I, Robot

Emerging technologies are poised to change our claims industry. Robotic process automation has already made a significant impact by reducing manual work, creating capacity and alleviating strain from adjusters who are regularly inundated with repetitive data entry tasks. Our office provides an illustration of how automating processes through robotics can help streamline your claims operations.

When considering automation within our organization, we identified “non-value-added” processes as the area of greatest opportunity. Such processes are non-customer facing and human intervention adds little value. These are the tasks you don’t like to do: they are very repetitive and, in the words of claims staff, they are “tedious” and “uninteresting.” Our staff readily identified processes perfect for automation.

Monica Kuzyk, vice president, Curo Claims Services

Next, staff qualified in process mapping — people with a demonstrated commitment to reducing complexity, and who have a fulsome understanding of the customer experience — came together to work with the robotics provider to develop a project plan. Recognizing that the robot imitates human keystrokes and mouse clicks, the team identified the mail process as a “pilot process” for automation.

The mail process had already been partially automated through scanning, thanks largely to the paperless claims environment since 2002. But robotics provided greater process automation of the entire workflow, including data entry and identification of mail items requiring immediate escalation. It also allowed for a non-invasive, compatible functionality with the claim system. The initial automation deployment took approximately five months, from process development and launch to the point when we could “trust” the new system would function as intended.

Read the full article in the Digital Edition of the February 2018 Canadian Underwriter.

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