Top 6 reasons why the insurance sector should adopt Intelligent Document Processing IDP
Document processing is a part of everyday operations for businesses across the spectrum. Businesses have to go through large volumes of data regularly from a variety of sources to gain deeper insights for customer engagement.
COVID-19 has paved the way for emerging markets to empower customers to make demands. It has also led to growing customer engagement and expectations, which in turn is pushing the insurers to focus on their digitization efforts. Organisations are looking to get on their digital transformation journey rapidly to get ahead of the game, offer high levels of customer experience, and fight the competition as well.
The economic recession has slowed the pace of transformation for several enterprises, paving the way for sustainable options like low-code, OCR technologies, and artificial intelligence. Currently, insurance companies are grappling with growing volumes of documents in various formats — policy forms, supporting documents, customer feedback forms, invoices, receipts, and bills. Considering the volatile markets and need to optimise resources available, relying on paper-based business processes is a hindrance, weighing down the business efficiency levels as well.
The solution to all these challenges is “Intelligent Document Processing [IDP]”. In our earlier blog post, we talked about “IDP and how it can transform businesses across verticals”. In this post, we will address the need for IDP in the insurance domain.
Reasons for IDP to be part of the insurers technology roadmap
With IDP, companies can identify and extract data from both structured and semi-structured sources, irrespective of the document format [pdf, image, word, etc]. As businesses make a shift from product centric to customer centric approach, insurance companies need to update on how they process documents and data.
The entire customer journey involves exchange of information, which in most cases is paper-based. This spans across every stage, every interaction between insurers, agents, and customers — obtaining policy quotes, underwriting, onboarding, and claims processing. It is therefore no surprise that insurers are looking for alternative means to ensure operations continue and business grows. While there has been considerable progress across processes and the adoption of advanced technology, the document handling functionality requires a higher level of automation.
Intelligent document processing is slowly but steadily gaining traction. It is reinventing the entire document handling system across the enterprises. Here are a few reasons why organisations are increasingly adopting an IDP solution:
Going beyond OCR:
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that extracts text from images and has been used across businesses for decades. However, when talking about insurance-related documents, there are a few hurdles when using OCR. While it helps in extracting text, it does not analyse or draw insights from the data captured. The company, therefore, needs to rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) to capture the data accurately, and run analytics through it before providing usable and meaningful insights to insurers in underwriting and other functionalities. Insurers can then offer better underwriting services, and increase customer satisfaction levels.
Better customer experience
The focus today is to offer enhanced customer experience and this includes real-time updates. With an IDP solution offering an intelligent capture tool, customers can quickly scan and share the required documents digitally.
The system is safe and secure, helping build trust between customers and the company.
On the other hand, insurers can use IDP to automate and speed up document processing, especially when dealing with large volumes of data of varied document types. It increases speed to market, gives them the leverage needed for new business, and offers top-notch customer service which will subsequently lead to customer retention and upselling opportunities.
Data security and easy access
Through digital document processing, enterprises across sizes can complete their digital transformation journey without worries. Converting paper-based documents into digital provides safe and secure storage, easy retrieval, and access to all parties involved. An industry report states that while most are moving to digital storage, 77% of millennial workers still feel paper/physical documents will continue to play a crucial role, at least for the next five years. This might be a challenge that insurance enterprises need to work on resolving.
Compliance made easy
Like all businesses, insurance is controlled by regulations and compliance policies. With the help of IDP, insurers can maintain records and data in an organised manner which helps meet all the guidelines laid out. What sets IDP apart from other solutions is the speed and accuracy, which allows optimisation of resources and focusing on other priority items.
Increased efficiency
Documents provided by customers when processed manually involves time, resources and is error-prone. When using IDP solutions, the documents can be processed in no time using AI & ML capabilities. If the IDP system is unable to recognise a piece of information, it gets escalated to a human resource and is resolved thereon. Another advantage of IDP is that it can extract information from structured and semi/unstructured data, offering insights thereby driving operational efficiencies.
Scalability
IDP is one of those solutions that are easy to use and can be used across all applications processes and business units. It does not require complicated installation or integration, it serves as a platform where documents of varied formats, sizes, and from several sources are scanned, processed and relevant data captured. IDP is therefore a highly scalable solution.
How to choose an IDP solution:
Now that you are aware of what IDP can do for your business, here are a few factors to consider before deciding on the ideal document processing solution:
Time taken: What is the time and effort required to incorporate the IDP solution into your business and to get started on the first document?
Smart capture capability: Does the IDP solution offer a smart capture tool? Does it have the capability to recognise and alert in case of any errors?
Intelligence: Can the solution extract data using ML capabilities? How easy is it to use the tool in various document formats?
Ease of use and scalability: Is the solution easy to use and scalable with a significant increase in paper workloads?
Customization: Does the solution offer customization to incorporate existing tools and integrate with processes across business functionalities?
Automating integrations: Data processing is effective when it can be integrated into the process. Does the IDP solution offer seamless integration or is it a stand-alone data processing tool? Does it help draw insights?
ROI: Is there a defined ROI for the solution over a period of time and across upgrades?
Insurance enterprises handle large volumes of data on a regular basis, and require assistance in ensuring the data captured is accurate, error-free and can provide insights. The need of the hour is for a solution that will help increase efficiency, reduce operational costs, optimise resources, boost customer experience, and subsequently business growth. The first step towards achieving this would be to adopt an IDP solution into the system.