Top 15 Robotic Process Automation Insurance Use Cases

Insurance companies are increasingly turning to RPA to drive their digital transformations. Given the rising demands of customers and the urgent pressure to compete with innovative insurtech companies, using digital technologies to evolve is critical for survival. With a wide variety of RPA for insurance use cases and stellar scalability, this technology offers insurers the opportunity to boost efficiency company-wide and gain competitive advantage in the process.

At the heart of the insurance industry is the mission to provide customers prompt, empathetic support in times of crisis. Insurance has no shortage of time-consuming, manual processes and legacy applications that can’t communicate with each other. This results in errors and slow processing, which leave customers frustrated. Insurers often lack the time to attend to the “human” side of insurance, such as empathy.

RPA in the Insurance Industry

But RPA is changing the way insurers do business. According to McKinsey & Company, the insurance industry has the potential to automate 25% of its processes by 2025, with RPA technology playing a vital role. According to Novarica research, more than half of all insurers have deployed RPA.

With RPA’s many use cases in insurance, you can boost your operational efficiency, explore new areas of business innovation, and create better customer experiences.

How is RPA Used in Insurance?

Here’s 15 Use Cases for RPA in the Insurance Industry

1. RPA’s Compatibility with Legacy Systems and Applications

For many established insurance providers, legacy applications are still an integral part of business functions. This reliance can come with obstacles that born-in-tech insurtech companies will never know. For example, these systems often don’t communicate well with one another. As a result, you need knowledge workers to perform manual tasks to connect disparate systems. And when it comes time to implement a new ERP or BPM solution, integrating the new with the old legacy applications is intricate.

You can use RPA to bridge the gap between your legacy systems to improve the customer experience and back-office efficiency. RPA can fit seamlessly into your existing workflows to make the process smoother. Additionally, RPA can comply with any type of system you may have.

Watch this 2-minute video to learn more about how RPA can breathe new life into your legacy solutions and two other ways you can use RPA to extend your existing solutions.

Where to Start RPA - 3 Ways to Extend Your Existing Solutions with RPA

2. RPA in Claims Processing

RPA can help you overcome legacy application information silos. RPA allows you to integrate all your claims processing data from various sources. You can also use RPA to automate other manual claims processes like data extraction and input, complex error tracking, claims verification, identification and verification of fraudulent claims, and more. As a result, your employees don’t have to spend hours hunting down information across different systems. Your customers will also enjoy faster, smoother service and a much-improved customer experience overall.

3. RPA in Insurance Underwriting

Like claims processing, underwriting within insurance requires extensive gathering of information from different sources. RPA aids this time-consuming process by automating the data collection process across both internal and external locations. RPA also streamlines the process of risk analysis and evaluation for your underwriters considerably. It can populate multiple fields in the internal systems with appropriate data. You can also use RPA tot automatically create a report and offer recommendations while assessing the loss of runs.

4. RPA in Regulatory Compliance

RPA can help you avoid the serious risk of a regulatory breach. The insurance space is known for its evolving strict guidelines for audit trails and documentation. Additionally, given the high volume of error-prone manual processes involved with the industry, compliance can be tricky. RPA can help by automating these processes, ensuring data is free of errors by following your pre-defined instructions and maintaining a complete log of changes. You can also use RPA to automate:

• Compliance report generation
• Customer data validations and client research
• Data security operations
• Delivery of account closure processing notifications

5. RPA in Policy Administration and Servicing

If you currently rely on a policy administration software system, you know how expensive and high maintenance their upkeep can be. They also struggle to scale, which can be limiting as your customer base continues to grow. RPA, however, helps your employees complete various operations without having to do extensive navigation across different applications, saving considerable time in the process. RPA makes this possible by automating the transactional and administrative areas of processes like settlements, tax, risk capture, accounting, regulatory compliances, credit control, and more.

6. RPA in Form Registration

As redundant and time-consuming as form registration can be, it’s an essential part of insurance operations. RPA can complete the whole process in 40% of the time it took pre-automation, and with about half the number of staff.

7. RPA in Policy Cancellation

RPA can streamline the process of policy cancellation. The manual process of canceling policies is time-consuming and tedious. You must interact with email, a CRM, Excel, a policy administration system, and PDFs. However, RPA can easily switch through all these interactions simultaneously. With RPA in place, organizations have been able to complete full cancellations in only one-third of the time it once took pre-RPA.

8. RPA in Sales and Distribution

Sales and Distribution can be a daunting challenge. It’s highly manual, error-prone, and policy administration systems are expensive to maintain. However, RPA can simplify the tasks involved by automating:

• Legal and credit checks
• Conducting compliance
• Create sales scorecards to deliver notifications to agents

RPA can also complete these processes quickly without human error. As a result, your customers will enjoy the fast service they want, and you will unlock more time to devote to value-added tasks.

9. RPA in Finance and Accounts

RPA can easily press buttons, perform clicks and keystrokes, copy/paste, template autofill, and more with perfect accuracy, which comes in handy for many RPA for insurance use cases. This is particularly beneficial when it comes to finance and accounts, however. For example, RPA bots can take over a large portion of daily bank reconciliations. They can also minimize your policy-cost footprint and overall transactional expenses.

10. RPA and Process and Business Analytics

You want to provide the best experience possible for your customers. An excellent strategy to achieve this goal is to measure what you’re doing and analyze it for potential improvements. While paper-based processes once made tracking nearly impossible, with RPA, each step a bot completes is on record. RPA’s audit trails can be helpful for regulatory compliance as well as precise process improvement.

11. RPA and Manual Data Entry Processes

From claims to quotations, manual data entry is standard in the insurance world. RPA can take over these often mundane, time-consuming tasks so your skilled workers can attend to other valuable work. They can also get the job done with incredible speed. Additionally, all the human errors and inconsistencies of manual processing vanish with RPA.

12. RPA’s Impact on Scalability

RPA makes scalability easy. You can add and subtract bots, as well as modify their responsibilities as needed. This advantage is significant due to the slow-moving nature of the industry at large. Although the insurance industry is steeped in regulations and is often slow to change, their customers are often the opposite. The modern insurance customer is moving at a faster pace than ever. They usually have little tolerance for poor service and long delays. As a result, it’s to the benefit of every insurance company to find ways to evolve and keep up with their customers’ pace.

13. RPA in Product and Service Innovation

RPA supports new services and products, like customer portals, apps, and on-demand quotes. Bots can also be helpful “assistants” to your customer support agents. For example, agents may use an attended bot to answer service requests in real-time. An attended bot works like a virtual assistant, helping your individual employees complete their tasks with greater speed and accuracy. In this case, the bot can gather all the customer data instantly, allowing the customer to get the help they need faster.

14. RPA in Responding to Queries

Do you have a high volume of queries? RPA can help you answer them faster. RPA bots can interpret incoming emails and react accordingly. If the query is simple to address, the bot will resolve it based on your pre-defined answers. For example, you may specify answers to frequently asked questions for your bot to draw from when needed. If it’s on the more complex side, however, the bot can forward them to one of your employees.

15. RPA and the Customer Experiences

The key factor in differentiating a business from its competition is increasingly becoming the customer experience. Your customers want better experiences. RPA can help you deliver just that. Across its many applications, this technology can produce happier customers, by providing:

• Faster service due to streamlined back-office functions
• Fewer errors that are time-consuming to fix
• Increased availability of insurance agents to provide “human” aids in times of need
• Fewer delays
• More personalized and convenient experiences
• Decreased need for back-and-forth communication to answer questions and resolve problems

Reach Operational Excellence with RPA

To remain competitive in today’s crowded and highly innovative insurance market, insurers must embrace change. RPA can help your company streamline your processes and connect your legacy systems for increased operational efficiency. Additionally, RPA enables you to give your customers the fast, personalized, and empathetic service they need.

Want to learn more about ways that RPA can help you? Check out the video below to hear more about RPA use cases within insurance. You’ll also learn more about the importance of helping insurance get back to the human side of insurance to create positive experiences for customers.

RPA Use Cases for Insurance - Digitize Your Insurance Processes

Want More Content Like This?

Subscribe to the Naviant Blog. Each Thursday, we’ll send you a recap of our latest info-packed blog so you can be among the first to access the latest trends and expert tips on workflow, intelligent automation, the cloud, and more.