Tedious paperwork and manual interventions—traditional processes once bogged down the insurance industry. But the times have changed now!
Automation has taken over the insurance industry, simplifying the operations from policy creation to claims settlement. As a result, insurers are confident in promising fast, accurate, and personalized services to their clients.
But what exactly made insurance companies automate their operations and rewrite the industry’s rules?
Here are 6 benefits of end-to-end insurance automation to answer the question!
The Top 6 Benefits of End-to-End Automation for Insurance
1. Policy management is easy
From underwriting to policy issuance and renewal, automation simplifies and accelerates policy management for insurers. It fast-tracks processes like data collection, analysis, and storage into internal systems.
Using data analytics and natural language processing (NLP), underwriters can save time and reduce errors while performing:
- background checks,
- quota generation,
- customer qualification for the policy,
- coverage eligibility checks,
- monthly premium calculations, etc.
After this, policy administrators can walk their customers through automated policy issuance and policy renewal alerts. They can create virtual assistants for self-service options to help customers throughout the policy update and renewal process.
2. Claims processing is fast and efficient
Manual document verification is a tedious and time-consuming task in claims processing. It delays the process until the final settlement. But automation replaces these tasks with accuracy and efficiency.
You can use AI to automate document classification—which is confusing because of the variety of documents that come for verification—and data extraction. It does everything from identifying the intent of emails to routing them to the right person so they can review and settle the claim.
Besides, technologies like OCR (optical character recognition) can reduce errors and delays by taking over data extraction and data entry tasks from handwritten documents.
Insurers can choose whether they need attended or unattended automation to process the claims based on the risks associated with the process.
3. Risk assessment is fast and accurate
Insurers can use fraud detection software to identify potential fraud in insurance claims. This software uses data analytics and predictive modeling to study historical data (involving customer conversations) and look for unusual information, speeding up the process.
It collects data from various sources—both internal and external—to ensure insurers have adequate and correct information to identify risks and make a decision.
Such software then generates detailed reports for underwriters to conduct risk analysis which otherwise would have taken a lot of time had they collected and stored the data on their own.
Plus, the software can flag fraudulent-seeming claims and direct them to your team for review before payout.
4. Regulatory compliance is improving
The risk of regulatory violations is also increasing with increasing complexities around the insurance processes. Following this, documentation and audit trails undergo strict regulations that need high accuracy.
With automation, insurers can avoid employing manual resources to check for regulatory compliance. They can easily use automated processes to verify documents, generate reports, and send notices for closing non-compliant accounts.
Besides, with evolving regulatory norms, insurance companies that go through the entire business process changes can use automation to guide their workforce in monitoring the policies’ compliance with these changes.
5. Operational workflows are simple
Operational workflows in insurance companies primarily include mundane tasks like:
- data extraction
- data entry
- document processing
- task allocation
Automation reduces human intervention in these tasks and ensures technologies like AI, ML, OCR, and NLP take over with speed, accuracy, and efficiency. With this, your data is available at a centralized location for easy access and processing.
As mentioned earlier, AI also allocates tasks among employees based on their skill set, experience, and availability.
As a result, human resources are free to concentrate on strategic activities and complex issues. This increases their productivity, reduces overhead costs, and eventually improves operational efficiency.
6. Customer experience is boosted
31% of insurers shifting their focus from revenue growth to customer experience are increasing investments in hyper automation.
Why—because automation makes lives easier for both insurers and their customers. With automation, customers can help themselves (self-service portals) without relying on customer service agents to solve basic issues. They can now receive online alerts for their policies regarding quotes, updates, renewal, and compliance issues.
Besides self-service options, customers also have virtual agents at their disposal because of automation. They can directly talk to these agents for instant resolution or even escalation of issues.
Here’s what the future holds for insurance automation
The future looks promising! For a driver who accidentally bumps his car into a trash can, insurance automation would mean his virtual PA guiding him to take pictures of the damaged area and the surroundings. All these while the car’s internal diagnostic system analyzes the extent of the damage.
By the time the driver gets back to his seat, he would get notified of the claim being approved and a mobile response drone reaching the accident spot for inspection!
