Insurance Digital Transformation

How to simplify the work of insurance staff and enhance the insurance experience of customers

Introduction

Few insurers can operate sustainably without constant efforts to optimize processes, increase customer satisfaction, and permanently reduce costs. Today, insurance technology (InsurTech) offers effective solutions for these problems. As a result, the digitalization of the industry is advancing faster than ever – and the attitudes of both employees and clients are changing.

In 2020, around 60% of young U.S. insurance agents thought that InsurTech would have a positive long-term impact on the industry. In 2021, over 70% of all insurance customers wanted a mature omnichannel experience.

Employees in the insurance sector and insureds alike expect technological innovations designed to simplify and speed up the complex bureaucracy. With expected revenue of $10.4 trillion in 2025, InsurTech is one of the fastest-growing digitalization segments alongside Finance Technology.

How does mobile scanning optimize your processes while strengthening customer loyalty?

Day by day, insurers receive a constant stream of documents, which their clients submit to buy insurance or file claims. The list is endless: receipts, proofs of income, medical and expert reports, policies, ID documents, and many more. And: To maintain high customer satisfaction, all of these documents must be processed quickly.

Achieving this speed is not easy. Mailing paper documents via the post invites losses and delays. While digital submission is faster, photos of required documents are frequently low-quality. Both methods require complex back-end processing and, all too often, manual data transfers where automation fails. All this slows down internal processes and, ultimately, customer service.

Today, users expect everything to be available digitally as quickly as possible. Thus, paper-based, lengthy procedures are not only costly and inefficient, but they also affect customer satisfaction and loyalty. Fully-automated claim handling and account openings are essential here and require perfectly coordinated processes. According to a PWC survey from June 2020, as many as 41% of policyholders would consider switching to a different insurer if their current provider did not offer sufficient digital capacity. As you can see, digital services are essential to keep your business future-proof and competitive.

How can all this paperwork be digitized efficiently and in high quality to be immediately sent to the back end for automatic processing? And: How can you build such a process fast?

The answer is simple: mobile Scanner SDKs that your developers can integrate into your application or website within just one day. They allow every client to submit high quality digital copies in real-time, no matter when or where. By leveraging smartphones as scanners, you can generate the reliable data needed for effective process automation.

Additional capabilities, specifically designed for scanning MRZ fields or the PDF417 codes on U.S. driver’s licenses, extract all the necessary personal data and prepare them for automated processing. This eliminates manual input as a source of errors.

Digital Input Management: Process automation through mobile scanning

Input management teams handle streams of documents and data every day. Consequently, large companies use sophisticated input management systems. The goal of these systems is to classify and evaluate the subject of the submitted documents and then allocate them to the appropriate follow-up processes. Processing is delayed when records cannot be classified, and automatic allocation fails. This immediately increases costs and reduces customer satisfaction.

Document submission processes are complicated, especially in large companies. Since they tend to require much time and effort, they are also relatively costly. As more and more documents have to be processed and classified through various input channels, the processes grow increasingly complex. Sticking to traditional processing steadily becomes more expensive when compared to efficient automation.

Leveraging automation in both the front and back end is essential to increase digital processing accuracy. One particular obstacle to full automation is poor input quality, especially in smartphone photos.

Poorly digitized documents might be low-resolution, tilted, or lack cropping – meaning the background is still visible.

Additionally, many insureds still submit documents in paper form via post. These must be scanned in the back end, causing high workload, friction, and further delays. Reliable, easy-to-use digital alternatives are crucial for customer and employee satisfaction, short turnaround times, and cost savings.

Back-end technologies like OCR require flawless digital copies to extract text precisely pixel by pixel. If quality issues are already noticeable in the front end, further processing cannot achieve the best possible result. Poorly digitized documents slow and impair your workflows massively, and even the most advanced machine learning and AI technology cannot compensate for them.

Modern scanning solutions such as the Scanbot Document Scanner SDK create optimal results for further processing with OCR text recognition. Users can simply access such a solution on any smartphone or tablet via your company’s mobile or web app. In many years of working with a wide variety of input management systems of the DACH region’s largest private and statutory health insurers, we have learned that each system performs best on certain file formats for certain classes of documents. Thus, we offer to export the scanned documents in PDF, JPG, and TIFF formats.

An optimized workflow using the Scanbot Document Scanner SDK

01 An insurance client wants to file a claim. They must hand in various documents, including their insurance policy, the claims form, and a damage description.

02 They now open their insurer’s mobile app or website and start their claim submission.

03 Now, the Document Scanner SDK accesses the phone camera for the insured to submit their documents. Scanbot’s User Guidance leads even inexperienced users into the perfect scanning position. Automatic rotation and cropping, paired with image-enhancing filters, guarantee a perfect scanning result.

04 The user now submits the document scans.

05 In the back end, OCR can now be performed smoothly, enabling automated claims processing with short turnaround times.

Do you want to test the Document Scanning SDK in our Demo App?

Grab some paper documents and convince yourself of the usability and high scanning quality of the Scanbot Document Scanner SDK – Download now!

Scanbot SDK scanning folders with documents

Learn more about the Scanbot SDK in the insurance industry

Scanbot SDK offers a B2B product, the Scanbot Software Development Kit (SDK). This solution enables enterprises to integrate reliable document scanning capabilities into their mobile (iOS / Android) and web applications.

Insurances use our solution for claims management, onboarding, check scanning, and more. We are the market leader in mobile document scanning, providing our customers with products of the highest reliability and adaptability. Our intelligent user guidance makes scanning as easy as possible, even for non-tech-savvy users. Image-enhancing features like blur detection and filters do the rest to generate high-quality scans. The Scanbot SDK can be integrated within one business day, and due to our yearly fixed pricing model, our customers enjoy absolute planning security.

Insurance data is sensitive. Hence, the Scanbot SDK does all its processing 100% offline on the end device. It will never send data to our or any external server. Additional security features such as encryption protect your scanned data from external attacks, in transit and at rest.

The Scanbot SDK is used on a global scale. The Scanbot SDK’s customer base ranges from SMEs to Fortune 500 and Dax 40 companies across various industries. In addition to large corporations like Deutsche Telekom, Arcbest, and DocuSign, our clients include global insurance companies like Aflac, AXA, Generali, and SWICA.