Using intelligent document processing, agency employees process and respond to customer emails and attachments five times faster than with their legacy solution—building customer trust while helping people protect what they love most.
Tackling the Complexity of the Insurance Industry
Every day, this insurance agency serves 29 million people through a range of insurance and financial products. But helping so many people in an industry known for complexity comes with significant challenges.
The organization receives a huge number of emails daily, many of which include attachments with critical customer information. Of those attachments, an estimated 70% contain handwritten text or low-quality mobile captures. When coupled with a legacy optical character recognition (OCR) solution, this handwritten text and variation in image quality led to clerical errors, long processing times, and frustrated customers.
Addressing the Need for Greater Speed and Accuracy with Machine Learning
With every touchpoint increasing the likelihood of clerical errors, the organization’s manual processes didn’t inspire confidence for employees or customers. The organization’s legacy OCR solution struggled to accurately process handwritten data, and the insurance industry’s high variability in documents increased this difficulty, leading to manual workarounds and long document processing times.
For example, when the company receives emails with attachments, those attachments have to be analyzed by the existing OCR solution. Because the accuracy of this solution wasn’t up to their standards, these emails and attachments also required human review. Due to a surge in pandemic-related documents, the agency faced a growing backlog of evidence of insurability (EOI) forms that left customers waiting on responses.
Handling High Document Variability
The firm faced another challenge when it came to incorporating new documents into their existing workflow. In the insurance space, new documents are frequently introduced, whether due to changing industry regulations or updates in the company’s policies. For this agency, adding new documents to their existing automation capabilities involved lengthy development and implementation timelines, taking several months to scale to full capacity.
To make matters even more difficult, the company’s investment advisors found themselves overburdened with manual tasks. By spending too much time on administrative work instead of client facing responsibilities, customer relationships were unnecessarily strained.
In order to provide a better experience to the millions of customers, the company sought to reduce the level of effort, time, and cost required to classify and extract nearly 1.5 million pages of documents.
85% Reduction in Document Processing Times
With this deeper level of automation and collaboration, the company shortened document processing times from six-and-a-half minutes per email down to just one. Customers receive responses to their inquiries faster, and in turn can rest easy knowing the things they love are protected.
With the time saved on document processing, employees were able to shift their focus to other critical areas of the business that needed attention—paving the way for new opportunities and improved outcomes for everyone involved.
“The human touch is very important for us—we want to empower our contact center agents, not replace them. Our machine learning solutions enable our employees to serve customers better.”
Accurate Data Extraction
When the firm first began the search for a new automation solution, data accuracy was number one on the list of requirements. If a new solution couldn’t improve data accuracy, it wouldn’t reduce the manual labor as desired. Furthermore, low accuracy rates would actually impede user adoption.
With Hyperscience, the organization is capable of automatically extracting data from more than 200 documents with an accuracy level above 99%. And because their new solution uses machine learning, it gets faster over time, requiring less human intervention as more documents are processed.
“Accuracy is so important because it increases the confidence our contact center agents have in the solution. If there are too many errors, they’ll simply stop using it, and that won’t be helpful for anyone.”
Flexibility for the Future
The agency also recognized the need to evolve as the insurance market changed. With legacy automation solutions, any time there is a change to a process (or even to a single document), it often requires a significant effort to adjust the solution to recognize the new process.
The organization found that with Hyperscience, they have both speed and scalability at their disposal. This helps keep their business adaptable to changes initiated at the market level. Previously, any time a new document was added into the organization’s existing workflow, it could take several months to plan, implement, and scale to full capacity. Now, it can be done in just two weeks.
Millions Protected by Modernized Automation Technology
As the insurer continues using Hyperscience, the underlying machine learning models become smarter, faster, and more accurate, giving employees even more time for other critical tasks. As for the organization’s clients, the agency’s modernized automation solution has helped customers get the coverage they need faster than ever.
“That was really a ‘wow’ moment for me. Seeing the speed at which we can now scale document processing with new use cases—it’s very fast. And that grows the confidence of our entire team.”
Watch this demo to get an overview of how the Hyperscience Platform automates insurance claims processing.