The focus for the last 10 years in insurance has been around how to streamline business processes to increase efficiency and create better experiences for customers and employees. New technologies including Robotic Process Automation (RPA) have become one of the next big things, not just in this industry but across many. For insurance, promising to automate processes and customer interactions that currently require lots of human involvement, primarily due to so many applications to swivel in and out of to deal with customer and broker requests – often add little value and distract the insurer from the most important person in the journey, dealing with the customer.
Now organizations are beginning to take it a step further, coupling RPA with cognitive technologies including Machine Learning and speech recognition that can give these bots new power to learn and increase their ability to communicate intelligently. This is especially useful for those tasks that aren’t just routine, but that require judgment and perception.
These new technologies will increasingly help firms gain customer loyalty, making the mastery of these cognitive capabilities a key differentiator when competing with customer centric insurtechs.
In fact, 83% of technology professionals believe there will be a cognitive tipping point in the next five years. While the RPA market today is still relatively small, the technology is gaining traction as a cost-effective alternative to traditional systems integration and is projected to become a $5 billion market globally by 2020, with a CAGR of over 60 percent.
Platforms including Microsoft Azure and IBM Watson have made these cognitive services more readily available and easier to consume, meaning that these technologies are no longer in our future, but they are very much in the here and now.