Process Automation for Insurance Policy Operations

The PaperWork Agency Communication solution was developed to help insurance companies run and manage their underwriting and claims processes in a transparent, standardized and measurable way.

A significant share of insurance companies' communication between customers, agencies, regional offices, technical departments and other head office units, especially regarding underwriting and claims, takes place by email, phone and other messaging apps. Under increasing competition, customer experience and satisfaction have become as important as product variety and pricing in retaining existing customers and winning new ones. With remote work becoming almost mandatory due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it became essential to move processes beyond traditional communication methods and make them transparent and manageable in order to maintain and improve service quality in underwriting and claims operations.

For insurance companies, moving to digital process automation is becoming inevitable so that requests from agencies, which are in the position of customers, regarding underwriting and claims can be handled within defined standard business processes and timeframes. Because many of the systems used to fulfill these requests cannot respond quickly enough to process changes driven by today's rapidly changing conditions, agile and low-cost process automation tools that work integrated with these systems stand out as the best solution for insurers' needs.

With its process automation and document management products and its consulting team experienced in the insurance industry, PaperWork builds solutions that ensure the policy and claims processes insurers need are handled in line with customer and company expectations. The PaperWork process automation platform enables the process changes required by changing business needs or legal requirements to be made flexibly, quickly and at low cost.

Policy Operations Request Management Process

The PaperWork Policy Operations Request Management process was designed so that agencies can submit all policy-related requests (quotes, new business, changes, endorsements, etc.) through the agency portal, and so that the related operations can be carried out and the status of each request tracked in real time.

All requests submitted by agencies are routed, according to request type and line of business, to the relevant regional office staff, technical departments and other head office units, with workflows and service times defined in PaperWork, so the necessary actions can be taken. While quotes, new business and all other policy operations are carried out by the company's insurance applications, PaperWork ensures that what is needed for the process to run as expected is done, and handles work distribution, the necessary escalations and process notifications.

Agency requests are distributed automatically to the relevant regional office staff according to defined business rules. In exceptional cases where automatic distribution is not possible because of the request type or line of business, requests are routed to defined work pools so that the relevant managers can assign them.

Requests assigned to regional offices are forwarded to technical departments or head office business units when needed, or again based on specific business rules.

SLA or Service Level Agreement

For customer satisfaction, it is very important that incoming requests are fulfilled within the time the company has committed to and in a way that meets customer expectations. The process steps and durations defined for each type of incoming request can only help identify areas for improvement when they are measured transparently and consistently.

With PaperWork, process performance is measured by defining which steps each incoming request will go through and what the target processing time is for each step. These processing times can also vary by request type and line of business. PaperWork defines how quickly an agency request will be picked up and completed, and for work not completed within the defined times, it sends alerts, escalations and notifications so priorities can be set.

SLA and Process Reporting

The information gathered through the PaperWork policy operations request management process is turned into data for management decisions through real-time and historical reports. These reports contain very important information about processes and process actors, such as how many requests each employee currently holds, how many requests each employee completed in a given period, how many SLA breach alerts each request received, and requests where the number of returns to the agency for the same operation exceeded a set limit. This information provides instant access to many important insights, such as employee performance, process performance, workforce planning, employee training needs and agency training needs.

For example, an SLA breach report does not only point to a problem with an employee's performance. When breaches occur continuously, they may also point to a staffing shortage or a process flaw, helping the company identify the right area for improvement. Returning a request to the agency more than a certain number of times can be interpreted as a training gap on the part of the employee or the agency, or as a process gap, in other words, the information needed to complete the operation with fewer returns was not collected the first time.

Any kind of report based on process data, like the examples above, is designed and used on the PaperWork platform to meet the needs of managers in different roles and at different levels.

Conclusion

Policy Operations Request Management with PaperWork makes underwriting-related communication between insurers' customers, agencies, regional offices, technical departments and other head office units transparent and manageable.

With PaperWork, SLAs, in other words Service Level Agreements, are defined so that customer requests are fulfilled to set standards and within set times. By providing input from process data for identifying investment and improvement areas, it helps you make the right decisions to fulfill customer requests in line with expectations.

Contact us to hear about our experience with insurance process applications built on PaperWork.

Sources

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/mana/article/1454921
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/rpa-for-insurance
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/ijar/article/1032704