Automation is something that many industries benefit from, especially the insurance industry with its extensive workflows, documents and customer-facing applications. If you’re already using Microsoft products to run your agency, you may be curious about whether you can fully automate insurance processes using only Microsoft.
The right solution is different for every insurance company based on what they’re doing now, what they’d like to change and the types of processes that need automating. The good news is there are many Microsoft products that assist in making an insurance company run successfully. Of those products, some of the leading ones include:
- Dynamics 365
- Azure Cloud Services
- Power Platform
The great thing about these products is that they can all be implemented together or connected to other platforms using RPA and other automation tools that make it easier to get all of your work done. They each have their advantages and can help simplify processes and make daily functions much easier for employees. Let’s take a closer look at these Microsoft products for insurance and how they can be useful in the industry.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Insurance
If you are already using other Microsoft products, Dynamics 365 is easy to integrate with existing products. It’s important to note that custom automation, whether you’re an all-Microsoft office or you have other software that you use as well, can be accomplished to improve your employees’ effectiveness and reduce costs.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is often the backbone for insurance companies because it can be tied into other Microsoft products that work well for insurance. Read our blog on Insurance Use Cases: Microsoft for Business Process Automation
Microsoft Dynamics 365, when customized for your insurance company, can offer be useful in several different ways:
- Serve as your customer database - This is your customer relationship management (CRM) system where everything can be connected for a full customer record.
- Connect phone calls with online activity - The software creates and stores a history of phone calls, associated with a customer, including audio recordings that are safely stored.
- Rank tasks - Based on your current workflow process, incoming work requests are automatically assigned to your agents based on their current and future workloads.
- Track workloads - Dynamics 365 identifies the current production of employees to help schedule employees and track their time on specific tasks.
- Improve financial integration - Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides complete synchronization of financial activities by integrating ERP.
Related read: Best Ways to Optimize Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Insurance Agents
Microsoft Azure for Insurance Risk Modeling
Microsoft Azure is an excellent tool for insurance risk modeling. It allows insurance companies to run risk simulations more often and quickly to give a breakdown of potential outcomes. Ultimately, this results in more productive underwriters since they have the information that they need to make decisions quickly.
Of course, underwriting is highly correlated with company revenue and profitability, and streamlining that process means more financial gain in the long run. However, this information is only helpful if it is connected with other internal systems.
Automation can be set up to allow underwriters to have access to all of the information they need for their job in a single location including the data that’s been extracted from documents provided by the customer with important information. Not only does this simplify the underwriting process, but it leads to faster and better results for the customer as well as the company.
Learn more about Automating Insurance Underwriting.
Power Platform for Insurance
Power Platform is another Microsoft automation tool that is useful for the insurance industry. It has several different functions based on what you need.
- Power Virtual Agents - This tool allows customers to interact anytime with your company. The agent can be set up to address common questions and issues that customers have which may not require a live agent to provide the answers. Power Virtual Agents work to set up a conversation flow online, based on what you know your visitors may be looking for. This tool also allows for a live-chat handoff as needed to make sure the customer’s experience is a great one.
- Power Apps - This is an easy-to-use, low-code tool for creating applications used by insurance agents and customers. All of the interactions in the custom apps can be tracked within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM for sales and/or customer service teams to have insight into all of the visitor’s interactions. Ultimately, this entire process leads to an overall better customer experience.
- Power BI - Everyone in your company needs access to data to be able to make good decisions. By using Microsoft Power Platform’s Business Intelligence tool you can create custom dashboards and make it possible to analyze the data without pulling information from many different systems.
Many Power Platform users find that this is one of the most powerful tools you can use for your insurance company. While you’ll likely find a wide variety of benefits that personally help your organization, our clients repeatedly tout these solutions across the board.
- Manual process automation
One of the most beneficial approaches to automating your existing processes is to learn about what steps your staff has to complete manually. Once you understand each step, business automation can help improve the workflow. Power Platform offers increased productivity by automating a wide variety of tasks across various systems. One of the most valuable and successful tools our users have is creating automated forms with Power Apps. This allows the appropriate information to be populated and routed to the right staff at the appropriate time. Additionally, many agencies find that they can convert existing paper workflows into digital, saving money and the environment! - Improve the customer onboarding process
Any insurance agent understands the need to simplify and streamline onboarding to help turn warm leads into clients. Any slowdowns or additional steps in the process risk losing customers. Power Platform can help to automate the process and eliminate redundancies. As clients or staff enter information, Power Platform can immediately replicate it across multiple systems. Another added benefit is the elimination of human error during data entry. - Faster response times
Automation allows employees to be notified when their review is critical for the next step. This allows immediate responses and coordination for staff to help coordinate complex processes.
Choosing the Right Microsoft Products for Your Insurance Company
It’s good news that you can use many of Microsoft’s products for easier integration of processes within your insurance company. Choosing those that would work best, and how to make them all work together, is a process that often benefits from experience. Integratz is a partner with Microsoft and experts in insurance process automation.
We can help you identify the right technologies for automation, document management, data extraction, and other insurance processes to enhance the customer experience and help your company scale.
Let’s schedule an initial conversation so we can learn more about what you have now and what you may need to reach your goals.
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