Robotics – a solution with a wealth of potential for the insurance industry

Right now, digitalisation is on everyone’s lips. In most cases, the focus is on the digitalisation of customer interfaces, the so-called customer front ends, which is surely an area with vast potential for optimisation. However, I firmly believe that there are even greater benefits to be found in the digitalisation of back-end processes, as these deliver more advantages to customers, staff and all other stakeholders.

Claims handling and service provision are issues that play a key role for customers. We have given our customers the pledge that we will help them should they need it. However, if the claims process is exhaustively paper-based and drags on too long, customers soon become frustrated. Policyholders today have become accustomed to receiving up-to-the-minute information about the status of their case at the click of a button and they expect to be able to access online updates. 

Digitalising back-office processes is considerably more complex than digitalising front-ends. A complete digital re-design requires substantial and deep changes to the existing IT infrastructure. Legacy systems and limited IT resources can rapidly become bottlenecks, slowing down the transformation speed. This is where robotics comes in, as it presents a potential solution to these issues. Robotics or RPA (robotics process automation) uses software robots process the repetitive actions automatically in the background that would otherwise be performed manually by humans. The use of RPA requires only limited intervention in the underlying system landscape, making it a fast and cost-effective option.

ERGO is setting up a Robotics Competence Center with the aim of establishing the expertise needed for national and international implementation.

The idea for this center came from our Indian colleagues at HDFC ERGO, who have been using a chatbot to assist their call center agents in a project to a resounding success. Their business involves many varied and complex processes, making training of new employees very demanding. Due to the complexity, many freshly trained staff felt overwhelmed and stressed, and increasing numbers were quitting their jobs. With training times per person of around three months, this created a lot of extra work for the company and the resulting long caller queue times had a negative impact on customer satisfaction. Now, a chatbot – which has been named Aby – guides the agents through the workflow and automates many processes, including providing all necessary calculations and mailing out documents to customers. The effect: resignations dropped, processing times were reduced by 40 percent and customer satisfaction increased strongly. More and more of these RPA assistance functions are being rolled out in India, and we are currently exploring potential applications here in Germany.

This taught me that we need to listen to and employ the experience of our international colleagues even more, and that we should not hesitate to integrate the available technologies in our processes and workflows.

In my next blog post, I’ll be looking at concrete applications and reporting on the feedback from our Robotics Competence Center.

As always, I welcome your comments, questions and suggestions!

Kind regards, Mark Klein