Insurance Workflow Automation: How It Works, Benefits, and Real-World Examples

AI is revolutionizing the insurance industry by automating workflows. This helps streamline processes such as claims processing, reduce costs, enhance customer experience, and more. Even challenging tasks such as claims processing and insurance underwriting can be automated.

With so many benefits, automation is very common in the insurance industry, so here are the best ways an insurance company can automate insurance workflow.

What Is Insurance Workflow Automation?

Insurance workflow automation is the use of advanced tools (such as artificial intelligence) to streamline various processes that usually take hours or days to complete. It is mainly focused on automating repetitive tasks to minimize the need for human interference.

Besides reducing the time needed to complete various tasks, like claims processing, workflow automation also helps improve the accuracy of performed tasks, improve cost-effectiveness, and even reduce processing time.

With the automation of routine tasks like relevant data entry, document processing, and communication with clients, insurers can free up their time by delegating time-consuming and repetitive tasks. This leaves more time to focus on more important matters.

Insurance workflow automation also helps customers. Faster response times, personalized services, and more pleasant interactions while getting self-service options and real-time updates all increase customer satisfaction.

Therefore, insurance workflow automation is a shift that allows insurance organizations to operate more efficiently, adapt to market dynamics much better, and remain competitive within the industry.

Benefits of Workflow Automation in the Insurance Industry

Workflow automation benefits the insurance industry in many different ways. Some of the benefits include:

• Better operational efficiency
• Time-savings by automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks
• Increased productivity and output
• Improved accuracy and compliance
• Minimized risk of human error
• Adherence to industry standards
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Competitive edge in the insurance sector

The biggest advantage of workflow automation in insurance is the acceleration of task completion without sacrificing the work quality. AI can reduce and minimize manual (human) errors, and tasks like claims processing, and data analysis. Tasks like policy renewal are done much faster as a result.

While AI handles time-consuming and repetitive tasks much more efficiently, insurers have more time to focus on more important tasks.

Insurers get more time to respond and communicate with clients, which boosts the response time, personalizes the service more, and benefits both the insurers and clients with seamless interaction. However, AI can help automate client outreach too. This is done by providing real-time updates, delivering self-service options, and ensuring proactive support. This leads to higher retention rates and better customer satisfaction.

Analysis of larger amounts of data is also beneficial since it allows insurers to gain insight into customer behavior, market trends, and risk profiles much faster than usual. With such data, insurance companies can provide much more tailored services and products, creating new revenue streams.

All of these benefits lead to a much more efficient workflow, which results in increased profitability and sustainable growth.

Automation in the Insurance Industry

The good news is that even the most challenging tasks can be automated with the help of AI. Here are some of the workflow tasks that insurance companies can now automate:

• Insurance underwriting process
• Claims processing
• Customer onboarding
• Customer service
• Policy renewal and cancellation
• Marketing and sales
• Compliance and reporting

Insurance Underwriting Process

With its ability to analyze and process data faster, artificial intelligence can revolutionize the manual underwriting process. Today, insurers can automatically assess risk in real time and with a much better accuracy rate.

Real-World Example: Automated Underwriting System

Take Progressive Corporation as an example.

This company uses AI-driven algorithms to analyze data points much faster and much more accurately than with manual underwriting methods. As a result, they can assess risk faster, and provide quicker and much more accurate offers to customers, while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction.

As the benefits snowball, AI is also allowing Progressive Corporation to handle a large volume of loan applications much quicker than traditional insurance companies. The advanced AI algorithm continuously adapts and learns from new data and trends. From there, the company refines its assessment models, lowering the risk involved in the automated underwriting system.

That’s just one of many examples of how automation of only one task within the company can drive operational efficiency, improve credit risk assessments, and deliver value to both the company and the client.

Claims Processing Automation

The analysis and evaluation of insurance claims is one of the time-consuming tasks. AI can help analyze and evaluate insurance claims submitted by policyholders with very minimal human intervention. With AI being able to process large amounts of data faster while understanding claim details, policy information, and historical data, results are much more accurate with valid assessments of each claim.

Real-World Example: Automated Claims Processing

Allstate Corporation is the greatest example of an insurance company that has automated claims processing with the help of AI. This company expedites the claims processing, which reduces the time it takes to settle claims and gets policyholders paid faster.

When a privacyholder submits a claim, Allstate Corporation’s automated claim processing handles data and makes an assessment based on its processing system, which is also equipped with loan process fraud detection capabilities.

As a result, Allstate Corporation enhances efficiency, improves customer satisfaction, gets through claims processing faster, and gets much more accurate results while lowering the human error rate. Overall, with claims processing automation, insurance companies can improve the efficiency, reliability, accuracy, and timeframe of the claims processes.

Customer Onboarding

Signing up new policyholders was a manual process for a long time. AI now expedites the signing-up process with the help of advanced algorithms and company-specific data.

As long as there is one or multiple channels where potential customers can provide information, AI can guide them through the onboarding process. AXA is a perfect example of a company that automated the application processing with the help of AI.

Real-World Example: Automated Customer Onboarding

AXA allows potential customers to provide necessary customer information through various channels such as the website and the mobile app. From there, AI takes over and provides a personalized experience for each potential customer.

By analyzing inputted information, AI can offer tailored solutions based on customers’ specific needs and preferences. AXA’s AI system continuously learns and improves with each customer interaction, helping the company redefine and optimize its onboarding process for the best results.

The final result is a faster and improved customer service experience with a seamless automated onboarding process that benefits both the company and its customers. By streamlining the onboarding process, the insurers can handle more customer requests. This can drive business growth without sacrificing user experience.

Customer Service

Customer service is one of the most repetitive tasks. It is important but also time-consuming. Luckily, AI can help automate it too, thanks to its natural language processing and machine learning capabilities.

Real-World Example: Automated Customer Service in Insurance

State Farm is one of the best examples of companies automating customer service with AI. With its automated customer service platform, State Farm provides immediate answers to most common questions like policy information, claims status, and coverage details.

Such automation reduces the customer’s wait time before meeting an available agent and helps reduce the agents’ workload. As a result, customer support agents can focus and handle more complex customer queries.

With automated customer service support, any company, just like State Farm, can improve responsiveness, provide immediate response to customers, and improve customer satisfaction. This is possible without sacrificing personalization from the ongoing support for both new and existing customers.

Policy Renewal and Cancellation

AI can be used to automate policy management tasks, such as renewal and cancellation, and Liberty Mutual is a company that makes a great example of such automation in the auto insurance industry.

Real-World Example: Automated Policy Renewal and Cancellation

Liberty Mutual automates policy renewal and cancellation through a variety of channels, such as the website and the mobile app, where policyholders can review, renew, initiate changes, or cancel the existing insurance policy.

Without needing human intervention, Liberty Mutual’s automated workflow not only handles customer queries and actions but also automatically offers renewal options or alternative policy solutions based on the customers’ data and preferences.

Such policy renewal automation helps expedite the time needed to renew, change, or cancel the policy, ensuring better customer satisfaction and eliminating the intervention previously required to handle policy-related queries.

Marketing and Sales

Many insurance companies overlook the power of AI in marketing and sales, but Prudential Financial is a great example of a company that utilizes AI for its marketing efforts.

An AI system trained on company-specific quality data can identify potential customers with the help of AI-driven predictive analytics. By analyzing vast amounts of data, AI systems can target potential customers based on their demographics, online behavior, and even life events, ensuring that they find and reach out to individuals who could most benefit from the company’s products and services.

Besides analyzing a vast amount of data to find potential customers who would benefit from the company’s services and products, AI can also help personalize the outreach and offer suitable insurance solutions.

Much more efficient marketing effort, higher conversion rates, and improved customer satisfaction are just some of the results that any company can benefit from, just like Prudential Financial does.

With targeted outreach, personalized interactions, and better customer service, all of the benefits mentioned above lead to business growth and relevancy in the highly competitive industry.

Compliance and Reporting

Since artificial intelligence can analyze and understand a vast amount of additional information, it’s also useful for keeping up with the latest regulatory changes.

Real-World Example: Automated Compliance Monitoring

AIG is one of the companies that took advantage of AI to monitor regulatory changes, analyze complex legal documents, and ensure compliance with applicable laws. By automating this task, any company can benefit from risk assessment and identification of potential compliance risks, where the only human interference needed is to take necessary actions and mitigate the risk.

Alongside compliance, AI systems are good at generating reports for stakeholders, regulators, and internal teams while requiring very minimal help from human resources. AIG is also taking advantage of this by automating AI to generate and provide financial and performance reports.

Since the AI system is designed to adapt to regulatory changes, it continuously learns to stay current with the industry’s standards.

Crucial Factors for Insurance Workflow Automation

The thing about the automation of workflows in the insurance industry is that off-the-shelf solutions won’t be a good fit. The industry has too many variables to consider during the decision-making process. Besides, it’s a highly regulated industry, which is another challenge that automation solutions need to overcome.

Since insurance companies have a high need for human-level intelligence and critical thinking, the best solution for them are usually Generative AI models trained on company- and industry-specific data.

That’s why we offer Generative AI-powered insurance-specific solutions focused on automating claims processing and underwriting:

• Document AI
• Decision AI
• Database AI
• Conversational AI

These AI agents can carry out tasks like sorting policy details, analyzing risk assessment, and even making decisions that human staff can quickly review and approve or deny.

Thanks to their insurance-specific knowledge and human-like intelligence, they can improve insurance operations, boost revenues, decrease costs, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Our AI solutions are already helping clients reap real benefits:

• Direct Mortgage Corp. is using our AI Agents to speed up time-to-approval by 20x.
• Caktus is using our AI Agents to increase its customer base and boost customer experience.
• Talent uses our AI Agents to automate 75%-80% of their workflow and get tasks done almost 5x faster.

Automate Your Insurance Workflows With Us

Are you interested in achieving similar benefits as our clients? Then- please schedule a 30-minute call with our experts. We’ll discuss your needs, show you how our AI Agents work live, and give you actionable advice on the best use cases for your business.

FAQs

Can insurance be automated?

Yes, insurance can be automated and artificial intelligence can help streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance customer service. The most popular ways to automate insurance include automated underwriting systems and claims process automation, among others.

How does automation affect the insurance industry?

Automation in insurance is very beneficial and it affects the industry in positive ways such as increasing efficiency, reducing cost, improving customer experience, enhancing data analysis, assessing risk better, detecting fraud, and more.

How soon can I  automate my insurance workflows?

When you work with us, you can automate your workflows in as little as 8 weeks. This is approximately how much it takes us to customize and integrate AI into your existing workflow.