Automation in Policy Checking

Automation is extremely essential for the digital transformation and success of the insurance industry.

Here’s why. 

Operations teams inside insurance companies spend a great deal of time manually checking for policy errors and omissions. They check for mismatches between policies, proposals, and renewal documentation, looking for flaws that can be an expensive E&O error or cause serious impacts to customer experience.

When commercial insurance companies rely on these manual processes that don’t have the ability to centralize, automate, standardize or track policy checks. Trust between their brokers, agents and policyholders can be broken. Having teams of skilled knowledge workers armed with yellow highlighters and red pens to manually check policies which run into hundreds of pages lacks efficiency and often results in errors and omissions.

After combing through several pages of policy language, coverages, endorsements and more, humans get tired and often overlook key information. They end up spot checking only 10 to 50% of policies due to the lack of manpower and the amount of time it takes to review hundreds and hundreds of pages.

Manual policy check can easily take up to 40% of an Account Manager’s day, giving him/her little time to focus on other important tasks.

Intelligent Automation Solutions

The increasing focus on accuracy and providing a stellar customer experience has necessitated the need for intelligent automation solutions. Intelligent Automation streamlines the policy-checking process, evaluating against the checklist and requesting updates whenever revisions are required.

AI-driven BOTs can review scanned policies, validate them for issues or concerns, review accounts and addresses for potential mismatches, and push all this information into a payment-processing system. They can even flag and route exceptions for additional investigation. Automation in this area can help insurers and companies scale up when there is a volume spike and reduce the overall manual handling time by 60%.

Intelligent Automation can essentially help achieve 95% straight-through processing with high accuracy. Let’s look at some key benefits of a quality end-to-end automation solution which score over manual policy checking.

Advantages of AI-driven policy checking

Document comparison

Document comparison, also known as redlining, is primarily used to identify changes between two versions of the same document for the purposes of editing and review. AI-driven policy check gives insurance brokers the ability to digitally compare two different documents, like a binder with a new policy or a prior year’s policy with a new policy. A policy and binder are two differently structured documents that are often very different in length. For instance, a binder can be 7 to 10 pages long while a policy can be longer than 70 pages. A redline technology does not have the versatility to compare two different types of documents with varying lengths or formats.

An AI-enabled policy checking solution can read and render a 100-page policy and a 10-page binder to find the exact pages where the information you want to check resides within each document. It will also automatically color-code information in the binder and the policy to indicate whether the information is accurate or not. For example, it will compare the insured’s address in the new policy with the existing policy or binder. In case the street address or zip code are wrong, it will color-code these errors in red. If the information is correct, it will color-code the information in green. The solution essentially compares the information in the documents against the checklist to quickly and easily identify potential errors or omissions that need to be addressed before the policy is issued.

Another key benefit of AI-enabled policy checking is that the solution will automatically highlight all pages in a policy including endorsements where the policy number is indicated. As a result, instead of having to manually scroll through hundreds of pages on-screen to verify if the policy information is correct, the solution immediately highlights pages that contain this information, saving several hours of manual policy review time.

Leveraging Data in Downstream Processes

An AI solution can extract, interpret and classify data from unstructured insurance documents and automatically feed the data into other core systems. While re-keying data manually can typically take many hours, an AI solution purpose-built for commercial insurance can reduce it to seconds. This frees knowledge workers to focus on more strategic initiatives and accelerating downstream processes.

Boosting Productivity and Reliability

Empowering employees to automate manual processes can expand their customer service bandwidth by 50%. Automating high volume, repetitive tasks like policy checking cuts down reliance on knowledge workers, boosts productivity levels and optimizes operational efficiency.

Increased Revenue

Accelerating the broker and policy holder’s response times through automation lets them spend more time providing personalized, one-on-one customer service and increase revenue in the long run.

Increased Data Security

Companies will have their policies and practices in strict compliance to ensure that data is completely protected and secure at all times.

Flexible Pricing 

A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model provides flexible pricing models and the ability to deploy it instantly without any infrastructure investment.

Scalability

AI is scalable across all lines of business and geographies. This allows quick and efficient validation and verification of every policy, rather than only spot checking a small percentage of policies. This also nullifies the risk of costly errors and omissions. AI in policy checking lets you increase the trust with brokers and policyholders by delivering error-free policies.

Economical

An AI-based solution proves to be more economical and affordable. The pricing goes down with volumes, just like in any other technology platform.

Wrapping up

Insurance brokers and agencies that apply NLP and ML based AI solutions purpose-built to automate the policy checking process will gain the flexibility of easily centralizing and standardizing the process across business units. This will also accelerate their response times, eliminate friction and leverage data assets and insights in other downstream processes. Exdion is a pioneer in policy checking automation, with the strongest possible foundation on commercial policies. Contact us to find out more about our robust, CSR-friendly AI platform, Exdion Policy Check.

Get set to wow customers with our intelligent, AI-driven automation solutions. Consult our experts today.