A glimpse into the insurance industry


A glimpse into the insurance industry

We’ve all interacted with insurance companies at some point in our life. Whether it’s life insurance or home or vehicle insurance, a massive amount of back-office processes inundates the insurance companies. Mundane, manual tasks burden the insurers, which affects the organization’s efficiency.

Robotic Process Automation is fast becoming ubiquitous, bringing about enterprise-wide change across industries, and the insurance sector is no exception.

With RPA, time-consuming data entry work is allocated to software bots, relieving the human worker to focus on more value-added tasks, thereby undoubtedly reducing the turnaround time, which increases customer satisfaction.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

In simple terms, RPA is the automation of mundane tasks that are repetitive and follow a set of pre-defined instructions. The insurance industry is overwhelmed with many back-office tasks that take up tremendous time and effort of the employee. With robot-led automation, these tasks are handed to the bots, freeing the human worker to focus on strategic activities.

Insurance companies face a multitude of challenges, from getting rid of legacy applications and disparate systems to maintaining compliance. RPA — the recipe to success streamlines processes end-to-end and removes the burden of the human workers from time-consuming tasks.

RPA can automate sub-processes — pulling data from invoices, moving data from spreadsheets, or scraping information from websites, thus increasing the efficiency of the organization.

Below are a few benefits of implementing automation in insurance companies:

Streamlines claims processing

Claims processing includes gathering data/information from diverse sources such as admin and finance, which is time-consuming and daunting. The data collected is massive, unstructured, affecting customer service. Automation can help direct information to the right people, notifying those responsible for claims handling and integrating information gathered from multiple sources. With RPA, processing claims is faster and easier as it cuts down the processing time by automating manually intensive tasks, thus enhancing customer experiences.

Ensures regulatory compliance

Today, the insurance industry is highly regulated and complex. Maintaining high standards in governance is a top priority Liquidity, foreign exchange risks, and inadequate systems are some of the challenges that threaten the insurers. As compliance standards such as PCI, tax laws, and HIPAA privacy rules change frequently, businesses must realign themselves to the changing policies. This is where RPA comes in — it validates customer information, flags non-compliance by monitoring regulatory compliance daily, sending out reports and processing notifications, thus preventing a regulatory breach.

Helps in expediting the underwriting process

RPA can collate a vast amount of information from diverse sources, update the system, help assess the risks associated with any insurance, and provide recommendations that can assist in decision making and pricing.

Helps in data sorting, data entry, and validation

The insurance industry is replete with manual data entry tasks involving quotations, pricing, and insurance claims. The bots can automate the repetitive tasks in no time, thus reducing human errors and inconsistencies.

Improves customer service and operations

Legacy systems characterize the insurance industry. Robots take over the rules-based tasks, freeing the human worker to focus on creating better customer experiences. Whether it’s automating claims processing or handling customer queries, Robotic Process Automation transforms the customer experience.

Synthesizes, analyzes, and digests unstructured data

We understand that the human workforce spends a great deal of time in gathering, collating, updating, validating, and processing data. The digital bots can augment the various insurance processes by:

  • Reading and scanning data
  • Downloading data from multiple sources
  • Flagging errors in data
  • Compiling data from various systems

Drives scalability

The insurance sector is slow and highly regulated. The software bots can be scaled up and down as per your business needs, at no extra cost. For instance, if your organization has several claims to be processed during a particular period, the bots can be deployed as per your needs.

Conclusion

Robotic Process Automation is an emerging technology that augments the insurance processes, pushing organizations to embrace digital transformation. Most industries have already implemented software bots in specific business units, reaping the benefits and making better-informed decisions.

With the automation landscape evolving at breakneck speed, organizations are jumping into the technology bandwagon more than ever as they do not want to risk falling behind. Whether it’s policy cancellation or compliance management, insurance firms can benefit significantly from RPA.

Have you deployed RPA yet?