Despite the overwhelming global trend to minimize paper usage and go digital, paper, and physical mail remains an integral part of the insurance industry. Providing your customers and claimants with multiple avenues – including paper – to claim is still vitally important. But claims management is already a hugely labor and resource intensive process without having to merge multiple, disparate channels of communication.
Keeping track of important documents, managing multiple third parties and departments, all the while providing a smooth experience for the claimants is difficult. This is complicated further by continuous pressure to become more efficient and reduce administrative costs wherever possible.
Here is where a digital mailroom can help. Implemented correctly, a digital mailroom has the power to streamline your claims management processes, greatly reduce administrative costs and turn your business into a more efficient operation.
So, how does it do this?
Unite the communication channels
Customers seek convenience. This often translates into an almost unmanageable number of channels of communication. Naturally, this increases risk.
Whether accepting claims via written correspondence, online forms or by phone, managing these disparate channels and tracking progress can become extremely difficult – particularly if claimants chop and change how they contact you.
Uniting all these seemingly disparate channels into the same processes and workflows can help you start managing the process more effectively. Capturing incoming paper-based claims and digitizing them enables you to merge them into the same workflow and start streamlining incoming communications to enable you to:
Automate routing
The automation available through a digital mailroom can help insurance agencies extract and validate incoming policy or claims documentation and integrate them seamlessly into your wider business workflows.
Implementing a digital mailroom forces you to confront your current routing set up. We’ve worked with US and UK insurance companies of all sizes who, prior to implementation, had no concrete way of differentiating new customers, changes to policies, special requests and claims. This caused huge delays in response times. As you well know, getting this wrong can be a major pinch point in the process and greatly reduce the capacity of your teams and workflows.
We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to identify and classify documentation automatically before routing the documents to the relevant departments. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps refine and improve the process as the system collects more data and understands your nuances. This eliminates routing errors and expedites the claims process for individuals.
Crucially though, this isn’t possible without the strategic element of any digital mailroom project. Naturally, you have to get the first part done before the automation has any major value. Once you’ve mapped out your routing, then automation delivers improved capacity and through-put, drives immense efficiencies, and streamlines the experience for your claimants.
Reduce risk
This may at first seem counter-intuitive — after all there’s an almost comical perception that digital media can be hacked easily putting your data at risk.
But the opposite is true.
Physical policy and claims documentation coupled with human hands is regularly a recipe for human error. Tracking multiple documents across multiple stages of the whole process can quickly become complex. Not to mention the fact that a switch to digitized documents with automated indexing can greatly decrease the chance of error from manual data entry.
Our digital mailrooms maintain some of the strictest digital security protocols. All of Docufree’s digital operations adhere to stringent security standards so you can rest easy knowing your data is secure.
Worried about maintaining compliance? Destroying physical records within the allotted time frame can be difficult when these records are ten boxes deep in one of many warehouses. Once again, the automation provided by a digital mailroom helps you stay compliant. As documentation is digitized on arrival – and physical records destroyed shortly after – you can automate the deletion of data to ensure you never expose your business to unnecessary risk.
Improve response times and customer satisfaction
Running incoming communications and claims through a digital mailroom has the knock-on effect of improving outbound communications too.
How?
When everything you receive is digitized and stored in a central repository, case information is just a button click away. With more employees working from home than ever before, it’s crucial that team members have access to easily accessible data and documents when they need them. The quicker your team can respond to claimants with accurate data, the better the customer experience will be for the claimant.
It’s worth remembering that a fully functioning digital mailroom not only digitizes physical mail but can help you bring all communications including your social media channels into the relevant workflows. This isn’t just about ensuring claims are handled better – although vital – but that all communications are routed to the right departments.
A happy customer is a returning customer. They’re also – potentially – an evangelist, speaking positively about your organization and bringing in new customers with them. That’s a strong incentive to getting customer service right and a digital mailroom can support you with this aim.
Implementing a digital mailroom is both a cost-effective solution to claims management as well as a key way to keep customers happy.
If all this sounds good, let’s set up a call with one of our leading digital mailroom experts so you can get a digital mailroom quote for your specific organization’s needs. A short call will help us understand your requirements more clearly and calculate how much you could potentially save by going digital.
