When COVID-19 hit the world, there was widespread concern and increasing economic hardship across various industries. The Insurance industry felt the heat too – 71% were concerned with financial impact and 47% were worried about effects on our workforce and reduction in productivity. To ensure business continuity, build resilience and improve efficiency, Insurers are increasingly turning towards Robotic Process Discovery (RPA) with investment of $634m by 2024. But without process insights, automation efforts are futile.
Process discovery helps insurance organizations understand how their processes actually work. It shows how efficiently processes are executed, where processes fail or experience delays, how well the applications are integrated, where are the hidden opportunities to reduce costs, and which data points can be turned into insights to drive customer experience and satisfaction. You can use these insights to improve your transformation program and accelerate robotic process automation.
Let’s look at three common scenarios where insurers can use process discovery to build resilient automation programs:
- Faster claims processing: Claims management is perhaps the most critical process that influences customer satisfaction, giving the company a competitive edge. But the process itself is very complex and involves close scrutiny to avoid fraudulent claims and litigations. Be it for personal, health, or auto insurance, claims processing is document-intensive, requiring team members to collect a huge amount of information from various sources and vetting them against thousands of rules that are subject to frequent modifications. This manual process is highly error-prone and time-consuming.
A process discovery tool like SurfaceAI helps insurers easily spot deviations and highly automatable processes. It captures real-time activities to generate documentation, build process maps, and create scripts that can be imported into market-leading RPA tools for instant automation to meet the speed and accuracy that customers demand.
- Improve compliance: Insurance processes are guided by several compliance and regulatory rules such as HIPAA, PCI standards, and tax laws. Non-conforming processes and breaches can cost an insurer in terms of fines and lost customer trust. And since auditing happens only at regular intervals, there is a high chance of inconsistencies to creep in before the next audit.
Process discovery brings transparency that enables an accurate and fact-based process compliance checking. The step-by-step visualization of “AS-IS” processes allows you to pin-point compliance issues. With full visibility into the actual processes, at anytime in between the audits, you can compare and identify non-conforming processes, and perform root cause analysis to know why something went wrong and how to fix it. For instance, you could analyze that the non-conforming process can be standardized or automated through RPA.
- Increase operational efficiency: Insurance companies run on complex business processes – from administering existing policies to pricing new ones, and from addressing customer inquiries to processing claims. After the pandemic, insurers are looking for ways to drastically cut costs. While automation seems like the first option, when not done right more money is drained in rework and failed processes. For instance, a process may require underwriters to apply rules according to geocodes, credit history, inspection reports, etc. Perhaps, there are exceptions where underwriters email or chat with other team members for fraud checks. When you automate without understanding these intricacies, RPA could be doing more harm than good.
With SurfaceAI, you can truly understand processes end-to-end. Our process discovery solution captures every step of the task performed by all users across all the systems. It gives you the flexibility to record these steps in both text and video format for further analysis by the process experts and to train teams.
Explore how SurfaceAI can help you At SurfaceAI, we’ve helped several large insurance providers uncover hidden processes, maximize returns on RPA investment, and ensure continuous process improvement to withstand adversities. For one of the leading insurers, Surface AI saved 86% of the time to produce process documentation, enabling faster automation in times of crisis. Do you want to explore how process discovery can power your transformation program? Talk to us today.