Global Insurance Leader Leverages Automation to Open New Revenue Streams And Modernize Workflows

Some business leaders are wary of automation. They see it as something that eliminates jobs rather than something that creates new opportunities. However, the point of automation is to absorb the most mundane and repetitive tasks, freeing human workers and the companies that employ them to focus on more purposeful work: finding creative solutions to pressing problems while maximizing human potential.

Automation has transformed entire industries. Robots work alongside humans in automobile factories, improving safety and efficiency. Human Resources (HR) professionals use AI to scan thousands of résumés, allowing them to widen the pool of potential hires without having to look at each application individually. Retailers use QR codes to provide information about products on shelves, freeing in-store staff to deliver more personal customer services.

Many businesses have embraced automation completely, or at least partly, but some are still lagging. Here is how one company leveraged Adlib’s automation tools to accelerate business.

Evolving in the World of BPO

A Leading North American Insurance company focusing on business process outsourcing (BPO) provides underwriting, billing, account, and other back-office services to insurers. They also execute mass printing and mailing of policies, including the electronic delivery of those documents.

The company had been utilizing Adlib’s document transformation solutions to absorb data from customer- and agent-submitted documents and to produce workflow documents such as PDF files. The system would pull information from emails and attachments, compile it into discrete documents, and then send it into its existing workflows.

In 2019, the insurance company learned of Adlib’s document transformation for Insurance and its new automation capabilities to further enhance their BPO offering. As soon as the platform launched the team rolled out three new automated services to their customer base.

Transitioning to Automation

One of the first initiatives was to automate the mail quality control process. Up until then, the quality control (QC) team would conduct spot checks on these mailings before they went to the printer to make sure there were no blank pages or missing data, and to ensure the name and address on the declaration page matched the information on the invoice. Since it was impossible for the department to check every single document, they instituted a manual process to ensure some degree of accuracy. However, they couldn’t help but wonder how many more errors an automated quality control process would catch.

In 2020, the company printed and mailed out 1.75 million policies and invoices for various clients. This time around, Adlib’s document transformation platform allowed the insurer to automatically verify the raw data they used to generate the output tables that produce these documents. If they detected an error, the team could now trigger an automated regeneration process that created a new version of the document and sent it back for a second test.

If it failed again, the batch was forwarded to a human QC operator. With the old system, every error like this triggered an incident, requiring a member of the IT team to manually regenerate the document and update the database as necessary. With the adoption of Adlib, the team can now catch and correct most of these glitches. The more elaborate issues are escalated to human workers.

Indexing Inspection Reports

Second, the insurance company also uses Adlib to digest inspection data for new business policies. When a company purchases protection from one of their clients, the application is typically accompanied by an inspection report written by a third party and stored as a PDF.

Adlib’s platform makes those documents searchable and extracts the data they contain into XML files. Since everything is indexed, clients can review specific data points automatically and not by manually reading an entire report.

For example, if a business is required to have a six-foot fence to qualify for coverage, an employee can type in a few keywords and go straight to the section of the inspection report that demonstrates whether that business is in compliance. Adlib’s system provides an opportunity for the company’s BPO clients to have easier access to inspection data.

Having easier access to document data surfaced additional insights that enabled the business to better tailor its services to its clients.

Converting Rollovers

The final initiative, and biggest improvement, the insurance company was able to make was the way they managed rollovers, which is when one insurance company buys a book of business from another company. They effectively take over all of its policies.

In most cases, the seller provides usable information in the form of raw data. But sometimes, they will hand over thousands of declaration pages and leave it up to the buyer to process the information, which can take months.

The company built a workflow in Adlib's Document Transformation for Insurance that extracts thousands of declaration pages worth of data into a CSV file at a fraction of the time. This data is then fed into an automation platform to create new quotes and policies.

The insurer authored this feature out of necessity. About six months prior, one of their clients—a large writer of manufactured home insurance in the US—found itself needing to convert 10,000 declaration pages. These were old files, and the original source data was lost.

The insurance company had to start from scratch. It took three weeks to get these 10,000 policies in their systems using a combination of automated and manual methods. With Adlib, it would have taken less than a week.

Adlib’s customer plans to offer this type of automation to their full-time clients. They also hope to open a new revenue stream by providing rollover services on a per-use basis to companies that may not even utilize their BPO services.

An À La Carte Solution

The insurer appreciates the ability to pick and choose the features they want for as long as they need them, and for as long as its customers need them. Employees are able to go online, select the modules they need, deploy them, and put them back when they have achieved the desired goal. Simply put, the insurance company can tap into an automation toolbox at the ready at all times.

Final Verdict

Adlib’s Document Transformation for Insurance is helping this insurer take its BPO business to the next level. The company has experienced firsthand how automation frees up its human capital to discover new revenue streams and make its own workflows more efficient. Ultimately, what has shifted the tide is that the insurance company can demonstrate to prospective clients how automation will replace their repetitive, manual tasks to save valuable resources because they have done it first for themselves.