The 3 Core Components of Your Insurance Company’s Digital Transformation

Insurance companies face a new competitor, and it is not another insurer. There’s a new playing field, and that’s the digital experience. Your customers are increasingly digitally savvy and want only the best when it comes to online offerings. This isn’t just about improving your call center; it’s about a whole new way of doing business by digitally transforming the back office as well as front-office, customer-facing interactions.

CEOS, CTOs, and CIOs who don’t embrace digital transformation and its three pillars – Intelligent Automation (IA), the digital experience, and data and analytics, all powered by Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – will continue to not only fall behind their insurance industry competitors but also shed customers.

AT RD Global, we know digital transformation can’t be done piecemeal. Implementation of all three initiatives should happen together to form an agile, future-proof foundation. These essential technologies will digitize operations, help create new revenue streams, and offer a seamless customer experience.

First, let’s talk about what intelligent automation (IA) is: A combination of RPA and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies working together to empower fast end-to-end business process automation. Business process automation is the end result of intelligent automation, and this, in turn, accelerates digital transformation.

As applied to IA, RPA mimics the activity of a human to carry out a task within a process. This means repetitive tasks are done faster and more accurately, so staff can concentrate on responsibilities that utilize the abilities unique to human beings, such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and customer interactions. This ability to delineate between rules-based tasks and those requiring innately human traits is perhaps the largest benefit of IA.

Common insurance use cases for RPA include claims processing, underwriting, billing, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance.

The addition of AI to RPA forms a platform that integrates all of the capabilities required to automate an end-to-end process or an entire role. IA’s key benefits include:

• Cost savings: Automated work is done faster and can be performed 24/7 for much less than you would pay an employee.
• Fast ROI: The ROI can be between 30% and 200% in the first year, says McKinsey.
• Accurate, speedy, quality work: Mistake-prone repetitive tasks are performed error-free, which boosts the bottom line as well as customer satisfaction and retention.
• Empower employees: IA does not require special technical skills or IT involvement. Robots can be deployed by the end-user to perform their jobs faster and more effectively.
• Service continuity: Software robots are on the job 24/7 to provide dependability and continuity of service.

Another benefit is a scalable infrastructure, because IA decouples resource costs and process volume, so you can increase or decrease capacity in almost real-time. This can be a critical tool in customer satisfaction during peak demand times.

Some additional side effects of IA seen by corporate leaders include new job creation for skilled workers whose roles cannot be automated, a reduction in employee turnover, and insights that help gain and retain new customers. This brings us to our second pillar: The digital experience.

C-suite discussions about digital transformation cannot afford to leave out the human element. Human-centered design is what truly drives change. It means deeply connecting with both customers and employees, going beyond what they need to form a holistic picture.

This is an important step in your true digital transformation. By learning their pain points, the day-to-day effects of how things are done, as well as their needs, you can align your technology to support employees and customers in ways that will have the most positive impact on them and your organization. This consideration of all stakeholders will mean a positive Digital Customer Experience (DCX), and a streamlined Digital Employee Experience (DEX) will lead to higher revenue and reduce staff turnover while boosting productivity.

In addition, companies that implement RPA in their front-end experience have higher completion rates, reduce cycle and turnaround times, improve agent net promoter scores, and boost customer loyalty.

Partnering with RD Global means working with a company steeped in the importance of human-centered design to meet the needs of your entire user base. We create a cohesive digital experience across your DCX and DCX ecosystem at every touchpoint, including chatbots, mobile apps, SaaS platforms, and desktop/laptop software.

The customer journey is built from many granular experiences, and any company’s goal is to make even the smallest of interactions as seamless as possible.

Savvy C-suite executives know what today’s business customer wants, they demand a digital experience that mirrors the hyper-personalized consumer experience. Going forward, expectations will only rise, and businesses will have to rely on intelligent digital solutions. While AI doesn’t replace humans, it makes a great supplemental tool to provide necessary information quickly and easily via IA, as well as providing:

• Scalability: Chatbots can help your organization scale services to more people than you can provide by live agents alone. These bots can collect information from customers, suggest automatic responses, and prompt agents all along the customer journey, as well as answer simple questions.
• Self-service: If you pair your chatbots with self-service tools such as knowledge bases, you can help clients deal with issues themselves and deflect customer service calls, so agents can focus on more complex or critical customer demands.
• An omnichannel experience: Another important area where IA can improve customer service is in the omnichannel dimension. Your customers expect a seamless experience no matter how they engage with you. Offering an integrated IA tool across all customer touchpoints and requests means records can be updated in real-time to improve the experience.
• Shortened wait times: This applies to both interactions and transaction completion. As an example, if a customer submits a credit application, RPA can read the details, access the business rules, update records, and assemble the complete information for review much faster than a human could.

IA can also be used to create customized offers and content, as well as to learn what is and is not working when it comes to products and services, which can then be turned into actionable insights. The benefits of IA that extend to DCX have a parallel in those for DEX.

The benefits of IA for the customer experience can’t be understated, but insurance leaders must also recognize the importance of a seamless, cohesive employee experience and the impact on your organization.

After all, a customer can’t receive the experience they want with an ill-equipped agent or sales rep. The quality of customer service is an issue for many organizations, and the usual solution is more training when really the employee just needs the right tools.

But IA goes beyond simply providing what agents and reps need to service customers. It provides levelers to help leaders build their current and future workforce.

Employees need the right digital tools – those that boost productivity and streamline rote tasks. The payoff? Organizations with the most compelling workforce experience generated 22% higher engagement among employees when compared with companies who offered something less.

• IA offers employees opportunities to grow professionally by taking routine tasks off of their plate. Instruct your Human Resources team to design learning and development programs designed to train staff for more complex work.
• IA strengthens engagement by freeing workers for more face time with colleagues. Professional relationships develop and they exercise skills innate to humans such as empathy, cognitive reasoning, and creativity. This gives employees a sense of empowerment, which leads to better performance.
• IA increases workplace competency by giving employees high-value tasks that are more complex.

You know your success lies in the hands of your employees. Take care of them by providing the tools they need with a DEX platform that brings out their best. RD Global’s UI/UX design experts can create visual experiences that empower employees to access information in a more usable way.

Whether it’s applied to customers, employees, or your overall business strategy, IA can be used with data analytics tools to better understand your data and identify patterns. You can use this information to inform personalized product recommendations, identify easily automated processes, or understand not only what people are interested in but what they might be interested in next.

Corporate leaders rely on accurate business intelligence. It’s the most valuable asset for any company. Having a cohesive, holistic picture of your data ecosystem is imperative to capitalize on this asset. It can also tell you why and what you need as part of your digital transformation.

It’s all about big data: Data that has greater variety, arrives in increasing volumes, and comes in fast. It’s more complex, and your legacy data processing software is not up to the task of managing it.

Real-time data and analytics are the key accelerators of your digital transformation efforts. Big-data-dependent solutions enhance customer services, optimize business operations, mitigate risk, and inform critical decision-making. Insurance companies that can properly exploit this resource outpace their competitors.

Analytics is transforming the insurance industry by:

• Leveraging key insights using customer data to provide clients with exactly what they want
• Reducing fraud and waste with real-time information
• Improving pricing accuracy with actionable insights and behavior tracking

RD Global implements smart Event Stream Processing (ESP) systems that effortlessly unify data from every sector of your organization’s information system to make your business intelligence more connected, accurate, and usable.

ESP works by handling a data set one data point at a time. Instead of viewing data as a whole, it deals with a flow of continuously created data via a specialized set of technologies.

ESP allows immediate action on fraud, payment processing, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and IoT analytics, all of which deal with data points located in a continuous stream of data. It is the order and timing of these data points that help identify patterns and trends that represent important insights.
It’s also valuable to generate granular data for critical decisions. ESP lets you track any data changes within a period of time, so you or any member of your leadership team can make the best recommendation.

Data analytics is especially important to the insurance industry. Quantifying levels of risk serves as a growth engine, which makes accurate and detailed analysis imperative. This means data, in order to be actionable, must be effortlessly understood by anyone on your team.

Our visual experience data analysis tools are built to allow on-demand, secure access to your company’s analytical data so your organization can make better, faster decisions.

While data analytics powers external insights, insurance companies can make better internal strategy decisions as well to:

• Determine profitability
• Change sales practices to improve revenue
• Boost overall performance
• Stop wasting time with unprofitable business

Leveraging advanced analytics and integrating the results into your business processes should be an integral part of your strategy.

The insurance industry has become the epicenter of digital innovation. Insurers must embrace change and rethink their business models to move toward a compliant, secure, and digitally-enabled operating model. Leaders who adopt this model will enhance customer, employee, partner, and stakeholder experiences.

The high-impact digital tools and capabilities offered by RD Global will help streamline and enhance digital experiences, transform key functions, and unleash the business intelligence you need to succeed. Schedule a discovery call to see how we can help reach your digital goals.