Robotic Process Automation in Insurance Industry

RPA) applies specific technologies to automate routine, standardized tasks in support of an enterprise’s knowledge workers. By freeing human employees from these mundane tasks to apply themselves to core business objectives, RPA offers a number of compelling benefits to the workplace.
– Institute for Robotic Process Automation (IRPA)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) seems to be now crossing over the hype cycle and delivering real-world benefits in driving efficiencies, leaner processes and reducing costs and errors in processing of massive amount of demand or data driven processing systems that traditionally had a lot of human effort invested in mundane tasks.

Let us take a look at some real-life business solution areas in Insurance that RPA has been able to address successfully over the last year.

Insurance has some very key areas that are time consuming, data intensive as well as customer contact center based. Lot of human effort is spent on data gathering, collating data from multiple system, updating systems with changes or new data and validating and processing.
Based on data and case studies shared by various RPA Tool implementations, here are the areas in insurance where RPA has demonstrated successful implementations:

• Claims Registrations: RPA has improved time for claim registration process by at least 50%.The contact center has saved at least half the time it took for each claim registration to be registered and updated.
• Credit Note Refunds: RPA implementation improved the overall time and cost for Credit Note Refund process. On an average for the same number of transactions, it reduced the processing time to 1/5^th and the same throughput achieved through 1/4^th of the processing staff.
• Approval for Credit Note Refunds: With the implementation of RPA, the Credit note Approval process delivered 50% more efficiency with 75% less manpower.
• Cancellation of Policies: RPA implementation improved the cancellation process massively. For the same amount of transactions, the current process delivers in 1/3^rd of the time with 1/9^th of the earlier processing staff.
• Registration of Forms: RPA implementations improved forms registration process by 40% with half the number of staff.
• NCD (No Claims Discount) Verification: Pre- RPA, the NCD validation manually took about 10 mins. Post RPA, after the agent uploads the details, the BOTs can verify and flag mismatches within 2 minutes for the same number of applicants.
• Policy Issuance: Policy Issuance is a time consuming exercise and can take more than a week for the process to be completed manually. RPA implementation has reduced the effort at all stages and in the post RPA world, policies are issued in less than 2 days.

The above benefits highlight the success of RPA.

The RPA Bots have been able to:

1. Download Data
2. Scan and Read Data
3. Upload / Enter Data in key systems
4. Verify Insurance period / NCD and flag mismatches
5. Provide approvals
6. Create follow-up emails / alerts
7. Collate Data from various systems by logging in and provide a 360 degree view to contact center staff.

Though there are still limitations on how RPA can be effective, (mostly hardware/mechanical and OCR related), there are many new research and tools that are scaling up to overcome these limitations.

Given the real-world benefits, beyond the hype delivered by RPA, it is bound to spread into other business areas. With incremental improvements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive systems, RPA implementations can only improve to deliver more benefits. The limiting factor is most likely to be how organizations and society are geared up for these changes and respond to them.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Enhanced Customer Experience

In my last blog I talked about how, Robotic Process Automation leads to changing job roles and it’s effect on employees and employers. I take the opportunity to highlight the great multiplier effect a successful effect RPA implementation has on customer experience.

A customer journey can be simple set of tasks or a complex journey. It could involve looking up information, filling information, time taken for processing forms or those long holds on telephone. Whatever be the forms of these journeys, we had some such poor experiences. This is where a successfully implemented RPA and related investments can enhance customer experience and eliminate customer pain points.

How RPA transforms Customer Experience?

As an example let us consider the customer journey for Loan or mortgage origination and processing. Traditionally it will require the customer to fill up many forms and information and submit required sets of documents. These would then be sent for processing. Someone would re-enter the details (with possible errors), then back-office managers will do checks (credit scores, property details, etc) and sent for approvals. Some of these work may be outsourced to 3^rd parties (lack of proper controls / audits). The overall process itself takes a few weeks for the customer to get a feedback on status of his loan approval.

If an RPA is successfully implemented, the BOT can take over the complete process – from uploading the scanned documents, verified e-signatures, verification and checks and scores for automatic approval or rejection recommendations with complete audit trail. The turn-around time has seen to be reduced to a few days days (conditional approvals to as less as 1 hour) and customers can track their application stages and status online. This not only creates a beneficial customer experience, but allows the Mortgage provider to invest these savings in front line / customer facing resources – which along with RPA will drive up revenue as well as customer experience. 

Metrics and continuous improvement

Organizations can set-up metrics to measure customer experience (number of complaints, changes, rework, etc) and work on a continuous improvement plan for customer experience journey. The comparison could be made between pre and post-RPA implementation metrics. It will clearly bear out the investment in RPA and the subsequent investments in direct customer touch-points had improved the overall experience.

RPA is not an end in itself to improvements in customer experience. A continuous improvement plan will need improvements and maintenance of BOTS. Automated systems will encounter “exceptions” (due to change in processes or new data sets being introduced) and organizations would need to maintain the BOTS as well as carry out Quality control.

RPA and New Jobs

A few months ago I had written about the impact of RPA on traditional back-office and rule based activities performed by humans.

The key impacts that are evidenced in various industries and by analysts are:

•          Jobs that had been traditionally “out-sourced” or “off-shored” are brought “in-house” or “right-shored”. This is evident in many “off-shored” or “out-sourced” services being bought back “in-house” or moved back to developed countries and economies.

•          The skill-sets needed for fulfilling the replaced jobs are not same as those that are being replaced. The new jobs are more to support and maintain the RPA. As an example if the “bot” hits an error in the process, it alerts for human intervention. This requires task to be performed by “specialized” human support, maintenance and QA – a new set of job roles.

Who benefits?

·         Employers benefit from lower costs, higher efficiency and less errors. This savings in-turn can be invested to focus on better “customer experience activities” and a more focused “customer centric” approach to business operations. In combination with Big Data, Business Analytics and Natural Language Processing, this will drive better customer services and lay the roadmap for future “cognitive” technology implementations.

·         Employees benefit from a new set of job roles that are specialized in nature and not “repetitive” in nature. There is an ample scope of people being trained on new analytics and data mining technologies that will help drive the future growth of individuals as well as organizations. More jobs will open up in area of direct customer interaction and providing better “customer experience” that machines cannot yet replicate in the near future.

The disruptions looks scary and has an impact in the short term. However, newer sectors of job roles opening up will make it more interesting for workers as well as helping organizations run better customer centric experiences.