Processing online applications for specialty insurance coverage—such as earthquake, flood, inland marine, standalone wind, wind deductible buyback, and others—is a ton of work for your insurance brokerage’s Special Markets team.
Even when applications or requests for quotes arrive online, there’s still, unfortunately, a lot of manual, sit-at-the-computer work to be done. Your people need to:
In the average brokerage, this takes a Special Markets team member about 25 minutes, just to process a single application.
Remember that number: 25 minutes each.
Why? Because we’re about to blow that number out the window.
Spoiler alert: All of the activities we’d listed above can now be automated. The Lab is the insurance industry’s knowledge-work automation specialist; we can apply robotic process automation or RPA to this challenge (and many others).
In this article, we’ll show you how we recently configured an RPA “bot” to do precisely what we’ve described above. We’ve even created a little three-minute video of it, which you can view right here:
An important thing to bear in mind, especially if you’re new to automation, is that bots from The Lab are platform-agnostic. In other words, they don’t care which system, platform, or brand your brokerage uses. If a person can sit at a computer and access it, so can a bot.
And so the bot in this use-case begins its work on the brokerage’s online form-submission and management program. (The brokerage in the video is using Cognito, but remember that any system will work.)
The bot logs in. It has its own user name, password, and permissions, just like a person. And once it’s logged in, the first thing it does is to search for all the recent quote requests. It then filters that list for just those that are either “Submitted” or “Reviewed.” It exports those search results as a data set, and saves it to the brokerage’s shared drive. (Note that it even selects the proper filepath and sub-folder, and gives the data set a rational, appropriate filename.)
So far, the bot has mimicked what a human does. But then it goes one step beyond: It doesn’t just download that list. It also memorizes the entire thing. So whereas a person would need to park two different windows on their computer screen, in preparation for the laborious copying-and-pasting that’s soon to come, the bot doesn’t have to. It just gets to work.
The bot next logs in to the brokerage’s agency management system. Bots from The Lab can work with any of them, such as:
Once it’s logged in, it begins its drill-down. It searches among all the brokerage’s different agencies. It then searches, by account number, for the first quote from the list it had just memorized.
And then it really begins to work hard. The bot:
And now it’s got the details of the first building to be covered by this quote. And, faster than you can read this sentence, it opens, saves, and then populates the entire application PDF. Every single field:
It fills out the entire form in mere seconds.
But this quote is to cover more than just the main building. There’s also a detached garage, and exterior equipment. Each requires its own application to be filled out.
And that’s precisely what the bot does. It returns to the “Risk Locations” screen, grabs the information for the garage (even downloading the attached property photos), and populates the next application. It does the entire process, all over again, for the exterior equipment.
It even completes (and saves) the form for “Commercial General Liability.”
Next, it returns to the forms-platform, and marks that first application as “Complete.” And then it moves right on to the next application in the queue!
Remember that “25 minute” timeframe we’d mentioned above? That’s how long it takes a person to do everything we just described. Guess how long it takes the bot to do the same thing?
Two minutes. That’s all. It’s more than 12x faster.
And unlike a person, the bot doesn’t slow down as it goes. It never gets tired or takes breaks. And—get this—it never even makes a typo.
Still doing this manually at your brokerage? Feels outdated already, doesn’t it?
The best way to appreciate the speed and game-changing power of insurance brokerage bots 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 bots in action. You’ll learn how we do all this from our U.S. offices in Houston, with nothing ever outsourced or offshored, and get all your questions answered by our friendly experts. Simply call (201) 526-1200 or email info@thelabconsulting.com to book your demo today!
