Industry Solutions: General Insurance

The Challenge

In today’s general insurance business, both insurers and brokers alike face a number of ongoing challenges. Fierce competition, burgeoning administration costs and increasing regulatory pressures are issues being tackled on an almost daily basis in the current business climate.

Competition for business between both traditional and aggregation brokers is aggressive, with product prices squeezed to the minimum. Faced with increasing customer service expectations, many books of business operate on a modest, or even negative margin.

Increasing regulation adds cost of compliance and breach to the bottom line, and with ever more sophisticated fraud activity in the market, a significant percentage of the overall claims revenue is being paid out unnecessarily.

In most general insurance operations, processes are often paper based. Even in those processes where workflow technology has been introduced, its impact has been limited by the manner of deployment. Meeting the levels of expected customer service is also challenging due to the demanding nature of today’s consumers. Being able to provide same day turnaround on correspondence and instantly answer telephone queries is no longer seen as a luxury but a standard.

Staying on top of the costs, providing the expected levels of customer service and keeping ahead of the increasing amounts of collaborative fraud, means selecting the right technology solution. This activity in itself can be fraught with risk, particularly when embarking on an integration exercise between multiple applications.

The AWD Solution

Used by leading insurers and brokerages, AWD provides a proven, scalable process management solution which can help enable organisations to reduce the cost of managing work, improve regulatory compliance with legislation such as Solvency II, and provide better customer service to the product consumers.

By combining comprehensive document management with sophisticated work delivery and process automation, AWD can help insurance organisations achieve their goals of decreased costs and improved customer service.

Typical business areas that utilise AWD are:

• New business take on and underwriting
• Claims processing
• Policy administration
• Customer contact centres

AWD provides the ability to prioritise and distribute work electronically to the appropriate processing agents.

AWD organises and simplifies work activities. Users are guided through the process steps thus enabling levelling of skills and consistency.

AWD provides Management Information in the form of reports to help team leaders and supervisors control and manage the daily operation of processing work amongst agents.

AWD manages the correspondence to and from the customers and third parties via traditional ‘white’ mail, fax, email and SMS. By proactively notifying customers and intermediaries of the progress of applications and claims.

A distinctive feature of AWD is that it manages processes in a two dimensional manner. Firstly by handling the horizontal routing, delivery and prioritisation of work between human ‘knowledge workers’, wherever they are. Typically this is used in both new business and claims processing so that work is prioritised and distributed in the most optimum manner.

At key points in a process, the ‘vertical’ processing manages the interaction between the user and the application by guiding them through the steps to complete their work. Insurance companies often use this to build high level acceptance rules into the user interaction so that most new business cases can be taken on without the need for human involvement. Additionally, this vertical process application can be used to ‘orchestrate’ the host systems interaction and other third party applications. Typically this can be used to incorporate data analytics into a claims process to screen for fraudulent activity.

Using AWD also means that organisations have recorded and documented processes helping to improve customer service. AWD will assist companies with their obligations to deal with complaints fairly and quickly, using consistent, recorded data.

Dashboard based intra-day management information allows organisations to manage workloads and plan resources. Peaks and troughs in business volumes can be mitigated. AWD can help enable companies to anticipate regulatory breaches in time to resolve.

Comprehensive reporting is also available as a set of pre-packaged performance reports which enable senior management to understand key issues and costs of running a business operation. Customisable metrics allow specific SLA and performance reports to be generated without the dependency on IT skills.

The AWD Client Benefits

For insurance companies deploying AWD, the following benefits have been experienced in some cases:

• Head count saving
• Improved audit capability to support compliance and help reduce breaches
• Automation of labour intensive tasks where humans add no value
• Prioritised allocation of work, helping to enable our clients get the right work to the right person at the right time
• Improved customer service with fast access to data and documents
• Distribution of work to anywhere in the enterprise for processing

Related Products

• AWD

  To succeed in today’s corporate business environment organisations must harness the right resources and technology to deliver optimised process efficiency, quality and customer service.