There’s something, well, offensive about processing insurance policy cancellations. It’s the insult-to-injury part of it: It’s bad enough that you’ve got a policyholder leaving you… now, you’ve also got to pay your team to process each cancellation. Pardon our candor, but that just sucks.
Now imagine a vastly better world. Imagine if all of these cancellations happened on their own, with no human intervention. Sounds like a dream come true, right?
Well, it’s actually reality, thanks to The Lab and the power of robotic process automation or RPA.
In this article, we’re going to walk you through this previously-painful process, and then show you how we automated it all, for a real insurance carrier (we can do the same for brokerages, too). In fact, we’ve made a little two-minute video showing the actual bot in action (with things like policyholder names and account numbers blurred for privacy); you can watch it right here above!
Let’s track the “before” version of a typical policy cancellation. The cancellation request will originally be submitted by an agent, broker, or Customer Service. That’s when the work begins. You’ll need to first look up the insured by policy-number. Then you’ll need to log in to the document-management system. And then the policy-management system. In each, you’ll need to complete lots of detailed fields in order to process the cancellation. And then when you’re done… well, you’re not quite done, because 1) you still need to email the confirmation of the cancellation to all the appropriate parties, and 2) you’ve still got a huge stack of more cancellations, just waiting to be processed.
In fact, depending on the size of your insurance operation, this same rote process is happening anywhere from 75 to 1,500 times a day. Every day.
And did we mention that it’s also error-prone? It’s true. Human workers are all too human, generating about a ten-percent error rate for this activity. In case you haven’t guessed it already, the error rate for bots is zero.
Here’s how the RPA bot, which The Lab configured, handles its policy cancellations:
First, when it receives a cancellation request, it logs into the ImageRight insurance document-management system, exactly like a human would, where it gathers the policy number and other input information needed to cancel the policy.
Next, it logs into Inspire, the core policy-administration system, just like a person would. And right here is one of those hiding-in-plain-sight benefits of bots: Unlike, say, an Excel macro, which you can only program into a single application, the bot can handle lots of different applications, performing the same “swivel-chair” activities as a person would.
Think about that. Think about how much time, each day, your team acts as the “human glue” between systems that can’t, don’t, and won’t talk to each other. Time to “park a bot” on those time-sucking chores!
Here are some examples. The RPA bot can “plug in” to virtually any insurance document-management, policy-administration, billing, or claims-processing system. How many of these “bot-able” systems are you “swivel-chairing” today?
Back to our bot. Once it’s in the core policy-admin system, it navigates through all of the app’s old-school green-screen menus:
Oh, but what about that confirmation email? Not a problem: The bot composes that one (using a template it accesses and properly populates), and sends it off to all the appropriate recipients. Instantly, and error-free.
The insurer shown in our demo video must process about 75 policy cancellations, every single day. Each one takes a person about 12 minutes to complete.
The bot does them in just 45 seconds apiece! One-hundred-percent automated! And remember: The bot never makes mistakes, takes breaks, or even gets tired.
All told, this one bot saves this insurer 1,600 hours a year!
Best of all, The Lab was able to install this bot, remotely, from our U.S. offices in Houston, in just four weeks, with nothing outsourced or offshored. The staff responsible for the process trained us; then we trained and installed the bot. It’s that simple.
The best way to appreciate this speed and game-changing power is to see it for yourself. We invite you to schedule your free, no-obligation 30-minute screen-sharing demo with The Lab. You’ll see real RPA insurance bots in action, and get all your questions answered by our friendly experts.
Learn how we automate policy cancellations—and tons of other lengthy, time-consuming, and previously “un-automatable” insurance processes. You’ll also see how insurance executives are accelerating automation initiatives and AI readiness with help from The Lab, laying the groundwork for strategic End-to-End innovation to adapt to ever-increasing market volatility.
Simply call (201) 526-1200 or email info@thelabconsulting.com to book your demo today!
