The application of technology for the automation of mundane tasks has caused the RPA adoption rate to skyrocket across sectors and the insurance industry is leading the charge. By simulating human activity through powerful technology, Robotic Process Automation helps solve many challenges for insurers.
In fact, the insurance sector offered the perfect proving ground for RPA. Read on to learn about the problems RPA can solve, the benefits it can offer, and the many use cases of the technology in the insurance industry.
The Benefits RPA Offers.
For insurance companies, day-to-day tasks such as underwriting, customer onboarding, processing of claims, etc., take up a lot of precious time. Although important, these tasks involve extremely repetitive work. Delays and manual errors are often inevitable, affecting overall efficiency, customer satisfaction, and business profitability.
RPA empowers insurers with the capabilities they need to build a high-growth,
responsive business while constantly optimizing costs. It streamlines everyday tasks that otherwise drain employees’ energy, time, and morale, thus, improving process accuracy and efficiency.
By emulating key transactional and administrative tasks that are repetitive and
rule-based, the technology helps the workforce to spend more time focusing on activities that tap human strengths like reasoning, judgment, and emotional
intelligence.
Using RPA, insurance companies can:
- Enhance the speed and quality of customer data collection, approval, and
verification - Streamline tasks relating to claims handling and process claims faster
- Overcome the problems associated with regulatory compliance
- Automate the filling of forms and the integration of data into different systems
- Accelerate the onboarding process and thus customer experience
- Minimize operational errors and costs
- Flag errors and disparities in customer and business data
- Improve employee productivity and efficiency
- Enable effective risk management and fraud detection
- Enhance customer response times and issue resolution metrics
The Use Cases of RPA in the Insurance Industry
Underwriting
Underwriting is a complex process that demands the continuous collection of data and a thorough evaluation of risk exposure. Since a great deal of time is spent scrambling and analyzing data and determining the risks involved, it takes weeks for agents to arrive at an accurate conclusion.
Using RPA, insurance companies can automate the data collection and risk assessment process, significantly reducing the time taken for underwriting. By populating relevant information and generating reports, RPA delivers the right recommendations while enhancing the speed and accuracy of underwriting.
Claims processing requires insurance agents to gather a large amount of data from different sources. Since traditional claims processing systems lack the functionality and flexibility that the modern world demands, they lead to excessive levels of manual processing.
By automatically integrating data from multiple sources, RPA helps eliminate labor-intensive processes like extraction and verification of data, improving not just processing speed or quality but also the overall customer experience.
Fraud Detection is a growing challenge that insurance companies have to deal with. Unfortunately, the heavy reliance on outdated, rules-based systems makes it impossible to identify modern-day frauds.
RPA can be used to enable advanced fraud detection mechanisms, improving the accuracy and timeliness of human judgment. Using machine learning and AI capabilities, RPA can help find recurrent patterns in data and detect unusual behavior in systems – safeguarding the business and critical data against attack and misuse.
Compliance is a key requirement for companies in the insurance industry. There are strict guidelines for documenting work and creating audit trails, but manual approaches to regulatory compliance can lead to several issues and challenges.
With regulatory scrutiny in the insurance space at an all-time high, RPA helps in streamlining the multitude of tedious and error-prone processes, thus reducing the risk of a regulatory breach. Using RPA, insurance companies can validate information, curate the right compliance policies, improve internal processes, and demonstrate perfect compliance 24/7.
The Role of an Expert Partner
If you want your insurance processes to be efficient, you need to embrace RPA across the length and breadth of your organization. But given how complex RPA implementation can be, especially if you have an array of siloed tools and processes, engaging with an expert partner can make a significant difference. An expert partner can help overcome many common adoption challenges. More profoundly, a partner can:
- Carry out a detailed assessment of your existing IT environment and evaluate gaps and challenges
- Recommend repetitive tasks or processes that will benefit most from RPA adoption
- Build a robust RPA roadmap with key milestones and deliverables
- Implement the right RPA tools across critical business processes
- Monitor and maintain your RPA implementation and act on bottlenecks
- Train your users on how best to use RPA and educate them on best practices
- Ensure seamless scalability of your RPA implementation as your business needs grow
Wrapping Up
As customer needs evolve, the insurance industry is facing intense competition.
However, the reliance on siloed tools and manual processes impacts business process efficiency and customer satisfaction in many ways. If you want to enhance back-office process efficiency, you need to embrace RPA to automate transactional, routine, rules-based tasks and focus on sophisticated and strategic work.
Ellicium has been helping banking and insurance companies reap the many benefits of RPA for several years now. By leveraging our suite of RPA services, your insurance company can increase profits, improve compliance, maintain long-term company growth, and deliver excellent customer service today and always.
Contact us today to know more!