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How to Improve Productivity, Efficiency, and Compliance Management within Insurance RPA

4 min read
Jun 10, 2020 9:24:35 AM

In any organization, small tasks can build up into large time sinks, and the insurance industry is no stranger to these kinds of activities. Critical tasks such as underwriting, claims processing, and policy servicing bring along a plethora of important but mundane and repetitive work that affects organizational efficiency overall.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can shoulder the brunt of many of the time-consuming tasks that are inherent to the insurance industry, as well as streamline operations, improve customer experience, and free up critical staff for other strategic projects.

Applications of RPA in insurance

1) New Business and Underwriting

Underwriting involves gathering information from multiple sources, which on average can take 3-4 weeks. RPA can quickly and automatically gather and process precise data from both internal and external sites. This could free up 20-30 percent of your capacity, plus robots are accurate and timely so risk mitigation becomes easier.

2) Claims Registration & Processing

The claims process is document and data intensive. It is a lengthy process that is both a customer service and operations burden. RPA can cut claims registrations and processing in half, speed up the processes, and deliver better customer experience.

3) Business and Process Analysis

You can't improve what you can't measure, and with complex, paper-based processes measuring performance is especially difficult. RPA gives your visibility into RPA-driven workflows and as a result enable continuous process improvement.

How to accelerate delivery and ensure compliance across your RPA programs

The insurance industry is filled with back-office processes which are high-volume, complex, and repetitive in nature. IT staff in particular tend to get stuck with manual tasks that prevent them from working on more engaging and strategic work which leads to delivery delays, significant rework, and higher maintenance costs.

To avoid the inherent challenges with manual processes, organizations must understand the ‘as-is’ process from end-to-end, design it, and optimize it specifically for automation. By doing this, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of why this process should be automated, what benefits the organization can achieve, and how to best implement it so it scales. In addition, doing the planning and designing phases up front, you can ensure all enterprise constraints like policies, controls, rules, and regulations are not only accounted for but traced to the impacted process, helping you ensure compliance.

Because RPA robots don’t feel tired, don’t feel overworked, and don’t get distracted they make significantly less errors than their human co-workers. The RPA bots complete jobs quickly, consistently, and efficiently which significantly improves customer satisfaction, compliance management, and the employee experience. But with most RPA vendors you can’t accurately capture the flow of value, thus making it incredibly difficult to optimize and effectively scale.

Blueprint’s Enterprise Automation Suite provides robust yet easy-to-use visual modeling capabilities to connect and align business processes to overall business strategies. The Business Process Modeler enables team leaders to capture and connect the flow of business value throughout the process. This provides them with the necessary level of granularity to scale automation to more complex processes and drive continuous improvement.

The insurance industry is heavily regulated of because of its direct influence on the market and the welfare of consumers. As a result, the industry is under pressure to modernize and rationalize their regulatory risk program in a sustainable, proactive, and cost-effective way. Without a doubt RPA can help insurance companies manage their compliance efforts, but because regulations change relatively quickly, processes change quickly as well, making it more likely for your bots to break without the proper preparations.

Blueprint’s Enterprise Automation Suite acts as a single source of truth for all your regulatory information making it easier to manage change and ensure compliance. It gives you a complete visual map of all the processes a regulation or control is related to and vice versa so you can proactively consider which parts may be impacted by a change. In addition, it can relate and trace your regulatory information to processes mitigating rework and non-compliance.

The importance of scaling RPA in Insurance

The urgency of digital innovation within the insurance industry is growing.

Scott Simon, Head of Industry at Google says, "insurance is a highly regulated industry and it is not easy to move quickly—but the fact is consumers are moving at exceptional rates. So I’d say that the companies that will stand out are the ones that are going to find ways to move a bit faster, at the pace of the people they’re insuring.”

Without a doubt, the urgency of digital innovation within the insurance industry is growing and one way to achieve this is by scaling RPA across the enterprise. For insurance, achieving RPA at scale means they can feel confident their processes are compliant while they focus on transforming their processes to be efficient, cost-effective, and digitized.

But perhaps most importantly customer service will improve. For me, contacting my insurance provider requires blocking off my calendar and mentally preparing for the constant “please hold while we transfer your call” – and I’m sure I’m not alone. With RPA, the process for customer service calls become streamlined, efficient, and significantly faster.

Blueprint’s Enterprise Automation Suite helps facilitate the automation transformation by providing end-to-end visibility across all processes ensuring you are continuously improving for your employees and customers. It enables you to manage regulatory change with easer and with significantly greater accuracy. Beyond that, it makes it easy to scale RPA across the enterprise as it helps improve decision making, optimize processes, and design RPA for transformational change.

To learn how Blueprint's Enterprise Automation Suite can help you scale RPA within the insurance industry, download our Enterprise Automation Suite datasheet or watch our product overview below: