If there is one industry that faces a deluge of calls and mails with requests it has to be the insurance industry. They are constantly dealing with piles of paper work, processing and ultimately face a lot of flak from disgruntled customers. During the course of a day, there is new insurance application processing, claims processing, policy servicing and so on that is done by the insurers, apart from the many operational tasks. This in turn leads to delay in claims processing and increases cost for the companies. To make life easier, Robotic Process Automation [RPA] tools can be adopted, atleast to complete small repetitive tasks thereby easing up the entire Business process Automation system.
What is Robot Process Automation?
Robot Process Automation [RPA] is a software technology that utilizes robots that are inbuilt with Artificial intelligence to complete tasks. The tasks are typically simple straight forward ones such as collecting data from various sources, generating reports from the data, manipulating the data that has been gathered to suit the current process and so on. RPA can also be used in desktop applications, spaces where forms are filled and the data needs to be collated and shared with certain people handling the business.
While Robotic Process Automation is a new technology, it has been growing and seen quite a lot of demand in recent times, especially when enterprises are looking to control costs and optimize resources. The administrative tasks that are done on a day-to–day basis, which follow simple rules that involve no decision making or coming up with strategies, bots and Robots work better than humans. This technology is used across industries, and has proven to help make businesses better and boost growth in the process. Low-code development platforms facilitate RPA tools to work to their highest level of efficiency by enabling the various cross-functional teams to easily connect and collaborate several applications to provide end-to-end solutions. Another big advantage of bringing in Low code development or Rapid development platforms here is it involves no coding at all.
With a good RPA tool in place, people can focus on tasks that require human intervention, take decisions on claims, make approvals and enhance the experience for the customer while adding value to the organization as well.
Some of the key benefits of Robotic Process Automation,
Lower Cost
Higher Efficiency
Increased data Accuracy
Scaling with ease
Streamlining the Claims Processing system
Non- invasive Compatibility with other softwares
Improved Compliances
Easy Transition
Cognitive capability (AI, Chatbot & others)
Why is RPA a Good Fit For the Insurance Sector?
The insurance industry is bogged down with back-office tasks and endless processes, which are fairly operational in nature but are high volume and time consuming. Most of the tasks as mentioned above are repetitive in nature. Which is why Organizations need to turn towards adopting RPA to reduce the burden on their staff, and give them the freedom to work on other aspects. By doing this, they will be change the customer satisfaction levels apart from several other benefits.
Some of the areas where RPA works well in the Insurance industry are,
a) New Business & Underwriting:
Obtaining information, gathering necessary data from various sources to assess the risk that is connected to the policy is where RPA acts as a blessing. The data from the forms can be captured into the system in no time and the accuracy levels are phenomenal.
b) Claims Registration and Processing:
Another aspect of any insurance company is the claims registration and processing. The forms to be filled out, data gathered can get overwhelming and consume way too much time, considering the representative needs to speak to more than one resource. But then, once the data is obtained, it can be collated, analyzed and processed with the help of RPA tools. RPA system can also notify all parties involved, hand over the tasks to those handling the claims, and integrate all the data. It speeds up the entire process, makes the experience better for the consumer and increases business for the company as well.
c) Policy Administration and Servicing:
Insurance companies are always all about the policy and its administration. From the time they get the form completed to underwriting the same, it takes time and the process is quite extensive. Policy administration systems are high-maintenance, quite expensive, and time consuming, therefore RPA will help speed up the process to facilitate business growth.
Our experience has shown that RPA can help complete the task in one-third of the time taken.
d) Regulatory Compliance:
The insurance sector runs on rules & regulations laid down the governing body. Therefore it is necessary they adhere to the regulations especially since they come under the radar during the audit. Therefore, the process and compliance needs to done carefully and by using RPA, there will be none to zero breaches in this arena.
Bottom-line here is that RPA will work as a game changer when used in any industry, more so in the Insurance sector. But the enterprise owners should remember that RPA is a technology and it works best in small menial tasks rather than in bigger important aspects of the business.
The lesser the need for human intervention = the higher the chances of RPA fitting the process.