The need to innovate and automate insurance claims processes is more pressing now than ever. So, how can insurers quickly identify and adopt solutions that are flexible, scalable, and add value to the customer experience? Gijsbert Cox, Appian EMEA insurance industry leader, recently sat down with experts at Intelligent Insurer to discuss all of this and more. Here’s what he had to say.
Intelligent Insurer: What are the current trends in leveraging technology to expedite claims to enhance the customer and employee experience?
Gijsbert Cox: Today, leveraging technology is critical for claims operations teams. Most teams must juggle multiple disparate claims and policy systems, which slows down the claims process and increases the potential for poor decision-making, fraud, or losing a customer by not meeting their service expectations. Most insurers are working with a mess of disconnected existing IT systems and dispersed data that doesn’t easily integrate, resulting in silos. Today, many claims teams are choosing to leverage automation technology to transform the claims process, improve the customer experience, and increase efficiency.
Leveraging automation technology for claims management can also help insurers empower their workforces. Insurers that evolve their claims process to meet the digital expectations of today’s employees will be the ones to retain and attract top talent. Claims handlers at companies that require logging into multiple systems to find the data and information they need will find themselves doing a lot more manual work, and that’s not going to make their jobs enjoyable. By streamlining and automating these once manual tasks, you can free up your staff’s time to focus on more high-impact, meaningful work.
Intelligent Insurer: How can insurers optimize first notice of loss (FNOL) and claims validation processes?
Gijsbert Cox: Most insurers now have online submission capabilities for FNOL, along with call centers, but the processes involved are often siloed and slow. They require manual intervention at multiple points over the lifetime of the claim, resulting in cycle time delays. Complicating matters further, insurers are typically bound to certain data fields and the process is not always user-friendly for the customer, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate information.
As insurers look to optimize and future-proof their claims operations, they need to look for ways to be more flexible in their FNOL data capture and gather information outside their legacy system’s proprietary data model. In order to achieve this, insurers need to have the right business rules and technology in place. They need to look for ways to optimize FNOL using new technologies with intelligent document processing and artificial intelligence to automatically extract information from claims documents and expedite intake.
Intelligent Insurer: What can insurers do to conquer the challenge of growing technical debt and create a process landscape around the customer journey?
Gijsbert Cox: Liberty Advisory Group cites analyst firm Forrester Research’s estimation that maintaining older applications and technology typically costs 70% or more of an organization’s technology budget. This severely limits what can be spent on innovation or new development for value-added services that would enhance the customer experience. Using low-code automation, insurers can unify their existing systems without data migration and create a single engagement layer across the entire claims process. This reduces insurers’ technical debt and frees up IT budgets to be spent on more innovative technologies focused on improving the customer journey.
Intelligent Insurer: How should insurance companies combine legacy systems with new innovations?
Gijsbert Cox: Using low-code technology for workflow automation, insurers can unify and extend their legacy systems. Low-code will help insurers avoid costly “rip-and-replace” scenarios or expensive core modernization initiatives that may take anywhere from three to five years. With low-code, insurers can keep what works in their legacy systems and easily integrate and connect them with emerging technologies like IoT, telematics, and insurtechs to create a single engagement layer.
Insurers can also combine the power of low-code with technologies like artificial intelligence, intelligent document processing, and machine learning to drive further efficiency throughout the entire claims process. If insurers leverage parts of their legacy systems and connect them with these new technologies, they will deliver greater value in both the short and long term and be better positioned for the future.
To read the full Intelligent Insurer interview, check out this article or register for Intelligent Insurer’s webinar where Gijsbert Cox will sit down with insurance leaders from Generali UK, HDI Global Specialty SE - UK, and Achmea to discuss how to deliver a superior customer experience while reducing claims leakage.
