This article was produced in partnership with UiPath
Karen Surca, of Insurance Business America, sat down with Sathyanarayanan Sethuraman, senior director, global with UiPath, to discuss the need for insurance providers to provide a straight-through, end-to-end digital experience for their insureds in the current competitive, hardened market outlined in its whitepaper.
The checklist needed to provide the best customer experience is vastly detailed for any insurance enterprise. In today’s digital era, clients are expecting insurance companies to provide ease of transactions, a streamlined customer service approach, reliable follow-up, and a digital platform that enables all these priorities to be carried out seamlessly and efficiently.
Although the adoption of technology platforms has increased over the last several years due in part to industry adaptation and a lengthy pandemic that increased insurance companies’ reliance on remote and digital capabilities, there remains a tangible need for insurance companies to integrate the elements of their customer platform from beginning to end.
It is not enough to provide ‘upfront solutions’ that can solve simple inquiries. To prevent customers from shopping around for better service and competitive rates, an insurance provider must be able to provide a platform that is designed with an end-to-end fulfillment solution in mind.
The mechanisms needed to provide a smooth end-to-end customer process is the topic of a recent whitepaper entitled “Automating for End-to-end Claims Processing, How Design Thinking Combined with Automation Technology Pushes Insurers to Evolve”.
Authored by UiPath, an enterprise technology provider that provides an end-to-end platform for Intelligent Automation to help organizations rapidly scale digital business operations, the whitepaper helps to pinpoint operational inefficiencies that may make an integrated, end-to-end digital solution difficult, while providing a roadmap to a better customer journey.
Download the whitepaper for now: Automating for end-to-end claims processing
The whitepaper highlighted that 70% of insurance CEOs are looking to operational efficiency to drive revenue growth, while only 3% of insurers have managed to scale their digital workforce.
Although many insurance carriers may promise a quick claims process, without demonstrated operational efficiency, the path from the first phone call for a notice of loss all the way through the settlement can be a bumpy one, especially in the year of “Great Resignation” when the employees’ churn is at its peak.
“When it comes to operational efficiency, insurers have recently seen claims getting higher in number and the average amount being paid for insurance claims is also going higher,” Sathyanarayanan Sethuraman, senior director, global, with UiPath, stated.
“[Insurance carriers] are also losing people in their claims operations. When you recruit new people, the efficiency is going to take a hit. It becomes a double loss. So, preventing the leakage of claims while retaining their employees, as well as working with the current employees, all fall under operational efficiency for insurers.”
Sethuraman pointed out that both speed and accuracy come into play when tackling the operational efficiency of the claims process. It is important to “balance the two to create the optimum efficiency.”
“The insurance industry is basically a relationship business under data business,” Sethuraman explained.
“The relationships with respect to customer acquisition, customer retention, and serving the customers in relation to data,” comes into play. “The customers’ expectations from the insurance provider have never been higher,” Sethuraman added.
While relationships form the core of the insurance business approach, the whitepaper also highlights the importance of the role that automation plays in the insurance process. Specifically, there is an industry need for digital capabilities that provide a straight-through, or end-to-end, approach.
“The recent technology call for improvement supported by AI, machine learning, and analytics provides insurance companies with insights and clear data where there may be a choke in the system,” Sethuraman outlined.
The whitepaper illustrated the usefulness of contact center dashboards and automation capabilities, such as ‘digital assistants’, to help pull this data and information together in a low code application.
“Low code applications can build a comprehensive dashboard about the customer and their reason for the call, pre-fill all the details, and also be able to trigger the next best action to seamlessly deliver that superior customer experience,” Sethuraman said.
Other key recommendations outlined in the whitepaper include the establishment of a customer journey to automate, putting together a diverse cross-business team, utilizing a three-pillar categorization system, and clearly understanding who your clients are and what they need.
The whitepaper explains that understanding the customer’s moment of truth and building automation around the fulfillment journey delivers a superior experience for the customers and significant efficiency to the insurance carriers.
Sethuraman illustrated that discovering bottlenecks in the claims process, rolling out persona-based automation such as digital assistants, and providing multiple ways to integrate through the user interface to API also establish a smooth path to a successful customer journey. He also points out that externalizing the automation around core platforms helps to roll out end-to-end automation faster at a lower cost.
“Our platform helps the end-to-end automation right from the discovery,” Sethuraman said.
“UiPath provides low code capabilities and low code apps and low code automation that can help to externalize some of the key connectors from the front office to the middle office to the back office, connecting the dots, at a faster pace than other applications.”
