In their article “How to Beat Your Competition Using Analytics in Insurance”, UK based Insurance Nexus explains how insurance companies can use analytics to their advantage to become more cost-efficient, give clients individualized offers, enhance marketing targetting, and fight fraud.
The article in itself is worth a read but doesn’t dive too deep into the fighting insurance fraud aspect. Since we at BusinessForensics are experts on that subject, we thought we’d give you an insight into the competitive advantages for your company when using data and automation to eliminate insurance fraud in your company.
Every business needs to keep costs to a minimum to optimize profits. That’s business 101 and one of the main competitive advantages of automating the claims process is that it can save a lot of costs. But saving costs isn’t the only thing that makes you more resilient against your competitors. By using automation you can eliminate a big problem for your organization and at the same time make your customers as well as your employees happy. Let’s break it all down, shall we?
1. Decrease the paid out damages budget
Your first advantage is the most obvious one. When you start to make use of modern technologies such as machine learning and robotics, the number of detected fraudulent claims goes up. The more false claims you find, the fewer damages you have to pay out.
2. Fewer operational costs
When you don’t have to manually assess every single claim that comes in, and when the claims that are fraudulent are handled faster, you could downsize your claims department. When you downsize, you have less salary and benefits costs. And, if you have a lot of vacancies right now, you won’t need that extra staff when you chose to automate the claims process. That will save you costs related to recruiting and educating new staff.
3. Less overhead costs
If you have less staff, you don’t need as much office space so you might be able to move into a new office building with a lower rent. You’d also need less office equipment and supplies.
4. Increased client satisfaction
If you’re able to separate the false claims from the legitimate claims and process the legitimate claims automatically, your honest clients will get their claims paid out much faster. This leads to increased client satisfaction.
5. Free marketing
The best things in life are for free. With all those happy clients, you’re bound to end up being the talk of the town. Word of mouth is still the strongest type of marketing there is and it’s free! You might even be able to turn off your marketing and advertising efforts a notch and save some money.
6. Increased employee satisfaction
When you automate the claims process, you also reduce the workload for your employees. How will that affect them? They’ll experience less stress and will feel that they have more time to do the work that they love to do: investigating fraudulent claims. Before you know it, you’ll see genuine happy faces on Monday morning.
7. No more sickness leave
A happy employee is a healthy employee. Too much pressure negatively affects a person’s health. According to WebMD, 75% to 90% of all doctor’s office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints. In our tiny country the Netherlands, stress is the number one reason for sick leave. It costs companies two billion euro. In the United States of America, that number is much higher: stress costs employers 300 billion dollars there.
To save or to expand?
We showed you where you can save on costs and optimize your profits. Automation is often seen as a replacement for staff. That’s why employees can be apprehensive about it. But, instead of downsizing, the money you’re saving on costs could also be spent on expanding the company. The money you’re saving in one department can be invested in, for example, a larger sales force to attract more clients.
Did this article make you curious about how automation works? Read our white paper “Eliminate insurance fraud and save up to 10% in paid out damages by standardizing the investigations process”. Get free access to the white paper here.
