Hyper-Automation: Your Future-proof Guide to Its Benefits and Successful Implementation

Let’s define hyper-automation before proceeding to examine its different dimensions. This section also differentiates it from its predecessor, automation. This way, it will be easier to stay on the same page and sentence with the latest automation trends. Why? Because essentially, hyper-automation is automation’s latest development. It’s an expanded automation version with a broader and deeper application.

In simple language, hyper-automation blends automation technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to augment human capabilities. It allows people to perform tasks more accurately, efficiently, and faster. With this foundation, let’s define hyper-automation:

• Hyper-automation harnesses advanced technologies like AI and machine learning (ML) to enhance automation and augment human execution.
• Hyper-automation enhances the sophistication of automation processes used in discovery, analysis, design, monitoring, reassessment, and measurement.

Essentially, this technology optimizes automation processes and infrastructures. Based on the above definition, it’s easier to define automation as:

The use of technology and other digital solutions to perform repetitive human tasks faster, more efficiently, and more accurately.

This way, businesses can free up their employees’ time and potential to concentrate on other more productive jobs. It also frees the limited resources companies could have spent on repetitive tasks, lowering risks and boosting productivity.

Hyper-automation is the technology for the future that will catapult automation to its peak. That’s why Gartner recognizes and identifies it as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends in 2020 and 2021. The survey it conducted revealed that 85% of its respondents were willing to:

• Sustain or increase their enterprises’ hyper-automation investment for the following year.
• Over 56% of respondents disclosed that they had four or more concurrent hyper-automation initiatives.

This trend is shifting this technology from an optional enhancement to a survival essential. No wonder Gartner calls it “an unavoidable market state.” Fortunately, many insurers are adopting automation with tools and technologies that can progressively be enhanced and grow. Eventually, these firms are bound to enjoy optimized business processes and improved employee performance.

So, are you ready for a hyper-automated future? Continue to read the next section to discover 10 big ways this digital solution can benefit your business.

Hyper-automation can benefit your business in many beautiful ways that accelerate it. This section discusses the top 10 ways your agency or company can benefit from this future-proof solution.

We start our list of benefits where it matters the most: the customer experience. Satisfied customers are your business’s primary goal. It’s the only silver bullet that can guard you against competition because only satisfied customers can keep you in business.

Adopting this digital solution enables your staff to serve customers better, resolve their issues faster, and satisfy them. In turn, fulfilled customers who have enjoyed an excellent experience reward you with their loyalty. For example, hyper-automated bots save your customers long queues because you no longer need to dig through piles of information to serve them.

Insurance policies are your business’s bread and butter. This technology helps you meet your policy personalization needs. Remember, the modern insurance customer doesn’t only deserve customized solutions; they demand them.

With this tool at work, insurers can customize their offers to allow policyholders to pay only for what they need. Further, your customers are better placed to make smarter policy choices.

Your business operates in a legally controlled environment and context. Additionally, compliance processes with different regulations take time. Any alterations can cause massive process restructuring that requires greater precision to avert losses that manual errors can cause.

Fortunately, hyper-automation eliminates most costly errors. Its templates are customizable, letting you respond in time because they track new regulations to maintain adjusted records.

Underwriting is a critical insurance function that lets you collect all your applicants’ data and calculate their risk levels. The amount of data you need to review and analyze to make an informed, personalized decision can be overwhelming. This requires an automated process that handles all these data points quickly and accurately. Automation easily collects data from different sources, and hyper-automation can quickly process it and come to the optimal conclusion, protecting and fast-tracking your risk analysis.

Data is your business’s driving force. However, modern insurers find themselves in an ocean of data that they must wade through to make sound decisions. Many times, such an abundance of information from various sources can be confusing.

The good news is that you no longer need to worry about data organization. Hyper-automation helps process and organize information faster. Its predictive analytics abilities also enable you to understand the information better while generating the necessary reports.

Fraudulent claims aren’t new in the insurance industry. The tough economic times we live in and desire for overnight riches drive people to fraud. Unfortunately, detecting fraudulent claims remains a tall order for many insurers. Worse still, the guys behind these false claims are tech-savvy and abuse their high-tech skills to defraud others.

Insurers and their agents can stay on top of the game using hyper-automation. This tool enables insurance firms to subject all claims to automatic screening to expose any fraud. Such a task would be very challenging if your staff did it manually. Also, the chances are high that the bad guys can outshine them by abusing sophisticated technologies. Hyper-automation can dramatically improve your anti-fraud efforts.

Retrieving and accessing data easily is just as important as the data itself. Any data you can’t access easily and promptly can’t enhance your business processes. The modern insurance carrier or agent operates with loads of information drawn from various sources and formats. Thus, it’s necessary to access, study, and understand these documents faster.

Meeting that need would be chaotic and stressful for insurers without automation. Hyper-automation can even help you with prediction. Automation bots also help you comprehend the data’s context and ensure everything happens accurately.

Policy management is a vital practice in insurance. All policies include heavy documentation that must be compared and shared with clients. Also, these documents need to be updated and communicate those changes to policyholders on time.

Changes to policy details can also originate from customers. Combining these changes and updating them manually is painstaking. Thankfully, intelligent document processing is possible with bots that automatically retrieve, organize, and make reports.

Processing claims is another industry pillar that deserves careful handling. Claim processing takes time because information needs to be reviewed from different sources. Also, the information under review may be in different formats that require sorting, homogenization, and verification.

Agents and their carriers can use hyper-automation to speed up claim processing by reducing manual work. Intelligent bots can review data and verify that it is complete and valid before approving claims. The bots can also send customers timely claims processing details automatically, without human intervention.

Lastly, insurers and their agents can price claims more accurately and faster using automated bots. Carriers need to check their customers’ profiles before accurately pricing their policies, and these processes could take days or weeks if they’re done manually. The best side of hyper-automation is that its AI-powered capability changes and modifies a policy based on customer requirements and needs in real-time.

Remember, pricing is a make-or-break competitive factor. Overpricing your products could make them unaffordable for your potential customers, eventually hurting your business. Inversely, underpricing them could benefit the end-user but drive you out of business. Fortunately, automation helps you strike the perfect pricing balance.

Here comes one of the most critical sections of our discussion: implementation. All the goodies this technology offers are impossible and inaccessible without accurate adoption. Let’s talk about how best you can tap into this technology’s limitless potential and possibilities. The following six steps will kickstart your journey to hyper-automation and digital transformation.

Auditing your current process is the first step to make hyper-automation work for your business. Start by doing the following:

Gather insights into your current environment, workflows, and processes; this step lets you detect gaps, challenges, and opportunities for automation.
Develop a duplicate process model that visualizes your intended results, identifies the need for enhancement, and creates efficiency. In other words: What do you want to automate and how do you want that to change your business?

Identify your preferred digital transformation toolbox to enable you to implement your new platform. Your toolbox could include technologies like RPA and AI. Don’t allow tech hype to carry you off your center. Just use the tools that align with your automation needs, goals, and strategy, period. You are also going to need a consulting partner to guide you on your journey. RPA done well requires certified experts to help you start off on the right foot. This is where RD Global can help.

What do you want to achieve for your insurance firm or agency? Determine and envision your goals before moving forward. Otherwise, your project will be among the 40% of technology projects that abort because they lack clear goals. Your desired outcomes could be:

• Cost reduction
• Efficiency improvement
• Improvement of customer satisfaction and experience
• Revenue boost
• Profit maximization

Develop your hyper-automation plan with an eye to the future. It has to be scalable and grow with your business as it helps you expand. Factor in current and future opportunities that could potentially be automated and start optimizing business processes, stabilizing the underlying technology and training people to understand what an automation opportunity looks like. Doing these things will help you forge ahead with future-proofed confidence.

Next, execute all the tasks you identified for hyper-automation. You now need to harness all relevant technologies like cognitive learning to perform these jobs.

After setting the ball rolling, don’t forget to measure and monitor the results. Digital business reports and performance reports allow you to see how users are interacting with your automation, their level of satisfaction with it, and the business impact it has. This helps demonstrate success to stakeholders, but it is also the only way to find shortcomings and learn how to improve your automation strategy based on analytics and feedback.

Now that you have all you needed to know about hyper-automation, its benefits, and how to grab your deserved share of it. Which way forward for your business? Get on board by contacting RD Global today. Let us help you start this transformative journey into the automated future.