Insurance Processes to Automate:

9 Places to Begin, Plus 3 Often-Missed Bonuses

Within the realm of automation, you have countless options for where your organization can look to gain efficiencies.  It does not matter if you are considering automation for the first time or if you already have a robust automation division. We are here to help you explore, execute, and further harness the powers of automation to grow your business.

While the best places to automate are not always obvious, there are a few key business areas that we recommend starting your search in. The following 12 opportunities are what we consider the best bang for your buck when looking to automate in 2021 into 2022.

Human Resource

1. HR Onboarding

Why is HR Onboarding in the number one position?

First, because it almost always crosses multiple systems, so it immediately alleviates an administrative burden for multiple people in your organization, and, it provides a great use case for reducing manual data entry and the known errors associated with human input.

Second, automating HR Onboarding is a huge time save that reduces redundancies.

And third, because it is such a common use case, it has been proven to be highly successful.

Great savings, data improvements, and a deck stacked in your favor make this an obvious first choice for automation.

Customer Service

The second area worth focusing on is a bundle of three customer support needs. This bundle can and should integrate seamlessly with your sales team.  Once the basics are covered through automation, the customer conversation can be passed to your sales team to further explore opportunities with your clients.

2. Customer Support Data Retrieval

When you have a customer on the line, the last thing you want is for them to wait as multiple systems are manually accessed for critical data. To improve the customer experience, reduce call times, and create the best support environment possible, you want to automate this part of your process.

Customer retention begins with respecting your customer’s time and doing everything in your power to quickly resolve their issues and questions.

3. Customer Support Data Updates

This is your chance to wow your customer.  If the customer is used to waiting multiple days for a change to reflect, and you make that same change while they are on the phone with you (and push it to all systems), you just elevated your customer experience to a 10.

In this digital age, customers expect immediate gratification. People associate execution speed with value.  If you can tap into, and accommodate that customer’s need for immediate results, you are one step closer to securing a customer for life.

4. Chatbot

While we are discussing customer support, why have a person do all of that easy, high-volume work ? Leave the more robotic-style tasks to a robot.

Your first step should be to complete an assessment on what most of your calls about.  

How many are ‘simple’ and rules based?  Coverage?  Payments? Policy Updates? Other mundane data retrieval processes?

Move them all to chatbots.

This will free up your talented workforce to handle more strategic items and simultaneously help prevent burnout in your team from performing repetitive, mundane, robotic tasks day in and day out.

This bundle of customer support automation is easier and quicker to implement than you likely expect. And, it can quickly grow to handle more complete service scenarios. What are you waiting for?

Reduce Human Error, Increase Employee Satisfaction

5. Level 1 Tech Support

An audit of your high-volume issues is your first task. Mine your help desk tool for the most common issues if you do not know that information already. Maybe it is password resets or basic login help. In our experience, about half of the common issues fall into 3-4 types of issues, and most of those are repetitive, mundane work that qualifies as a great candidate for automation. The help desk is customer support for your team.

6. Data Validation Bots

For any multi point data validation, why leave it up to human error? This is for validating data across systems, across reports, across excel and apps, or any combination. Automate this validation and again, watch how employee happiness improves with the elimination of mundane daily tasks.

7. Email Campaign Bots

Your business sends reoccurring emails.

Think: Happy Birthdays, anniversaries, new offerings, bills do, etc.

Anything with a high volume and a current staff member completing it should be automated.

Assisted Computer Vision and Machine Learning

The last two hold great value but are too often underestimated, or overpromised by vendors.   Many business leaders expect 100% processing with no/minimal team intervention. In our experience that is hard to achieve and a risky starting target.   

At DT Group, we take a process orchestration approach that leverages machine learning to accelerate the work that your team can do.   We target 2-4X productivity gains for your team while retaining their input in validating critical data elements.

8. AP Invoice Processing

This process should be designed to help your staff make their decisions quicker.  It should validate the critical data, and if / when the trust in the process is high enough, achieve STP in specific scenarios that are easily adjusted by your teams.

9. Claims Processing

Similar to AP processing, initial data extraction is possible through current machine learning enhanced OCR, but it is not ready for STP in most cases. Look to use the extraction as a multiplier of your team’s efficiency. Focus, instead, to get 2-4X more work done in the same time, and ensure key data accuracy.

Three Often-Missed Bonus Areas

Organizations often look to automate processes while forgetting about what new opportunities automation can  enable. Here are three areas of great value that are often overlooked.

10. Additional Customer Insights

If you had certain data, what could you do with it? What could you learn and then achieve?  How can you use automation to capture that additional data without adding burden on your team

11. Data Consistency Issues

Similar to Level 1 support and customer support, this begins by looking at where you are experiencing data issues.

Think about: customer complaints, audits, quality control processes, etc.

Automation can be used to either fix the root cause, or as a validation step after the fact.   Either way, you end up with a design focused on validating and enhancing your data.

12. Upsell or Customer Retention

What other services could your customer use that perhaps there isn’t enough time or employee-power for outreach right now? You can use automated outreach, instead, to upsell. This requires no additional staff, just the definition of rules and a process put in place.

Please reach out to DT Group with any questions or comments you may have. We are here to support you on your road to automation.