Centre the customer in your digital and automation journey

While it’s widely accepted that a customer-first approach to insurance is the way forward for the industry, the reality is that achieving this will be an ongoing challenge. This is particularly true for established insurers in the property and casualty sector, where meeting high customer expectations is impeded by legacy processes, systems and culture.

In our webinar taking place on May 4 at 4pm  titled “How to implement strategies for managing the policy lifecycle and achieving a truly seamless claims process” a panel of experts from Ecclesiastical, Zurich and Blue Prism discuss their journey towards customer and digital transformation, and strategies for meeting constantly evolving customer needs and expectations.

Claims is an area where digital and automation technologies are making a huge impact. Many insurers are already employing these technologies to varying degrees, yet there’s more work to do in order to create a seamless experience for both the customer and the claims handler, connecting front and back-end operations and speeding up the lifecycle from first notice of loss (FNOL) to settlement.

Edward de Mas Latrie, insurance director at intelligent automation provider Blue Prism, works with a number of insurance companies to help them implement and scale automation strategically in the organisation. Here he shares some thoughts on the webinar topic and on automation in insurance.

What are you seeing impacting the insurance industry right now?

In the general insurance space, many insurers are still dealing with the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s changes to pricing and fair value rules which came into force in January this year. The new guidelines are that renewal prices cannot be higher than the price paid when the customer was acquired, which means that insurers have been rethinking pricing strategies and how insurance premiums relate to risk. The dynamics of the customer-insurer relationship have changed significantly as a result.

This is on top of the ongoing impact of COVID-19, supply chain issues, the political climate and overall market uncertainties. And the impact of these has only just started to be felt in terms of loss ratios.

In the life and pensions space you have a lot of market consolidation, which is applying pressure to the servicing of policies and continuity of service in general. Insurers in the pensions space need to be mindful of the effect of open banking, with open pensions sure to follow.

What are the most promising use cases for intelligent automation and artificial intelligence in customer experience?

We need to be able to put the emphasis on customer retention, by looking at the whole customer journey. The aim of technology such as robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation is to reduce customer and business effort. But to do this you need to have a good understanding of every individual customer through your data.

If I look at the hygiene factors of the FNOL process, for example, it’s important to have a 360-degree view of a customer across all channels.

Having insight into business and customer effort is essential, and data is the key. An intelligent digital workforce can help to use data more effectively, whether in reporting, segmentation, or to facilitate an omnichannel approach to the customer experience.

The aim is to get the customer on a happy path through the claims process. An example of where Blue Prism has been used to improve the customer’s claims journey is with the ERGO Group. When one storm affected over 4,000 customers, 80 percent of the claims were fully processed, including repairs and payouts, within a week thanks to digital workers.

Previously this would have created a backlog and impacted the customer experience.

How can intelligent automation be best used in the contact centre?

It’s a case of using the best of human and the best of machine. Empathy is required in insurance. It’s an emotional interaction—whether it’s a life, injury, liability, home or motor claim. Humans play a vital role in shaping the overall customer experience and that’s not going to change.

Automation is about making the mechanics of the experience work seamlessly. If a customer has to explain a situation more than once, or spend more time than necessary entering data, or repeat their information over the phone because an agent doesn’t have it in their system, that’s not a great experience.

Automation can help to empower the human workforce on the calls that matter to resolve customer queries quickly and correctly the first time.

Everyone talks about digital-first or digital-only. But it might not be right for your entire customer base. You want to bring in human empathy and not be a slave to the digital process. Twenty-two percent of the UK population are still not equipped with the personal skills or desire to deal with digital-only journeys. This should inform the acquisition and retention strategy.

Many companies want to reduce call times or increase the number of calls handled in their contact centres. This isn’t necessarily conducive to a good customer experience. If you do six calls of 10 minutes each or one call of 50 minutes, you have to consider whether there is a correlation between the two. If the agent is told to deliver call time, s/he will deliver that call time. If s/he’s measured on resolution, s/he as the agent will deliver a different thing.

The key is to make sure that the elements of the customer journey that don’t need a person to handle them can happen automatically, and that call handlers can spend the right amount of time with the customers who need to hear a voice on the end of the phone.

We’re seeing a lot of great contact centre automation work being done with our telecoms clients which could be replicated in the insurance space. BT for example has recouped over 20,000 hours of manual work per month in its organisation, and Telefonica has reduced operating costs by 25 percent.

What are the key takeaways you’d like delegates to gain from the webinar?

I would like the audience to understand that RPA has evolved and that a company’s approach to how it can and should be used should also have evolved. Twenty years ago, the founder of Blue Prism identified that he could automate Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. It has now become intelligent automation, a smart set of tools that can orchestrate end-to-end customer journeys, among other things.

Insurance companies must consider the use cases for automation across the entire organisation and bring it out of the back office. You can deliver a different customer experience, a proactive, agile operating model, and we can help to govern hybrid ways of working, we can orchestrate legacy and strategic capabilities. It’s much more than Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. It’s about game-changing in the organisation.

Register for the webinar “How to implement strategies for managing the policy lifecycle and achieving a truly seamless claims process” and join experts including Jeremy Trott, claims director from Ecclesiastical; Liz Ryan, head of claims performance and insights at Zurich; and Edward de Mas Latrie, insurance director at Blue Prism, on May 4 at 4pm UK time.