Justin is the Manager of ReSource Pro’s Digital Insurance Lab and Angel is Assistant Manager of Automation at ReSource Pro
Determining whether automation makes sense for your insurance organization requires assessment across multiple areas—your people, your business process, and your technology systems. Because automation involves all three, it’s critical to understand each area when considering implementing automation.
Is your team ready?
Many employees’ imaginations tend to run wild when they hear “automation” or “bots.” They may fear machines will displace them from their jobs. In reality, automation is intended to free humans from repetitive tasks so they can be more productive as they work on more complex activities.
When your organization is considering implementing automation, you should take several steps to assess your team’s readiness to embrace this change. For example:
Explain the why and how. Discuss with your team the desired outcomes of automation, why your organization wants to implement it, and how you envision bringing automation into their workflows. Take time to hear their questions and concerns and respond to them.
Engage team members. Involve your team members in identifying the processes where automation can pay big dividends. Include them in the development strategy so they feel part of the process.
Accentuate the positive. Change is challenging for most of us, even when we understand the need for it. Explain how automation will positively impact your team members and identify what they can do with the extra capacity they’ll gain from it. For starters, automation can help your employees achieve better work/life balance and focus on high-level work that will make their jobs more interesting.
Are your processes a good fit?
Another key step in the road to automation is to determine which of your processes are a right fit. An insurance organization might have 100 different tasks that it performs every day, but only 20 of those tasks might be suitable for automation. Understanding both automation and insurance specific processes—such as quoting, binding, and issuing documents—helps separate the wheat from the chaff and home in on opportunities to apply the technology.
At ReSource Pro, we apply this knowledge when assessing our clients’ automation readiness. We start by conducting a wide scan of their tasks and business processes, with a goal of creating a narrower list on which to make detailed observations. To determine a task’s suitability for automation, our team looks at the nature of the work, and whether it is ruled-based or requires human judgment to complete. The more rule-based a task is, and less reliant on human knowledge, the more suitable it may be to automate. Similarly, a repetitive task that occurs with high frequency may be a good candidate for automation.
An insurance organization’s source data for a task can also make it a better fit for automation. Structured, digital data is more likely to work in automation than source data that involves images and unstructured email, which are more difficult for automation tools to process.
Tying it all together
Assessing your people and processes is important, but your organization also needs the right infrastructure, environment, and tools to support automation. It’s critical to take a close look at the technology and data situation within your organization. If you’re still utilizing legacy systems or unstructured data, for example, you may face difficulties deploying automation.
Understanding your organization’s automation readiness is an extensive process that can be challenging to carry out on your own. If you’re looking for help, ReSource Pro can create an assessment for you and enable you to see how your organization compares to industry peers that have had success with the technology. If your organization isn’t ready in any areas, we can even create a roadmap to help you get there.
Learn more about how ReSource Pro can support your insurance organization’s automation journey by scheduling a meeting with us
