10 Revolutionary Changes Brought by RPA and Advanced AI in the Insurance Industry
Today we have reached an age where each day breaks to expose our lives to technology. Where we are controlled heavily by various inventions and upgrades in technology, we cannot afford anything but keeping pace with these changes. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial intelligence (AI) are among those innovations which didn’t only transform the way businesses have been carried out until this point but also changed the way customers have been experiencing products and services.
Functions, processes, and operations that involve a large amount of rule-based, clerical work make for a perfect candidate for implementation of the bot technology. Software robots, offered by RPA, are rich with artificial intelligence to accomplish tasks such as executing desktop-based applications, acquiring databases on certain aspects, exposing accumulated data to desktop applications, and manipulating data depending upon the requirements of the process.
Robotic Process Automation in insurance offers a digital workforce that takes over redundant and monotonous tasks, enabling the organization to deploy the human workforce into tasks that require the ability of judgment and strategic thinking. It saves the business enough precious time and human efforts, thereby resulting in cost savings in the long run. With powerful and promising features, RPA is becoming the favorite choice for many industries, insurance is no exception.
Insurance can leverage the software bots for working with the legacy systems, gathering external data, and automating tedious yet time-consuming repetitive work. As a result, the insurance companies get increased productivity, savings on operational costs, enhanced customer experience, and many more such benefits. With the ability to free the human workforce and opening gateways to opportunities, there are several use cases of RPA and advanced artificial intelligence in the insurance industry.
1. Underwriting
Underwriting involves the collection of information from multiple sources for analyzing risks associated with the given policies. It is a lengthy and tiring process for insurance professionals. In general, underwriting in the insurance sector consumes up to 4 weeks, leading to around 18.7 million people failing to complete it because of loss of interest. Software robots can capture data from internal as well as external sources without human intervention. Thus, the implementation of RPA in insurance frees up to 30% of employee requirements for underwriting, ensures 100% accuracy, and reduces the turnaround time by bringing it from weeks to minutes.
2. Claims Processing
Claims processing is a data and document-intensive process. Generally, claims processing requires the insurance sector to gather a large amount of data from numerous sources. Manual processing of claims can be bothersome for insurance executives as well as customers. The digital workforce brings speed and efficiency in claim processing by gathering data from diverse sources to be used by the centralized system.
Trends reveal that the claims can be processed 75% faster with the implementation of RPA. The paper-based manual claims processing result in a disaster, especially while insurers are trying to cater to the needs of a large and increasing customer base.
3. Analytics and Insights
The insurance industry can improve operations if there are ways to measure performance and efficiency across various processes. Here, RPA comes in handy by enabling insurers to track and record values involved at each step of every process. RPA equips the insurance companies with details associated with total transactions processed, errors and exceptions encountered, and so on so forth. The valuable insights generated by RPA can be used to optimize processes, reduce human dependency, relieve resources for more productive work, and deliver a better customer experience.
4. Reducing workload
Processes such as quotation and insurance claims demand time and efforts of the staff, resulting in lowered productivity and delay in results. It, furthermore, affects the customer experience. Failing to address this issue in time, the reputation of your organization goes under threat. RPA implementation, on the other hand, can reduce costs and the workforce required to carry out such processes and ensure 100% accuracy in the end results.
5. Legacy Systems
Many insurance firms depend on legacy applications for conducting business functions. When the new ERP or BPM solution is implemented, the insurance companies strive hard to integrate them into legacy systems. Robotic process automation services require no additional infrastructure and can be implemented in the existing system.
6. Regulatory compliance
The insurance companies are bound to follow a set of rules indicated by various local and national bodies. They include privacy rules, regulatory standards, and statutory laws. These compliance standards are tough to follow for both companies and clients. RPA implementation ensures regulatory compliance and saves businesses from the glitch.
7. Scalability
Artificial Intelligence techniques such as big data analytics and robotic process automation ensure scalability across processes and operations as per needs and situations. Intelligent software robots can scale up or down depending upon the requirements.
8. Seamless Integration
RPA comes with surprising benefits for the insurance industry. It has incredible features such as image classification for claims and text analytics for resolving customer queries. Where RPA brings efficiency and agility into the various processes in insurance, it does not require changes in the IT infrastructure. The bot technology can be integrated with existing systems effortlessly, enabling insurers to reap maximum benefits without having to spend much on new infrastructure.
9. Automated Data Entry
When insurers are looking to acquire new clients, it takes a lot of data entry by customers as well as staff. They have to fill lengthy forms. Here, the combination of RPA and AI can work wonders. Information can be pre-collected from internal and external sources and can be auto-filled. If we talk about the manual filing of forms, insurers refer to the information of claim seekers from the forms they had filled at the time of taking policies. It’s a monotonous and time-consuming job. Moreover, when a human worker must process, say, hundreds of forms per day, maintaining accuracy gets challenging. Especially when it involves a long series of numerical figures. The duo of RPA and AI helps insurers overcome this challenge by ensuring all the data is entered without any change.
10. Swift Customer Onboarding
Customer acquisition involves lots of paperwork, and the time and hassle it takes can frustrate customers. Organizations can set up an intelligent RPA model to make the customer experience more pleasant by auto-filling some of the fields on the forms. This makes customer onboarding a swift process. The fields such as company name, the industry they serve, contact person, location data, and more can be collected from public listings and filled automatically.
The bottom line:
Insurance automation produces a positive impact on companies, their staff, and the end-user. It optimizes processes and operations, thereby. As a result, companies conquer tedious and time-consuming tasks with higher accuracy in the shortest possible time, leading to a reduction in the requirements for the human workforce and savings in costs. For customers, the implementation of RPA reduces turnaround time and removes the hassle involved in the manual processing of information. By bringing transparency and ease in claims and payment processing, RPA improves customer experience to a great extent.
