Introduction
The workflows in the insurance industry are known to be involving heavy repetitive tasks. The staff is burdened with mundane functions and has less time available for value-adding activities. Procedures such as underwriting, onboarding, processing claims, and policyholder services are all essential but filled with repetitive work, often slow, and affect overall business efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction.
Robotic Process Automation(RPA) is a perfect solution regarding cost optimization and building a responsive business. It can perform all the transactional, administrative, and repetitive work without the need for manual intervention. In essence, it gives employees the room to focus more on meaningful and revenue-generating functions.
Challenges of the insurance industry
Currently, insurance companies receive millions of claim requests making validation and processing are tiring and time-consuming for the staff to complete accurately. Furthermore, if any oversight occurs, the process can take even longer to rectify the mistakes. The entire process of receiving, validating, and approval can take many days to finish successfully. Manually undertaking the above functions makes the whole process longer, expensive and time-consuming. To avoid such damages, companies have begun using RPA to optimize costs and operations. The three primary challenges that RPA helps solve include:
1.Commoditizing Customers:
Insurance companies strive to do better in a highly competitive world, gain new customers, and retail the current ones. Offering low rates is an excellent way to do that, but if consumers begin to feel like they aren’t getting treated well, they will not be satisfied.
If companies begin commoditizing or treating customers like they are commodities, they will lose customers quickly. Every client wants to feel value above anything else. Hence, to achieve the desired result, RPA derives a highly personalized service that is speedy and efficient when implemented.
2. Analytical Data Quality:
Manually, insurance companies are constantly generating and leveraging data. However, more volume of data does not equate to quality. Here is where RPA can ensure insurers have robust user, operational, and marketing data through an efficient and error-free management plan. Hence, making sure the quality of analytical data offers meaningful insights resulting in better customer experiences.
3. Data Security:
Customer data is fundamental when offering personalized experiences. However, the increase in the level of data sharing and usage makes it vulnerable to cyber-risks. For any insurance business to achieve greater customer loyalty, vigorous measures are needed to ensure data is safe, which is often difficult to accomplish when using manual methods to function. Deploying RPA bots can ensure data remains secure, creates sufficient backups and restricted access, resulting in minimized risk.
RPA in Insurance: advantages
RPA is naturally a good fit for the insurance industry as it automates the process lifecycle by connecting front-end technology with the back office setting. Additionally, it integrates all core insurance workflows with the latest features to reduce response timings and ultimately ensures the staff focus on high-value tasks. Automation has immense potential in eliminating most obstacles insurance companies face. Furthermore, RPA minimizes operational risks while drastically increasing productivity in a way no other available option can.
Below are a few ways in which RPA proves to be the best solution for the insurance industry:
- Claim processing runs smoothly through automating time-consuming functions while improving efficiency, accuracy, and customer satisfaction.
- Easy to scale as RPA resources are adjusted to business requirements and for preventing financial leakage.
- RPA can be deployed as an add-on to existing applications without any coding.
- RPA enhances regulatory compliance, which results in data accuracy with precise log maintenance through software bots. Hence, insurance companies should have compliance checks in place for internal auditing and policy planning activities.
RPA is a highly beneficial tool for the insurance industry. In addition to the above offerings, it can reduce costs, accelerate claims handling, enhance underwriting, increase customer retention, low employee turnover, and improve customer service to a whole new level.
Ten RPA Bots in Insurance
On understanding the power of RPA, let's review a few use cases of RPA for the insurance industry. Below are the 10 RPA bots used in insurance:
1. Underwriting Function:
Underwriting involves evaluating the risk and exposure of each client. In essence, information must be gathered from many resources while assessing risks for a specific policy. Such a task consists of a lot of data scrambling, analyses, and determining risks before reaching a conclusion, which takes around 2-3 weeks.
RPA is an efficient solution to speed up the process of underwriting through automating data collection from numerous sources. Additionally, it can fill up multiple fields in the internal systems with accurate information to make recommendations and assess the loss of runs. Hence, RPA is forming the basis for underwriting and pricing, which is highly beneficial for insurers.
2. Regulatory Compliance:
The insurance sector is required to follow strict guidelines for documenting tasks and having accurate audit trails. With an enormous volume of tedious activities and error-prone workflows, a regulatory breach is high.
Here is where RPA offers companies the potential to improve regulatory processes by eliminating the need for the staff to spend a significant amount of time enforcing regulatory compliance. It automates validating existing client information, generating regulators reports, sending account closure notifications, and many more tasks.
3. Analytics:
Insurance businesses have to continuously improve to service clients better, which is only possible if they can measure the effectiveness of what they are currently doing. With many operational and paper-intensive workflows, it is tough to track and measure efficiency without RPA.
RPA, through the use of software bots, track and measure transactions accurately. The audit trail created by bots can assist in regulatory compliance, which supports the improvement of processes.
4. Form Registration:
Form registration is a necessary but tedious task in the insurance space. RPA, especially with ElectroNeek, can automate and assist in completing the process in 40% of the actual time taken, with half the number of staff required when done manually.
5. Cancellation of Policies:
Canceling policies involves many functions, such as tallying the cancel date, inception date, and other policy terms. RPA can carry out all the above tasks in just one-third of the time to complete them manually.
6. Scalable:
Above all, one of the most significant advantages of RPA in insurance is scalability, as software bots can get deployed as required by the business. Additionally, RPA bots can also get reduced when needed with no added costs. Hence, making it an effective solution for insurance firms.
7. Processing Claims:
Claims processing involves a lot of data and documents. The process consists of collecting data from each source and, when done manually, is lengthy and prone to errors that negatively affect both customer service and operations. RPA can ensure such processes are conducted seamlessly by collecting data and centralizing documents speedily and less expensively.
8. Data Entry of Quotations:
The insurance industry involves significant amounts of data entry for various tasks such as quotations. Like most workflows in insurance, it is long and tiring, involving many inconsistencies and errors when performing them manually. RPA can get the same amount of work in less time and produce better results.
9. Use of Legacy Applications:
Most insurance firms still rely on legacy systems to handle various business functions. When new solutions or technologies get implemented, such companies face trouble in integrating with existing systems. Here is where RPA assists in working with old systems as they can work with any type of system or application.
10. Administration of policies:
A traditional policy administration system is high maintenance, expensive, and not scalable enough to meet the growing number of clients. RPA can automate administrative tasks such as settlements, capturing risk, and credit control in a less costly and more productive way.
Why ElectroNeek is the best option?
ElectroNeek offers end-to-end RPA solutions customized to your organization's needs. We ensure your insurance firm gains the most advantage at an attractive pricing model as a comprehensive strategic tool.
At ElectroNeek, we assess everything right from planning to adopt RPA to ensuring the program is scalable across your organization's functions. The services get offered through a powerful integrated platform that can help your business thrive without the hassle of licensing, coding, or any further added costs. Choosing the right vendor is crucial in successfully implementing RPA solutions. Our support team at Electronique is available around the clock to ensure you succeed.
Conclusion
As evident above, RPA is a highly valuable tool for firms in insurance to gain a competitive edge in a cut-throat market. If interested to know more about how RPA can help your business, please don’t hesitate to contact our team.