Automation can help P&C insurers rebound from the pandemic

As people begin to phase back into “normal” life after the global COVID-19 pandemic — returning to the office, attending gatherings, traveling and socializing — the expectation follows that property & casualty insurers will see upticks in business as people purchase policies to support these advances.

However, a recent Deloitte report of insurance executives predicted that insurers are still going to be facing lingering obstacles to growth and profitability throughout 2021. For instance, workers’ compensation insurance sales aren’t expected to reach previous volumes or premium income levels until late 2022.

The same survey also found that 79% of respondents believe the pandemic uncovered shortcomings in their company’s digital capabilities and transformation plans. This means that on top of lagging revenue, insurers may be dealing with operations that aren’t working as optimally as they could be, which could further sabotage growth plans.

In the balance between regaining lost capital to sustain profitability and creating more agile business to drive growth, automation provides the lever to augment digital workforce. Here is how leveraging automation technologies can create resiliency in an insurance organization, ensure smooth operations, and mitigate cost inefficiencies.

Optimize routine processes

After a year of doing everything online to slow the spread of COVID-19, customers have a heightened standard for efficiency for the businesses they are interacting with — insurance industry included.

Automation can compensate for gaps in operations and help reduce delays caused by human error, offering insurance enterprises a competitive edge. Especially within continued remote work environments or hybrid remote and in-office environments, augmenting operations with software robots can support automated core insurance tasks from front-office to back-office processes.

For example, processing a single claim requires collecting customer information from numerous sources including policy administration systems, documents and third-party systems, and logging it into one or more claims processing systems. Even if an insurance carrier or third-party administrator has digitized its record and data collection processes, tracking down this information across virtual locations can be challenging.

Once the information is obtained, entering it manually takes time and is a frequent source of data entry mistakes. The consequences can sour the customer experience.

Automation of tasks such as claims processing means agencies can react more quickly to increasing demands from policyholders, agents and partners for fast, transparent, and multi-channel experiences, 24/7.

Robotic process automation (RPA) can compile data from various systems and sources on a claims adjuster’s behalf and process it within a secure system of records. RPA can also execute more complex processes like automatic adjudication and underwriting thereby enabling straight-through processing even for complex or high-value cases.

Hybrid automation, which uses a combination of unattended robots sending cases to humans for decision-making and attended robots can accelerate employee productivity, value and satisfaction. Apart from the employee engagement benefits, these activities are completed quicker and more accurately, lowering cost and risk.

With the time saved, employees will have more availability to execute higher-value work like engaging with clients or pursuing new business opportunities. Likewise, if an organization can operate more resourcefully, it can offer more competitive pricing for its services, which can be a major differentiator for prospects.

Integrate legacy systems

A study by Celent found 45% of insurance CIOs identified heavy, disconnected and duplicative legacy systems as a key inhibitor to digital transformation. Though insurers have been striving to improve customer experiences, customers still see a gap between their expectations and insurers’ perception of experience delivery, primarily around continuous customer engagement.

Organizations can rapidly create unattended software robots that tackle highly repetitive tasks based on predefined rules, or attended software robots that take on smaller, more fragmented tasks under human supervision. Nonintrusive attended robots can help employees in customer-facing functions such as contact center agents and claims adjusters to serve the customers faster. Attended robots also provide opportunity for business users with full control of the process automation removing uncertainty and doubt of job loss.

Either option can lessen the burden of manual, repetitive tasks, reduce process costs and cycle times and free up time to focus on higher-value work. RPA is noninvasive and can be rapidly implemented to accelerate digital transformation. It is ideal for automating workflows that involve legacy systems that lack APIs, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), or database access. It can be used to automate processes on top of existing systems, including spreadsheets, PDFs, scanned documents, and applications like Duck Creek, Guidewire and LexisNexis.

Enhance the customer experience

Automation not only gives time back to busy insurance professionals, but it also enables far more engaging interactions with customers. For example, when a customer calls for a billing question, which is usually the top five reasons for inbound contact center calls, instead of spending time pulling a customer’s background information from multiple systems manually, when they first call in, a software robot can work in the background to source that data. Integrating robots with customer sentiment and behavior analytics and presenting the actionable insights into a low code application will enable the quick access to next best actions for the contact center agent.

The benefit of this assistance is two-fold: Customers do not have to wait on standby as long for an agent to get familiar with their situation, and agents are equipped to have a more informed conversation, which means reaching personalized and strategic resolutions sooner. These insights open the possibility for upselling opportunities based on the value of a seamless customer experience.

While it may be some months before business operations return to previous levels, automation presents an opportunity to establish long-term solutions that help to accelerate digital transformation, speed up recovery, and spur growth with a lower total cost of ownership. By equipping the organization with automation technologies, fully automated Insurance enterprises can deliver a level of efficiency and quality that builds customer trust and loyalty.

Sathya Sethuraman is a global leader of intelligent automation at UiPath, which offers an end-to-end platform for automation, combining the leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with a full suite of capabilities and techs like AI, Process Mining, and Cloud to enable every organization to rapidly scale digital business operations. He can be reached by sending an email to uipath@v2comms.com.

These opinions are the author’s own.

Also by Sathya Sethuraman: How to manage the current uptick in automation requests