Automate underwriting to reinvent customer experience and drive business growth

Consumers today demand a transparent, digitised and personalised buying experience, equal to that which they’ve become accustomed to with popular online retailers where products and goods can be delivered within the hour. For most insurers, this is no small task, given the legacy systems and processes that comprise their operations and can often make the industry slow to respond. There is a real risk of losing market share and becoming an industry laggard so adapting to new technologies is key, according to Charlie Newark-French, chief operating officer at  Hyperscience.

Respond faster, deliver better value for money, go above and beyond in customer service – these are just a few of the demands customers make of today’s insurers. The market is responding to those needs, but critically much of the early innovation has come from the startup and disruptor end of the market.

Will much smaller organisations unsettle large legacy insurers? Not immediately.

But the consumer has taken note and expects the start-up experience to translate across to more traditional products. Then there is the added threat from the more forward-thinking legacy carriers who are already some way into their digital transformation journeys.

Intelligent Insurer caught up with Newark-French to find out how to find, evaluate and implement the right solutions at the right time to drive digital transformation - and customer experience - success.

This article is published ahead of the Intelligent Insurer webinar ‘ Automate underwriting to reinvent customer experience and drive business growth’ on May 18, 2021.

Why is now the time for this webinar?

It all comes down to changing market dynamics. Large insurance companies are experiencing a threat to their market and doing nothing is not an option.

Firstly, there are new entrants. They are small, but they are also unencumbered by legacy stacks. As niche players, all they need is a handful of information and they start nipping at the heels of large companies. Large companies, on the other hand, generally tend to offer more competitive pricing and a wider range of products and services, yet they are often tied to outdated, manual operations or technology stacks that hold them back from delivering on customer experience.

Our view is that carriers should be optimising for speed. That speed and smoother service begins with back office operations. Being able to understand and reconcile various customer data points and information streams is key. If you can quickly read an invoice from a retailer or process a licence or proof of address, and get that data into the right place, the result is a faster, cheaper, more accurate and better experience.

The second reason that the time is ripe is accelerated digital transformation driven by COVID. Companies that respond fastest and offer better prices are going to emerge stronger, and as we move out of recession, this will become increasingly important. In a bull market, innovation can be a bit slow, but that’s not true right now. In 2020, what had always been important suddenly became urgent overnight, and we’re seeing insurance companies rethink their manual operations to protect against further unexpected challenges and ensure business continuity.

Finally, customers simply expect better. The power is with the consumer. Underwriting doesn’t have to be so difficult, and intelligent automation technology is here to help both organisations, employees and the end consumer. My hope for people attending this webinar is that they’ll see the power and potential of automation technology and begin to develop, or refine, a strategy for implementing it.

How is automation then going to change the landscape of the way insurers work? And how can we reassure insurers that automation doesn’t inundate an already bursting tech stack?

When you look under the hood of some of the largest insurance companies in the world, what you see is a cobbling together of legacy technologies, people, and outdated systems. And while most customers have no idea as to how complex these processes are, they do feel the pain of what happens when these legacy processes don’t work and it takes weeks to onboard or receive a response to their request.

Intelligent automation helps solve for this, trying to take some of the more mundane work that can be automated – and automating it. For example, taking that wide set of information inputs - whether that’s a fax, a PDF, a photo or other documents - uploaded onto a portal, extracting the valuable data and getting it into a single place to render a better decision or outcome with less manual work required. This will only be achieved with software and humans working together side-by-side in a new digital assembly line that divides the work between the two based on the needs of the task and the strengths of each.

For the foreseeable future, this will involve humans. While a car door is entirely pressed by a machine - there is no ambiguity there - knowledge work is the opposite. The collaboration between people and software is key, and if the technology determines it can do a task with 99 percent accuracy, it will do it. If not, it will raise its hand and turn it over to a person to review and resolve. When, where and how that hand-off happens, and how the interaction and results are used to drive performance improvements, is key to achieving return on investment and developing a long-term, sustainable approach.

The benefit of automation is mostly in faster processes. We want insurers to be able to underwrite an insurance policy in days, not weeks. There is an information backlog today that is more than just people can do accurately, reliably and at scale.

The takeaway here is that automation is inevitable, and market share will be won and lost on that basis. Change is possible if you choose the right partners and don’t resist the tide of change.

Watch the webinar recording here.