How to fill the jobs no one wants

Just about every industry is experiencing the effects of The Great Resignation, which began during the global pandemic of 2020-21. Government lockdown measures, a shift to remote work environments, and a general re-evaluation of career and life priorities have forever changed the way human beings see work.

This trend has been particularly evident in the finance and insurance industry. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of job openings in this segment alone has increased to 411,000 in January 2022, more than doubling from 197,000 job openings one year earlier. In addition, insurance companies are seeing rising labor costs with the industry ranked third highest for expected salary increases in 2022 ranging from 2.7 percent to 3.5 percent, according to CPA Practice Advisor.

The problem often leads to fines associated with missed service level agreements, a deteriorating customer experience resulting from slow claims processing, and lower overall operational performance, which is hampered by the need to constantly recruit, train and maintain a team.

This shortage can be attributed to many factors besides the pandemic including stagnant wages due to downward cost pressures, increased workload leading to employee stress and burnout, and the repetitive and mundane nature of the work itself. Soul-crushing tasks can fill an employee’s day with data entry and mundane work, result in forced overtime, and offer no career progression opportunities. According to an article in Forbes, Gallup estimates that the cost of bored workers in the U.S. costs companies somewhere between $450 and $550 billion annually.

The Problem With Current Solutions

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As insurance companies grapple with the immense and rising amount of work that needs to be done in combination with this labor shortage, they typically turn to one of two solutions: business process outsourcing (BPO) or robotic process automation (RPA) solutions.

BPO typically looks for offshore, less expensive labor sources to help complete claims processing tasks. However, these solutions often require a high level of training, face even more dramatic turnover challenges, are more costly today due to increased wages, and can result in a large number of human errors. In addition, many BPO companies using machine learning and/or automation, often cannot truly unlock the power of these technologies due to customer mandated rules around competition, data privacy or simply siloed operations.

McKinsey expects that more than 50 percent of current claims activities could be replaced by automation by 2030, eliminating some of these boring tasks and creating new opportunities. Currently, many of these are RPA solutions, which typically require a great deal of customization on the customer side after the technology itself is purchased. The IT department, which is also frequently overworked and short-staffed, is suddenly given the task of building the intelligence behind the RPA to make the solution effective.

The Better Alternative

The best solution to filling those repetitive jobs that no one desires is a holistic, intelligent solution that can be coached just like a human being and built for the insurance industry itself. Instead of only providing the automation technology, the solution must already be well-versed in the forms, workings, and needs of the insurance industry. It must use integrated, advanced technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, process automation and API in order to draw from a deep corpus of knowledge, data, documents and systems to “learn” over time. These industry-wide experiences then can be applied to novel situations, benefitting individual companies as well as the industry as a whole.

Document Vision, a solution from Roots Automation, accurately extracts data, speeds up decision-making, and improves document-based processes for today’s insurance organizations. Its pre-built solution reads healthcare forms such as the CMS/HCFA 1500 and UB-04; insurance documents such as quotes, binders, policies; both insurance and pharmacy cards; and first notice of loss and claims setup emails. This solution has reduced manual effort by 80 percent for one global insurance organization and generated a 256 percent return on investment within six months for another U.S. insurer.

“Our vision is to help insurance executives augment their staff by effectively automating those mundane, boring tasks, thereby freeing up their professionals to take on more challenging, interesting, and fulfilling work,” says Chaz Perera, CEO and co-founder. “Document Vision is designed to do just that.”

Read more about how our Document Vision solution can improve your document processing cycle time, reduce cost and free your people from mundane work.