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Michael_S
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Reducing delays and stress in bereavement situations for policy holders
Which industry did you deploy this use case in?
- Financial Services
Which functional area / department within the organization benefitted most from this automation?
- Customer Services
Which SS&C Blue Prism tools did you use?
- SS&C Blue Prism Enterprise
Describe the problem your automation aimed to solve
When policy holders pass away there is a manual process to notify other areas of the business that policies need to go through a claim process or be cancelled. As this was a manual process this wasn’t robust and often led to things being missed leading to delays and issues at a very sensitive time for a claimant.
Provide a brief, step-by-step outline of how you set up your automation
Discovery
This opportunity was initially identified through a transformation project and formed part of a work stack where each individual process for processing a claim was a unique project to deliver.
Design
The first step taken was to identify that the right overall approach was to deal with a death claim as 1 process in the organisation with multiple sub process that can be followed. This dictated the need for a “master” process that would act as the initial data gatherer and the decision maker that would feed into the various sub processes. Through a phased delivery this would allow the process to expand into multiple areas of the business over time and allow for a joined up approach through the “master” process.
Build
- Step 1:
The first step was to design a digital form that was simple, that Customer Service Advisors could easily complete allowing them to focus on the call which would likely be an emotional call. Keeping the form simple also meant that training was very simple and quick to roll out. - Step 2:
The master process was the next part of the process to be built. This gathered the information from the form, collated policy and customer information from our CRM system. A summary document was then created of all of the policies the customer holds and details of any claimants. Where relevant other areas of the Organisation were notified of the customers passing and the summary document was archived for use later. Any claims that need to be processed were then to be either added to a work queue to be manually processed or fed into another RPA work queue. - Step 3:
Build the product specific claims processes. These will be triggered by the “master” process and will complete the various claim processes which will vary by product. - Future work:
Initially 2 product specific processes have been built within the Customer Servicing area. Potential for upto 7 more processes in the Customer Services area to be incorporated into this process. Other opportunities within the General Insurance area to also be reviewed and brought into the process.
Quality Assurance
Testing, implementation & hyper care of the “master” process was the priority as all other processes would be triggered by this and so crucial that this was extensively tested. Once live new processes went through our standard testing and deployment process.
Deployment
Deployment went through our standard implementation process with one additional step. As each new Product Specific process was implemented a change was raised to the “master” process to stop sending that process for manual working and instead trigger the newly implemented process.
What were the main challenges you faced during this project, and how did you overcome them?
The main challenges in this build was the design/specification of the process. A significant amount of time had to go into the design of the form and master process to make sure that as new builds we added in this didn't require extensive reworking of the form and “master” process.
This required several iterations of the form and workflow of the master process and working closely with SMEs from planned builds and also potential future builds to make sure that all scenarios and interactions between processes were thought out whilst also balancing the need to keep this as simple as possible for call handlers to make sure they could focus on the call and not the process.
What was the impact of your project?
The initial benefit from this project is 3.5 FTE, with this expected to grow as future processes get brought into scope.
Due to simplifying the form we were able to half the potential number of questions caller handlers needed to ask when being notified that a policy holder was deceased. This made the process far simpler for them allowing them to really focus on the caller and not the process.
As the process was simplified the business was able to roll this out to a larger number of teams to increase the number of people who could deal with a death notification call and invest more time in soft skill coaching/training rather than process training.
Claimants were on calls for less time, a reduction of circa 10 mins per call, as they were having to provide less information. The processing of claims was also able to be completed quicker by an average of 7 days.
At such an emotional time keeping the process as simple and effortless as possible is invaluable.
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