Today’s P&C insurance companies operate in a particularly challenging climate. As some of the oldest companies existing globally, insurers often have complex IT environments layered with multiple legacy systems. Historically low worldwide interest rates, high consumer expectations for more personalized services, and a skilled labor shortage add to the challenges of an insurer striving to maintain profitability.
By making the claims process customer-centric and offering policyholders a superior experience, insurance companies have a far better chance of remaining in the black.
Some companies are using straight-through processing, a method by which technology takes over all previously manual claims tasks. For example, Dutch insurer Interpolis allows customers in good standing to pay for repairs and declare costs without receipts for simple claims, resulting in an easier experience for good customers.
Insurers moving to a more customer-centric claims process have to have the technology in place to accomplish it. Bastiaan de Goei, insurance industry leader at Instabase, noted that intelligent automation is the new gold standard for streamlining claims processing and delighting policyholders.
Here’s how the Instabase Automation Platform for Unstructured Data helps insurers speed claims processing and thereby improve the customer experience.
Makes the Most of Customer Touchpoints
“The claims process is one of the most important customer touchpoints that an insurance company has,” de Goei said during a recent webinar in the Silicon Valley Insurance Accelerator (SVIA) Innovation Trailblazer series.”Typically,” said de Goei, “an insurer is granted very few such client-interaction opportunities, so it is incumbent upon them to make the most of the chances they do have.”
Policyholders who have experienced some sort of loss and need to make an insurance claim are often already upset by their circumstances before reaching out to the insurer, and understandably so. Keeping that in mind, insurers must do everything in their power to make the claims process as simple and straightforward as possible. Why? A poor claims experience can quickly lead to customer attrition and significant revenue loss for the insurer.
With Instabase, an insurer can automate the time-consuming, manual tasks involved in claims, such as data extraction from highly variable, unstructured documents. Without it, every first-responder report, witness statement, medical record and the like “needs to be looked at and reviewed by an adjuster,” de Goei said. “Instabase extracts the relevant values out of all of these documents to let the adjuster focus on his or her job of actually adjusting rather than rote tasks of going through documents.”
Instabase can reduce the manual processing of documents by up to 83%, according to de Goei. This allows the insurance company and its adjusters the time necessary to show empathy and understanding to customers in their moments of need. Though it may seem counterintuitive, by automating certain parts of the process, insurance companies can actually humanize the claims experience for customers.
Reduces Payout Wait Times and Increases Customer Satisfaction
Unlike automation solutions incapable of tackling unstructured documents, Instabase leverages deep learning for more accurate understanding of all the documents it encounters. Reducing the manual processing of documents by up to 83% enables Instabase to also decrease the duration of the claims cycle. That means that policyholders see their money sooner.
For both individual and business policyholders, that shortened time to a payout can make a huge difference. For example, imagine how relieved a restaurant owner whose kitchen was destroyed by fire will feel to quickly have the money in hand to restore kitchen operations and re-open the restaurant. Imagine how relieved an individual family whose home has been devastated by fire will be with the cash in hand to re-establish their home as quickly as possible. In such cases, timely claims processing has a dramatic impact on the lives of policyholders. As de Goei noted, “A focus on the customer is really important to creating customer satisfaction and loyalty.”
Enables Quicker Automation Upgrades for the Insurer
Vertical point document understanding solutions offer a single piece of technology that solves a single problem. If an upgrade is needed, the whole solution is subject to a rip-and-replace project, a process that can take several years and can cost millions of dollars.
Instabase eliminates all that. With the Instabase Automation Platform for Unstructure Data and its underlying modular foundation, each and every time a new deep learning or OCR technology comes out, “you can ‘swap in, swap out’ without touching the workflow automations living on top of the platform,” said de Goei. This unique benefit differentiates Instabase from other solutions, and it enables insurers to continuously innovate and evolve their automated processes, while still keeping their focus on customers. In turn, this customer-centric approach helps insurers to build lasting relationships with their customers and continue to grow their business over time.
Provide better claims experiences at scale for your customers with Instabase.
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Provide better claims experience at scale for your customers.
