Skip to Main Content

Simplify and Automate Your Paper Processes to Grow Your Insurance Agency

Paper forms and correspondence continue to slow productivity in companies of all industries. Insurance agencies are no exception. Many electronic forms go through inefficient lifecycles, going back and forth between digital, physical, manual signatures, and emails. These workflows are often plagued with bottlenecks which delay policies from being created, claims from being processed, and payments from being made.

Insurance Agencies Have Tried to Increase Efficiencies

Agencies typically have PDF forms available, either on their website or that they distribute to clients on-demand. Yet many of these forms don’t allow for digital population, or claimants are so used to filling out forms manually that their first inclination is to print, complete, scan, and email. Even upload to a self-service portal in some cases. Manual processes slow business growth because employees need to spend more time on administrative minutiae, and less time providing customers with value. By administrative minutiae, we mean:

  • Data entry from handwritten data
  • Copying and pasting digital information into structured data applications
  • Emailing forms within the organization, to companies that remediate damages, and with customers
  • Manual processing of policy and claim approvals

Yet even when policyholders do fill out forms electronically, many agencies don’t have the tools or resources to capture form field inputs, so they end up keying the data, and often needing to get additional information from claimants, further delaying policy and claim handling time.

Insurance agencies often try many static and interactive form applications in the marketplace with limited success. Some electronic forms make it simpler to fill out on a desktop computer but are unusable on tablets or smartphones, which are swiftly becoming the go-to devices for getting things done.

Workflow Doesn’t Have to Mean High Cost and Complexity

For many insurance agencies, enterprise business process management solutions often exceed budget availability and carry too much technical overhead. Process automation solutions are built for simplicity and efficiency. Workflow design happens within a graphical “studio” environment, not on a coding console. Logic branching paths, rules, forms, and signature rules can be defined in advance, including fail-safes that mitigates when “business as usual” goes awry.

The ROI of Digital Transformation for Insurance Processes

When building a business case for process automation and digital transformation, most businesses, insurance agencies included, need help quantifying the value they can expect from their investment. Here are three points which project sponsors should put near the top of their business case. The statistics below were sourced from authoritative sources, including Adobe, MIT and the SMB Group.

  • Digital insurance forms processing accelerates the time it takes for clients to sign and return documents by a factor of 21.
  • According to SMB group, insurance adjusters, agents and other administrative users can eliminate 11 hours of administrative desk work from their work week.
  • In addition, the SMB group survey in 2018 found that 56% of CEOs said they realized revenue growth by migrating paper processes to digital.
  • Nearly half of CEOs who responded to the survey they hadn’t shifted from manual processes to digital said they planned to do so in the near term.

Slow, inefficient claims processing can drive clients to change insurance agencies. Loss of business, repetitive manual data entry and approval bottlenecks often degrade employee morale and distracts them from their tasks. Automotive repair shops, renovation contractors, and health professionals that receive prompt payment for processed claims are great sources of customer referrals. Does four times as many referrals from satisfied clients, and business partners sound worth the investment? MIT estimates that sort of return is realistic as a return on digital investment.

Paper and unprocessed scanned documents are static, and they create more work for everyone that comes into contact with them. Documents which are embedded in digital processes often only require data entry from a client, enhance compliance and record trackability, and empower your employees to provide more strategic value to your clients than data input and shuffling paper.

Want to discover more about how process automation and digital transformation can enable your agency to generate more revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and accelerate document processing?

Watch our recorded webinar with hosts Crystal Hoecker and Jake Filloramo from the OnTask product management team. You will find the recording and presentation materials by simply clicking here. We’re offering 50 free transactions to anyone who watches the recorded webinar. Get started today!