can boost operational efficiency, explore new avenues for innovation and provide an empathetic customer experience.

What is Robotic Process Automation in Insurance?

In the insurance industry, RPA refers to the use of software bots to automate rule-based repetitive processes such as policy creation, collecting deposits, performing background verification, and a lot more. Moreover, leveraging the hyperautomation approach also enables insurers to perform a process that requires decision-making with bots. Overall, using RPA in insurance enables organizations to be more competitive and enhance their customer satisfaction score.
RPA Use Cases in Insurance Industry

Top 10 Use Cases for RPA in the Insurance Industry–

  1. Claims Processing

    The claims process in insurance is a document-intensive, detail-oriented and time-consuming activity. In the claims process policyholders seek reimbursement for covered losses and damages and claims settlement. The traditional method of the claims process is laden with accessing information from diverse sources, analyzing and calculating the different payout for identical claims, and dealing with inaccurate and outdated data.

    If reports are to be believed, only 5%of insurers are entirely digitized or automated to handle the claims process. Here, insurance claims automation can help insurers in handling claims. Using intelligent automation in the claims process enables insurers to take care of the whole process, from extracting data for claims initiation, verification, claims adjudication and claims settlement. For example, HDFC Life, one of our customers, processed 2500+ claims verification using AutomationEdge’s AI chatbot for business.

  1. Underwriting

    In insurance, underwriting is the process of assessing and quantifying the financial risk associated with an entity or an individual. There are multiple types of underwriting: loan underwriting, insurance underwriting, and securities underwriting, which underwriters need to assess. However, when performed manually, underwriters deal with multiple challenges like data availability and quality, risk assessment, claims fraud, and maintaining regulatory compliance. As per a report, underwriters spend 40% of their time
    By including AI and automation solutions, insurers can use chatbots to:

    • Fill required data field in the internal system
    • Access data from internal & external locations
    • Evaluate loss runs
    • Analyze customer’s history & provide pricing options
    • Trigger system at risk & fraudulent cases

    This eventually streamlines the underwriting process in the insurance sector so that customers receive decisions quickly and underwriters can be freed up to handle more complex tasks.

  1. Regulatory compliance

    To standardize the documentation and audit trails, the insurance industry is regulated by strict laws. With manual control compliance comes the risk of human error and regulatory breaches. Additionally, with high volume record maintenance involved, compliance can be tricky. But, RPA can automate the process & ensure that data is accurate by following your pre-defined instructions without errors. It also maintains a complete log of changes. By accessing log files insurers can easily monitor compliance regularly via internal review.

    RPA bot can automate –

    • Client research and customer data validations
    • Compliance report generation
    • Data security operations
    • Account closure notification

  1. Sales and distribution

    Sales and distribution are highly iterative activities that include creating sales records and funnel reports to push notifications for agents. Insurance agents oversee the compliance, legal, and credit standing through the whole process. This manual process is error-prone, expensive, and requires high maintenance. Also, insurance agents have to get a quotation from multiple insurance carriers, losing precious time manually requesting a quote is losing business. RPA can simplify the intimidating and rumbling tasks of sales and distribution in insurance. RPA can automate tasks like-

    • Legal and credit checks
    • Create sales records
    • Conducting compliance

    This way, robotic process automation helps enterprises in chalking out a workflow that ensures customer satisfaction through timely deliveries.

  1. Finance and accounts

    Processing invoices, payroll management, and handling other financial transactions is a regular task for insurance agents. With high volume data processing, insurance agents often struggle to provide error-free customer service. Instead of manual labor, RPA bots can easily perform clicks and keystrokes, copy/paste, autofill templates, and generate reports and push notifications with minimal human intervention. Besides, RPA can also minimize the insurance policy cost footprint and financial transaction and also generate alerts on suspicious claims.

  1. Policy administration

    Policy administration in the insurance industry includes rating, quoting, binding, issuing, renewing, and endorsing. And if you are relying on a policy administration software system you must have known the cost involved in keeping it up. With these challenges, the insurance industry often struggles to scale up when its customer base grows up. RPA can automate transactional and administrative activities like credit control, tax, regulatory compliances, and accounting settlements. Also, RPA navigates across multiple applications and saves significant time in the whole process.

  1. Business and process analytics

    As an insurance service provider, you must want to provide the best to your customers. But the vast number of operational and paper-intensive processes makes it difficult for insurers’ agents to track or measure the operational efficiency and identify the areas of improvement.

    With RPA in place, tasks can be easily performed and tracked by RPA bots with efficiency. AI bots audit trails help in regulatory compliance which further supports the process improvement. That’s how RPA improves the customer response time and streamlines the business processes with a customer-centric approach.

  1. Fraud Detection

    The insurance industry relies on standardized processes and systems that make it challenging to detect fraudulent activities. As a result, insurers deal with challenges like lack of real-time detection, over-reliance on historical data, lack of data integration capability and others. Here, intelligent automation solutions can help insurers detect fraud faster. With AI-driven RPA, insurers can analyze vast amounts of data, including policyholder information, insurance claims data, historical claims data and patterns to identify anomalies and potential threats. Also, these AI systems can monitor transactions and data in real time and generate alerts.

  1. Policy Cancellation

    The manual process of policy cancellation is a time-consuming and repetitive activity for insurance agents. To process policy cancellation requests, insurance agents must interact with email, CRM, Excel, and PDFs to access data. Also, policy cancellation involves many transactional tasks like cancellation date tally, inception date, policy term, and so on. However, with Automation in insurance, policy cancellation can be carried out in just one-third of the time. RPA can seamlessly switch through all the interactions and provide faster resolution to the customers.

  1. Query Resolution

    Unlike other industries, the insurance industry also receives high-volume customer queries for resolution. Providing on-time resolution is a cumbersome task for insurance agents with high volume requests. But, RPA can enable insurance agents to respond faster with bots. By using a predefined set of rules and natural language processing technology, AutomationEdge RPA bots can easily interpret incoming calls, emails, and resolve simple queries without human intervention. And in case the RPA bot detects complex queries, it seamlessly redirects the same to insurers’ agents.

    [Also Read eBook AI Service Desk and Automation Guide].

Conclusion

To maintain the competitive edge among the competitors, insurance carriers must embrace the change. RPA is capable of streamlining the insurance process and integrating the legacy applications with modern solutions at ease. By deploying RPA in insurance industry, insurers can not only reduce costs and workload, but also provide fast, personalized, and empathetic customer fast, personalized, and empathetic service they need.

With many success stories and client testimonials, AutomationEdge with its RPA capabilities has been enabling insurance providers to modernize their business operations and enhance productivity. To know more about what RPA brings to your insurance business and how you can customize RPA offerings to match your business goals, request a demo here or visit website

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