by Mani Swaminathan, on June 5, 2020 7:55:27 AM PDT
If you run operations for an insurance company, it’s time to rethink your priorities. The people and technology you’ve had until now can’t stay static, or you’ll be left behind as digital transformation reshapes the industry.
Competition to create the best customer experience is fierce, and the pressure is on to digitize processes and meaningfully re-evaluate the positions you need to be staffed within your organization. Everyone wants to put automation to work to make a huge impact on their operations and to make their people and processes more efficient.
Hence, the urgency. The industry has been eying the role of automation for several years now, as McKinsey points out: “With the rise of digitization and machine learning, insurance activities are becoming more automatable and the need to attract and retain employees with digital expertise is becoming more critical.”
Customers expect seamless, intelligent experiences from their insurers these days, and internally, back offices that don’t meaningfully put technology to work will find themselves drowning in ever-increasing requests to do more with less.
From a people perspective, up to 25 percent of full-time positions in the industry are poised to be consolidated or replaced by 2025, according to McKinsey. The firm highlights the enormity of the shift taking place, and the need for insurers to be “retraining and redeploying the talent they currently have, identifying critical new skills to in source, and retuning value propositions in the war for new talent and capabilities.”
A Whole New World
It’s a new world for insurance players. Competition is everywhere. Insurance companies that still use manual steps to extract data from unstructured or complex documents are stalled in their abilities to fully digitize key processes. It’s a problem. They need a better solution, one that eliminates this barrier and that enables their data to work for them instead of holding them back.
Luckily, it’s just what new entrants in the industry have in mind. They’re raising the bar with a disruptive innovation that will unlock data and result in profitable digitization. They’re also building stepping stones, in the form of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), on the path to end-to-end automation. It’s certainly a competitive advantage for those that can achieve it.
Better Process Ahead
Right now, people are playing a central role in data extraction -- technical solutions often fall short, and insurers stand to benefit from reducing their manual data process workload. Often limited by OCR, because there are unstructured documents that OCR can’t handle from a complexity perspective, the process suffers.
Helping enterprises access the data locked in their documents, reducing workload, and fully automating more documents makes the process more efficient. To be specific, a customer can upload a copy of their existing policy and a feature can extract the relevant data, directing the right information to the policy admin and delivering a better experience to the customer. That’s a massive improvement from the buyer having to manually enter pages of data to get a policy. It reduces friction, saving time and effort in the quote-to-policy experience.
IDP at Work
One insurance firm broke free from its bottlenecks and reduced errors, for example, by processing claims without OCR templates. The firm previously processed a consistently high volume of claims, but with much of its data trapped in tables. IDP technology improved accuracy and consistency for the firm and also eliminated OCR templates.
A next-generation solution, IDP, goes beyond OCR’s template-focused limitations and is used for extracting data from complex, unstructured documents.
The firm transformed their claims moment of truth with their customers:
- Speed: Process times were able to be cut to hours from days
- Accuracy: IDP delivered higher accuracy than manual data processing
- Experience: Improved CX with faster response time and increased certainty
IDP also allowed the firm to gain operational efficiencies:
- Cost: Significantly lower cost to process a claim
- Scale: Easy to handle peak processing loads without adding staff
- Simplify: More automation allowed for multiple systems to be consolidated
Insurance Use Case Shows What’s Possible
One insurance claims processor faced these challenges and won -- won for its customers, and won for its business.
Download this use case to learn the steps this firm took to win.
