Robotic Process Automation: Defining a New Era of Insurance Industry

Quick Summary: Exploring the potential of robotic process automation in insurance? RPA helps insurance companies to expedite their processes and take their business to a new horizon. Insurance companies are getting their services significantly improved with RPA. In this blog, you can read complete details about RPA (Robotic Process Automation) in the insurance industry, its benefits, and use cases. Happy reading!

It’s not hard to imagine how modern technologies like AI, IoT, ML, Cloud Computing, and more have reshaped our world today. Businesses are leveraging these technologies to increase their productivity and deliver better value to customers.

Like other sectors, the insurance industry is also benefiting from these technologies that have given rise to insurtech, a next-gen field of insurance. According to the report by Grand View Research, the expected revenue from the Insurtech industry is estimated to be US $152 billion by 2030.

There are many successful examples of insurance companies like Allstate, AXA, and Progressive, that have revolutionized their businesses with the use of modern technologies. The use of these technologies has empowered insurance companies to rise above their paper-based systems through automation.

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is one of the best examples of how insurance companies can leverage technology to take their businesses to the next level. Just like robotic process automation in the production of goods, RPA is designed to complete repetitive tasks speedily and automatically. But an RPA is a software program instead and doesn’t exist physically.

RPA is a software robot that can do tasks like humans but at a much faster speed. Companies can leverage insurance software development solutions like RPA to get benefits including but not limited to reduced costs and increased operational efficiency.

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What is RPA and How Does it Help in Insurance?

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is the implementation of automation through software robots that mimic the human ability to handle back-office tasks like filling forms, extracting data, moving files, etc. These software robots can perform repetitive tasks more efficiently with minimum human assistance.

In insurance, software robots are being utilized to automate onerous tasks like claims processing, policy management, underwriting, and more. With the implementation of automation across diverse processes of insurance companies, employees can focus on more complex tasks.

RPA vs Intelligent Automation

The difference between RPA and Automation is the same as the difference between mind and body. Mind can “think” and “learn”, and the body can perform defined tasks. Similarly, robotic process automation is deployed to perform a set of repetitive tasks and intelligent automation can think, learn, and improve the way they work.

Intelligent automation is a collection of technologies like AI, NLP, RPA, and more. These technologies create a solution that doesn’t just complete repetitive tasks efficiently but is also able to learn and improvise processes.

How Do Insurance Businesses Benefit from Automation?

Automation unlocks a whole new potential for insurance businesses providing them with efficient and quick ways to execute their functions. It brings new opportunities and helps them overcome many challenges. The following are the major advantages of intelligent process automation in insurance with AI and RPA.

Improved Customer Experience

Robotic process automation in insurance will improve customer experience because of faster processing of requests. These software robots can look after customer grievances and help them promptly resolve their issues. RPA improves the customer experience in the following ways:

• With the ability of natural language processing, these software robots can substitute human agents in areas like customer support. They can help customers resolve their issues related to insurance claims and processes.
• Robots will be able to learn and improve to address customer grievances more effectively with the help of machine learning.
• Insurance can leverage advanced data and analytics to learn more about their customers and offer personalized services that will improve their experience.

Minimize Operational Costs

Manual processing of claims and maintaining the records of insured persons require immense material and human resources. It has been an Achilles’ Heel for insurance companies that insurance process automation helps to overcome. Through automation, companies can save lots of money as the amount of labor and processing time is reduced significantly. Companies need not enter data manually once they have implemented automation.

Avoid Human Error

Human errors are inevitable in a process where humans play a major role. However, these errors can result in big losses for insurance companies, and they will always try to avoid such errors. By adopting robotic process automation, insurance businesses can get a more precise method for performing different tasks. RPAs can perform tasks more accurately, consistently, and at a faster speed. Hence, with the use of RPA, insurance companies can avoid human errors.

Better Scalability

Insurance companies can achieve business scalability without affecting the workflow with robotic process automation. Software robots can handle increased workloads without requiring a company to increase its workforce. Implementing automation can increase accuracy by 70-80%, improve business efficiency, and streamline processes.

Improved Fraud Detection

Insurance fraud has become a great challenge for companies, and they need an effective method to counter this threat. Intelligent automation provides a robust shield against insurance fraud and helps companies detect forged claims by screening them through AI-based processes. Conversational AI and RPA empower companies to detect frauds and prevent them on time.

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Understanding the Different RPA Use Cases in the Insurance Sector

Insurance businesses deal with lots of repetitive tasks, so there is a lot of scope for automation using RPA. With automation, companies can perform different tasks more quickly and accurately.

Let’s see various robotic process automation use cases.

Policy Management

Policy management includes mundane chores like issuance of policy after underwriting, updating existing policies requested by policyholders, renewal of matured policies with adjusted premiums and coverage, and more.

Performing these tasks requires a lot of manual labor making the process slow and time intensive. Intelligent software bots can process and sort documents, collect data, and update information more quickly. These bots can even alert policyholders about the updates.

You can expect many advantages in policy management by implementing insurance process automation like:

• More than 50% increase in productivity.
• Ramp up 3X the speed of policy renewal, update, and creation.

Claim Management

Classifying and processing claims is cumbersome manually and affects an insurance company’s ability to settle claims quickly. Manual processing requires a lot of labor work from checking the documents to verifying the claims, it’s a time-consuming process.

Intelligent bots equipped with RPA, ML (Machine Learning), and NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies have empowered the insurance sector with efficient claim-processing methods. These software bots streamline the process with automated workflows.

There are many ways these bots help in claim-related tasks like:

• Software robots can assist in processing FNOL (First Notice of Loss) that is provided by the insured person in case of an accident or loss. Bots can allow a policyholder to provide information, photos, and any other required thing and enter that into the system.
• They can extract data from the application and fill in the claims system.
• Fraud can be prevented at the initial stage with the fraud-detection ability of bots.

Regulatory Compliance

Insurance companies have to abide by the rules and regulations set by the local authorities. Failing to comply with these regulations will attract heavy penalties that will hurt the company’s business and sway customers’ trust. However, keeping up with the frequent changes in these regulations is quite challenging for companies.

Automation with RPA and other technologies helps companies maintain their compliance requirements through quick identification and adaptation to changes. There are different compliance-related tasks that automation can perform such as:

• Researching and validating customers.
• Generating reports regarding compliances.
• Checking and verifying customers’ personal details with company records.
• Monitoring regulatory updates.
• Performing real-time data checks to comply with data protection rules.

Underwriting

Underwriting is a critical process in insurance where an assessment of risk posed by a potential insurance-seeker is done. It helps insurance companies decide the price or amount of the risk. Because the process involves analysis of data, it can be improved by underwriting process automation comprising Artificial Intelligence and RPA.

RPA in insurance underwriting process can help in the following ways:

• It’s possible to automate as much as 80% of tasks in the underwriting process.
• Automation can speed up the underwriting cycle by 2 - 5X.
• Information from application hardcopies can be extracted, classified, and arranged with technologies like document capture.
• Assess risks based on the data collected from internal and external sources.
• Provide a premium by leveraging machine learning trained on a set of data.

Customer Support

Insurance companies can leverage conversational AI to expedite customer service and resolve issues more effectively. They can also empower their customer support teams with AI-driven assistants that can take customer requests and provide solutions on time.

These assistants can process data and create profiles by using the data. Using these assistants offers numerous advantages as follows:

• Process unstructured data.
• Generate profiles for customer support executives to allow them to know about the policyholder before providing assistance.
• Automate customer onboarding process.

The Bottom LineThe use of software robots or robotic process automation is a revolutionary step for insurance businesses that will transform their processes. They can automate lots of things that take enormous human effort in the usual state of affairs including collecting data, filing information, profile creation, and many more. In insurance, companies have lots of tasks that can be automated, and RPA is a boon for them. However, they should adopt intelligent automation by complementing RPA with AI.However, if you really want to benefit from insurance robotic process automation, you need a cutting-edge software solution. Radixweb is a trusted software development company that has helped lots of businesses achieve digital prowess through top-notch solutions. We specialize in AI, ML, and other latest technologies. You can choose us to create RPA and intelligent automation solutions for your insurance business. Reach out to us to discuss the scope and let’s create an innovative software solution.