P&C insurers are grappling with massive headwinds: a low-interest economic environment, new competitors, and rapidly evolving technology. Insurance executives can turn to automation to save costs and improve the efficiency of their business.
Consider implementing these five fundamental principles to drive more value from technology.
1. Understand your status quo very well.
Before getting started with an automation project, your organization needs to understand the current environment. Know and analyze your existing claims systems and underlying business processes. Then, you can identify opportunities to eliminate, simplify, and automate.
To start, document, and analyze your current business processes if you haven’t already. The ultimate goal is to identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies. Next, identify the improvements that will deliver the greatest return on investment and increased customer satisfaction.
Don’t swing for the fences to start. We suggest starting with a smaller initial project. You might want to break up the task into phases: Phase 1 can be automating a claims payment process end-to-end, as an example.
2. Set a realistic scope of expectations.
When redesigning a process for efficiency, think about how you actually work instead of how you should work or how you want to work.
If you start process modeling from an idealistic point of view, the targets you set could become frustratingly impossible to achieve. On the other hand, when you begin adding improvements to the current process, you should set a realistic scope to see meaningful progress over time.
3. Take a step-by-step approach.
It isn’t necessary to automate all of the necessary processes at once.
Depending on your budget, resources, and business requirements, you can often divide the project into several phases. Selecting a light-weight automation platform can save you from costly consulting and implementation fees, which can be a good start.
During your early sales conversations, ask potential providers how their solution and teams approach the customer journey and how they plan to partner with you along the way.
If you’re starting a minimum-viable-product project, keep in mind a reasonable timeline shouldn’t exceed three to four months from configuring the project to completion.
4. Keep the customer’s perspective front and center.
Claims remain the “moment of truth” for all insurers and represent the best single opportunity for an insurer to build trust and loyalty with customers.
Customer satisfaction and process efficiency can be tackled and improved at the same time. When starting an automation project, it is important to understand an efficient process alone won’t boost customer satisfaction.
Before embarking on your next automation project, ask how your customers will benefit from the changes you plan to make. Will they need to make one fewer follow-up phone call to ask questions about their coverage? Can they get their claim paid or settled faster from weeks to just days?
5. Keep processes flexible and simple.
Over time, business changes and processes may need to adapt. Your automation solutions should be flexible enough to incorporate and reflect these changes as they happen. Automation aims to make business processes simpler and more straightforward, and if the process requires a lot of human intervention, you must understand that something is wrong.
The bottom line
Metromile Enterprise offers a proprietary touchless claims experience platform using industry best practices and workflows so that you can quickly realize all of the benefits of claims automation. Contact us if you would like to learn about how we’re helping other P&C insurers fast track their claims innovation roadmap and enable a modern, digital claims experience for their customers.