We sat down with PropertyCasualty360 for a discussion last week to explore how insurance organizations are reimagining their claims processes](/resources/reimagined-claims-processes/) with future-proof technologies. During the webinar, we dove into how today’s insurers are staying ahead of the competition by keeping up with the changing market and technologies that are enabling it.
Insurers are tasked with overcoming major challenges, understanding the impact that content and data has on their claims process, and staying in-tune with how they can leverage new technologies that are helping organizations manage it all.
Key challenges that insurers face today -
- Too many touch points - Claims processes need to capture all incoming information whether submitted online, by phone, or physically. Access needs to be determined by role, and the ability for processes to differ depending on different lines of business. Organizations need to manage higher volumes and provide the right automation and routing to respond to what is coming in.
- Exponentially increasing data - There’s huge growth in regards to the amount and types of content that exists today, a big issue for legacy systems. Many different types of content gets created, and the list continues to grow – from text, to images, video, and audio. As the number of content formats grows, the complexity of managing these media files does, as well.
- Increasing customer expectations - Providing a top-notch customer experience remains top-of-mind, as insurers strive to stand out among the competition. Organizations are leveraging better user experiences to stay ahead of their peers, prioritizing superior user interfaces and better tools to support customer interaction.
- Changing claims workforce - The workforce is shifting; as a new generation comes in, their needs change. Not only are customers expectations changing, but employee expectations around technology are too.
- New competition disrupting the market - With the new competitors disrupting the market, it’s forcing insurers to stay current with customer experience expectations to retain their existing customers – and gain new ones.
- Emerging technologies - New technologies are changing the game for today’s insurance industry. Cloud, machine learning, analytics can do great things, but it’s up to the organizations to come up with a plan on how they can implement them to improve the business.
When thinking about leveraging the new technologies available to bring your organization’s modernization strategy to life - where does one even start?
But before we start, you can read this brief from AIIM on what does modernization mean.
Efficiency and Automation
Avoid unnecessary manual steps to mitigate some of your costs. Manual steps that slow teams down can be damaging to the team’s workload capabilities. Teams need help making better and faster decisions – and that all starts with the data and the content. Is your information accessible with the ability to interact with it, and do you have control over the governance of the information? Is it secure and does everyone have access to it when they need it? Information needs to be instantly available.
Customer Experience
It’s key to retain customers long-term, and maintain that competitive advantage. Information is exploding in terms of the volume of information, and the types of information coming in. New challenges arise in modern content as different types of content come through one funnel. How will you organize all of the types of content and make sure they are attached to the correct associated claim, and then be able to extract key metadata so that you can manage the information appropriately? And then, how fast will you find your content?
Disconnected Information
As insurers get more information and types of media, the management of claims becomes more difficult – resulting in content living in different applications and repositories. The result is that employees spend valuable time searching various sources for information…and in many cases, they are unable to find what they need. These silos aren’t going away – so how can you pull all of the information together? Check out this case study on how one of the largest banks in the world improved their cx through digital transformation.
A modern content services platform provides a single source of truth that connects all of your content from across all of your systems, so that employees can continue to leverage the apps and services they normally use, which enables better productivity.
Cloud Adoption
Organizations are looking at the shift to the cloud to simplify their costs and complexity, reduce upfront costs, and take full advantage of emerging cloud-based technologies.
The amount of content is rapidly growing, compared to growth trends in the past, making the scalability of the cloud increasingly important. Over the next 5 years, it’s predicted that financial services organizations manage more than double the amount of content they are today. One of our customers today manages over 2 billion customer communications, and 3 billion SMS and email messages annually coming in from customers. The cloud is providing the opportunity for scalability and flexibility – without needing a significant capital investment to support the expected changes coming in the future.
Flexibility of the cloud is another big advantage. While Nuxeo is a cloud-native content management system, the choice is yours whether your deployment is on-prem, the cloud (vendor-managed or self-managed), or a hybrid (sometimes due to regulations) configuration. One of the benefits of the cloud is the ability to scale and meet the requirements you have today, and also expand in the future as your business grows.
Compliance
Compliance is always going to be around as a priority and new regulations are being added each year. How can you protect data and ensure compliance? One of the key areas we see today is around privacy, and retaining certain sets of information in order to comply with regulations, and for a certain amount of time. Content services platforms like Nuxeo are helping to enforce retention within the system in an automated way to ensure that the information is secure.
The Old Way of Managing Content isn’t Working
Today’s modern content management for insurance requires more than ever before and IT leaders are faced with the following challenges:
- Bridging information silos
- Delivering insights and intelligence
- Embracing new digital content types
- Ensuring governance and security
- Accelerating cloud adoption
- Operating at extreme scale
- Making it easy to build new apps
Content services are solving legacy system issues and meeting IT requirements in a rapid and easy way – more than a legacy Enterprise Content Management Platform would. Nuxeo Studio, our low-code configuration tool, enables you to make rapid changes, where you can test all of the assumptions you have from a requirements basis and user experience perspective – to be sure you’re meeting all of the needs of the organization, and can continue to meet them as modern IT requirements adapt over time.
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can provide real value to today’s claims process by understanding your content and data, like the mind of a human – but at scale. Today’s insurers are leveraging AI in different ways, using machine learning to recognize content types, extract data from content, enrich metadata, predictively deliver information, analyze usage and importance, recognize patterns, relationships, and identify underlying data points.
Generic AI can identify things like logo, license plate, asphalt, and basic tagging information – but without any real context. However, when you create custom machine learning models, you can extract much more information and also understand the context of the content. With custom models, you’re able to use your content and data to help drive your business processes, and the specialization is where it really provides value. Here’s a guide to Powering your Content Services with AI.
Get From Where you Are Today, to Where you Need to Go
Your next-gen claims management system should integrate with all of your repositories and systems – allowing you to get a fast ROI and a consistent platform so that you can modernize over time. Start by connecting all of the information you have today in one place. Then, you can begin to consolidate by moving more processes over to the new platform, and eventually retire old systems - decreasing overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), increasing support of cloud initiatives, and enabling your team to have a single future-proof platform.
Here’s one of our customer stories, which illustrates how Nuxeo helps insurers address many of these challenges: A Fortune 100 insurance company was facing major challenges with their legacy ECM platform. Managing it became increasingly more difficult with increasing maintenance costs, over 2 billion objects to manage and growing, and over 30,000 users across 7 different business lines. The insurer chose Nuxeo because they wanted a platform that they could easily integrate with new technologies, was cloud-native, open source, and had the ability to build custom user experiences through APIs – to be agile, flexible, and scalable. As a result of mitigating their legacy systems and moving to a Content Services Platform, the project resulted in a significant decrease in TCO, the ability to manage all different media types, and the information management team gained strategic value inside the organization. After implementation, they “moved the value the organization from the basement to the boardroom”
Today’s insurers are at a real advantage if they move quickly to stay ahead of their competition. Organizations are leveraging AI to bridge existing silos, unbind CCM customer communication management, automate retention and archiving, and significantly drive down cost and risk. To watch the full recording of last week’s webinar, click here: Reimagining claims processes with future-proof technologies.
Q&A on Claims Management Process
During the Q&A, we covered the following questions.
What sets Nuxeo apart from other key players in the ECM space?
Nuxeo allows you to customize your needs based on exactly what you need and when, enabling you to scale individual components – up or down – to meet your needs. The level of flexibility is like no other Content Services Platform, providing some great advantages for a lot of organizations we work with.
What are the typical work efficiencies gained through the use of your platform?
We do as much as we can through automation, extraction, and AI. It allows us to automate as much as possible, and extract valuable information from content – really doing complete straight-through processing. Providing and extracting as much intelligence and insight from the content and data to be able to handle the claim. Making sure that your customers are being taken care of in a timely way.
You can also read this guide about “The Future of Claims Management“