Many insurance companies still use paper documents and age-old legacy systems to handle insurance policies and carry out many other processes. However, these kinds of manual procedures are tedious and inefficient, drain employee productivity, and prove unsatisfactory for customers.
In today's digital-first world, customers are used to quick and efficient real-time service delivery, whether they're ordering a meal, requesting a cab, or buying life insurance. Employees, too, work better when automation technology handles the repetitive, mundane aspects of their work, especially when dealing with high volumes of data sources and when information is passing through many hands.
It is crucial for forward-thinking insurance companies to implement better internal workflows to enable employees to do their best work in less time and keep customers happy, boosting both employee retention and profitability for the organization. This article looks into the concept of insurance automation: its role, benefits, and the top use cases. We'll share valuable information for insurance providers to create better experiences and overcome the most pressing challenges in the industry.
What Is Insurance Automation?
Insurance automation is the process of using software tools and technology to streamline business processes, document processing, operational tasks, and routine decision-making such as approvals, sign-offs, and renewals. This significantly reduces the time spent on tasks such as candidate pre-qualification, insurance claims processing, policy management, regulatory compliance, and underwriting.
Insurance automation focuses on automating processes to make work more efficient and error-free and improve service delivery and the overall customer experience. Popular insurance automation technologies include:
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Machine Learning (ML)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Intelligent Automation (IA)
Technological advancements require that insurance companies prioritize digital transformation initiatives to keep up with market innovations and customer needs in today's modern landscape. Insurance companies can digitize and automate time-consuming, paper-heavy tasks using RPA, freeing up employee time for high-value work. They can use NLP, ML, and AI to create chatbots to educate and onboard new policyholders, creating a pleasant and hassle-free registration process while enabling customer service representatives to focus on solving real customer problems. The possibilities are limitless.
How Automation Benefits the Insurance Industry
The insurance industry is complex and heavily regulated. Automation helps in many ways to reduce the overflow of back-office operations, demands of regulatory compliance, and deal with ever-evolving customer needs. Other benefits of insurance automation include:
- Improving the customer experience: With automation, insurance companies can create a better customer experience. Tedious manual insurance processes can be digitized and automated, allowing customers to interact with providers and complete insurance purchases, onboarding, and policy renewals using the internet from the comfort of their homes.
- Reducing costs: Insurance automation helps insurance companies cut down on costs by eliminating redundant tasks, tightening workflows, and modernizing legacy systems to drive efficiency.
- Driving growth and expansion: Automation fosters scalability for companies of all sizes. With growth automation, providers can speed up cycle times and reduce expenses, furthering growth and expansion plans.
- Reducing human error: Automation reduces human errors and fraudulent behavior in simple tasks like data entry, which may be common without oversight. This is crucial for an industry where handling sensitive customer data is the norm.
4 Top Use Cases for Automation in Insurance
Other industries in the financial services sector are fully embracing automation with excellent results. This adoption is reshaping the insurance industry with significant positive results. Some of the most valuable use cases for insurance automation are:
1. Driving customer satisfaction
Insurance automation helps to simplify and minimize interactions with insurance providers throughout the customer journey.
Insurance companies can enable purchase and processing through web and mobile apps and other digital means, enabling automation through application programming interfaces (APIs) and connection requests in the backend. Cognitive software tools like NLP and machine learning power simple user interfaces like chatbots to support and guide customers and respond to their questions when navigating insurance apps and processes. They also help verify customer identity, update profiles, and check for both eligibility and fraud at different stages.
2. Streamlining claims processing
Efficient claims processing is crucial to the success of insurance companies. Streamlining the process brings significant gains for providers.
When it comes to claims management, eliminating redundant processes and automating request intake and update processes are necessary to create a better experience for both insurance employees and customers. From claim notifications and communications to documentation, tracking, and report generation, insurance automation elevates a company’s operational efficiency and reduces costs, errors, and manual work.
3. Keeping up with regulatory compliance
Insurance companies must comply with industry regulations to continue to serve their customers. They must update and restructure business processes to adapt to the regulations in real time and avoid any fines and reputational damages. RPA bots can help handle compliance checks, customer verification according to industry standards, security and eligibility checks, and scheduled regulatory report generation and distribution.
4. Underwriting
Automated underwriting is fast gaining prominence in the insurance industry, boosting accuracy and speed in this critical insurance operation.
Underwriting is how providers determine whether to accept a risk and the amount and terms of a policy. The process can take weeks or months. Implementing insurance automation speeds up the process and minimizes the reliance on human intervention to move an application through the required stages. Automation also reduces human errors and frees up employees to focus on improving applicants' experiences with the insurance company.
Use Pulpstream to Get the Most Benefits From Insurance Automation
When looking for an insurance automation tool, it's wise to find one that integrates easily with the other tools and apps in your technology stack to expand the efficiency and output of the sum of your business processes. Your insurance automation tool must also enable flexibility, easy customization, and scalability.
Automation tools like Pulpstream satisfy these criteria and more. Using Pulpstream's no-code automation functionalities puts power into the hands of every employee, enabling them to build and connect their workflows for more efficiency in a stress-free process.
Take, for example, a case study on Risk Management Advisors, a firm specializing in the management of captive insurance companies. Before using Pulpstream to generate insurance policies, Client Service Director Sabrina Straley used ad hoc tools like Excel spreadsheets and Word documents to store premium and limit data and create necessary documents. Processed applications and policies were stored in folders on an internal network, requiring considerable time for team members to locate, identify their stage in the insurance process, and discern what to do to move it forward.
Pulpstream's claim management software helped digitize all policy documents and records, streamlining the policy issuance process from start to finish and enabling visibility into each application to avoid time wasted trying to figure out status or needed actions.
Now, when creating a new policy, Straley logs into Pulpstream and chooses the appropriate document from a catalog of policy templates. After the creation of a new policy, Pulpstream moves the document from stakeholder to stakeholder by creating assigned tasks and notifying the relevant team member.
Whether obtaining a necessary signature or cross-referencing policy data, Pulpstream helps you get more done in less time. Pulpstream stores all records in the cloud, enabling employees to access the information they need, whether they're working in an office or a remote location. When a claim is filed or a policy is updated, the action is time-stamped and attached to the relevant document.
Are you ready to streamline and optimize your insurance processes for the best results—not to mention improved customer satisfaction? Contact the team at Pulpstream for a consultation to learn more about our no-code claims management automation solutions or request a free demo today.
