Acquiring or maintaining a strategic competitive advantage in the insurance market is faced with some serious challenges in the current socio-economic context:
- Consumers’ raising standards and demands for price transparency and timely answers to questions;
- Reliance on legacy systems that are no longer able to meet customers’ expectations;
- The need to keep up with ever-changing regulatory jurisdictions that set the norms for capital requirements or customer interactions.
Meeting growth and profit targets from within the traditional environment where a high volume of monotonous, menial back-office tasks are manually performed, that are both time consuming and prone to errors, doesn’t look like a good option.
Therefore the appeal to robotic process automation in insurance, with its capacity for quick, accurate, and non-costly data manipulation, might provide the necessary impetus for upgrading this industry sector.
In line with our pragmatic approach to technologically-supported business, we have consistently recommended across our series of articles to mull over robotic process automation use cases as a form of valuable ‘learning by doing’. So let us look at some relevant factual information about RPA use cases in insurance.
Real world use cases of robotic process automation in insurance
1. Underwriting and pricing
This amounts to evaluating the risks associated with each prospective client, and, based on this, deciding the price that needs to be charged for insuring the risk. It is thus a core process for insurance companies; in fact, the accuracy of this category of decisions determines the financial success of your insurance company.
A thorough, comprehensive risk assessment requires data collection and analysis from a variety of sources, which can take up to three weeks of painstaking effort. Software robots automate data gathering from both internal and external systems, entry of relevant data to internal sites, or report generation.
The whole process is streamlined and becomes a lot less time consuming, producing quasi error free outcomes.
2. Claims processing
Bots’ ease in data gathering from multiple sources is what makes it such that claims too can be processed much faster than when manually performed, i.e., in only a quarter of the time.
With the steady increase in the number of clients, it becomes even more necessary to use RPA for claims processing. Automation ensures more appropriate handling of clients’ claims, and this improves your company’s reputation.
3. Business and process analytics
In insurance, there is a need for benchmarks in order to improve business processes. Because of offering the possibility to track and record all the actions undertaken, software robots can be rightly called experts at quantifying and appraising.
It allows your staff to have direct access to information-loaded details, such as processed transactions or encountered exceptions. This means significantly less workload on the employees’ shoulders, which allows them to focus more on the clients and better address their needs.
