Imagine if Covid had hit in the Eighties or Nineties, with the internet in its sluggish infancy, with little uptake by the UK’s businesses. People would have been panic buying thermal paper rolls for fax machines, not loo roll! More importantly for the claims process, imagine how slow (& unreliable) everything would be with only human involvement.
Covid has hit at a time when we have super-fast broadband speeds, making it possible to share information and data, in real time, with any client, supplier or partner. API has allowed us to send & receive information between different software applications both internally and with partner companies, whilst automation allows us to process this information & make logic driven decisions.
Our human involvement has changed as these processes have evolved. There is now no need for humans to perform laborious tasks such as data entry, work flow processes and in many cases repetitive customer communications, as we have incredible cloud-based software. The flip side of this tech is the overarching information available; from big data comes trends or patterns enabling us to predict outcomes better & produce amazing management info.
The key to collaboration is communication; we are now in a position where we can give partners the exact data required to allow them to do their core role to the maximum and vice versa. For example an FNOL instruction coming into us would typically contain a mix of some, or all of the data we need plus a fair few red herrings. Our humans would sift through the information, pick out the bits we need, then find the missing data from any number of sources; With API we agree with our partners exactly what we need & what we don’t from the outset. This logical approach then allows us to automate by defining certain set-plays depending on the circumstances; if this, then that.
We have found that an authentically transparent attitude towards collaboration has allowed us to seamlessly integrate with over a dozen independent partners and hundreds of clients; they could be anywhere in the world but our information exchange is running, accurately, 24/7.
Reproduced with kind permission from Modern Insurance Magazine