How the cloud and AI can take insurers beyond legacy systems

Today’s insurance customer is increasingly tech savvy and expects smooth, streamlined interactions with insurers. For the many insurance companies that are still locked in siloed systems, this creates a challenge, especially as digitally advanced newcomers enter the field.

The makers of Nuxeo Platform – which provides a solution to this problem – are seeing increasing interest from insurers who recognise the need to change.

“We are having conversations with what I would consider to be pretty entrenched insurers. They are finding there are new solutions coming on the market that are creating disruption,” says Sean Baird, Nuxeo’s director of product marketing. “Whether it’s new products from existing insurers or brand-new competitors, they are seeing an increased focus on the customer: providing more bespoke offerings and improved customer experiences.

“We see the most disruption around providing tools to engage with the insured, or to create faster, less resource-intensive processes; new insurers are coming in with really great tools. We’re very focused on helping existing insurers streamline their claims processes and deliver improved customer experiences to meet that demand and to meet the challenge from competitors.”

Nuxeo Platform is highly adaptable, so its functionality can be tailored to suit each insurer and the systems they have in place. It’s a scalable, cloud-native solution combining artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, content services, and process management, enabling insurers to achieve better customer satisfaction through a faster turnaround on claims and better management of claims.

This has become particularly pertinent with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has required a greater proportion of the claims handling process to be conducted remotely.

“COVID-19 has amplified the challenges around claims processing,” says Baird. “It’s taken away a lot of the ability to talk to a claims agent first-hand or for a claims agent to be able to witness what the claim situation is first-hand.

“Being able to address this disconnected reality is really a big issue that we see again and again - and that’s where the ability to handle multimedia formats, such as photographs, audio, and video files, is becoming really important. If you are not going to be on site and able to directly witness the situation, you need to be able to at least use photos, if not video and other media, to be able to infer what the situation is so you can make right decisions as to what claims are appropriate.”

Nuxeo is finding that insurers want to know how they can leverage newer technologies, whether that’s the cloud or AI, to be able to improve those processes, reduce some of the manual steps required, and make it easier to engage with customers remotely.

“Insurers are very focused on the speed of processing and providing better user experiences for customers, for example through tools that make it possible to submit new claims on a smartphone or to quickly access the status on an outstanding claim. Providing greater visibility into the claims process is important both for the customer and the insurer,” says Baird.

An upcoming seminar on October 22 hosted by Nuxeo, titled Rapidly roll-out innovation: deploy AI and the cloud in operations and infrastructure, will examine the experiences of some of Nuxeo’s customers who have revolutionised their claims processes by leveraging these technologies.

In particular it will highlight the capabilities of the cloud for improving the claims handling process.

“The cloud is ubiquitous, available all the time and wherever you are, and it provides infinite scaling capabilities – you can start small and have the ability to grow,” says Baird. “It also enables you to be agile: if you have seasonality to your claims it gives you the ability to scale up when you are having those peak times and lower some of your expenses and cloud usage during lulls in the business.”

The other key component addressed in the webinar will be AI, which provides the capability for insurers to train their claims processing systems to better understand the content documenting the claim, making the process more touchless, and making classifications that enables claims to be routed in the right way. It can even make key decisions during the process by using insights that can be gleaned using AI systems.

“If you are taking pictures of an automobile accident for a claim, we have the ability to train our system to identify number plates on cars, makes and models, and look at the level of damage that has taken place,” says Baird. “It also enables some level of fraud detection: for example, it can identify if it has seen the picture before or if the photo matches the automobiles involved in the incident.”

Other capabilities include producing transcripts of videos and phone calls to make it quicker for staff to search for and access key pieces of information.

“By training the system appropriately there is a huge amount of information you can obtain from pictures, video and audio,” says Baird.

“From an efficiency standpoint, there is a great advantage in being able to extract more information from those multimedia files automatically and present that information directly to a claims agent – so if he’s looking for photos of a certain model of car, he can see where those are without having to watch the whole video. In some cases, you might be able to extract enough information from those media files to be able to fully automate a claim.”

A key point about Nuxeo Platform is that it does not require you to reinvent the wheel: it can provide a content management back end to an existing claims processing system integrating with that system to provide the ability to manage the forms, photographs, video and any other information provided as part of the claims process.

“Some customers have made the Nuxeo system the basis for their claims processing solution while others who have a claims processing solution are using it to augment and provide additional value to the claims processing. There is quite a bit of flexibility there,” says Baird.

“As a company we are focused on providing tools that enable you to better understand the content you are receiving from the customer and process that information in a much more streamlined way. The result is that you are able to produce better outcomes faster for your customers, have better management of claims process.”

Click here to register now.

Discover how to achieve true digital transformation in this upcoming webinar from Intelligent Insurer “Rapidly roll-out innovation: deploy AI and the cloud in operations and infrastructure” (October 22, 11am EST/4pm BST).

You’ll find out how to use the cloud to increase flexibility and scale, create streamlined processes for better decision-making, and overcome the limitations of legacy platforms to rapidly roll-out innovation.

You’ll hear from these leading industry speakers: 
Jeanette Ward, chief operating officer, Texas Mutual Insurance Company 
Mary Bahna-Nolan, SVP, head of product innovation and strategy, Pacific Life
Kevin Kirby, digital transformation product owner, State Auto Moderator
Sean Baird, director of product marketing, Nuxeo

Click here to register now.