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AA Insurance claims big benefits for business and customers from digital employees

AA Insurance claims big benefits for business and customers from digital employees. Early work with Quanton sets the foundations for faster claims, and improved customer service and claims handling when claims events surge, such as during Cyclone Gabrielle

_{About AA Insurance}

AA Insurance is an independently operated New Zealand-based joint venture between the New Zealand Automobile Association and Vero Insurance New Zealand. With more than 500,000 customers holding more than one million policies, AA Insurance has provided home, contents and car insurance in New Zealand since 1994, adding commercial and small business insurance offerings in 2018.

AA Insurance has been recognised with numerous industry awards and honours, including being voted Reader’s Digest Most Trusted General Insurer for 13 years running.

_Background

By early April 2023, New Zealand insurers had paid out more than 14,000 claims relating to the Auckland Anniversary Weekend flooding and Cyclone Gabrielle.

AA Insurance Technical Solutions Manager, Brian May, is particularly proud of how automation contributed to AA Insurance’s results with total loss vehicle settlements.

“The figures were really telling. With unprecedented volumes of total loss motor claims during the weather events, the automation we had built in for total loss vehicle settlements supported our teams by removing the manually intensive administration tasks associated with settling motor claims. It enabled our teams to quickly get customers sorted,” May says. The AA Insurance team first dipped its toes into the robotic process automation (RPA) waters in 2018.

May said “it was a bit of a journey coming to terms with whether RPA was something that could be of value to us as a business.”

Attendance at conferences, where AA Insurance heard about the role RPA was playing for organisations in other industries, proved invaluable – and led to the establishment of a long-running relationship with Quanton, New Zealand’s leading practitioner of automation, and leaders in providing digital transformation services.

“Quanton played a really valuable supporting role helping us to understand what automation is and the benefits it could deliver to the business, not only from an efficiency perspective but as another tool to help us to deliver great outcomes for our customers and for the business,” May says.

_{Setting foundations for end-to-end zero touch claims}

Following an opportunity assessment, which included workshops to identify business opportunities for RPA and the specific processes which would provide the biggest returns, AA Insurance and Quanton launched a pilot, with Quanton providing the foundations and deployment of a UiPath bot to assist with online vehicle windscreen claims.

AA Insurance Automation Team Lead, Dan Rippon explains: “Back in 2018, customers were able to lodge a claim online, but in the background it still required manual work and time from our staff to pass those claims through to suppliers – the glaziers or windscreen repairers.

“Our first RPA process was to have a bot pick up those claims and automatically pass them through to suppliers, providing full end-to-end zero touch windscreen claim lodgement.” It provided huge value, including reducing the already tight turnaround times by ensuring suppliers received customer claims within two hours so they could promptly contact customers.

The bot handled nearly 10,000 windscreen claims between January to July 2023 and provides operational resilience by handling any peaks in windscreen claims lodged online.

It means when customers lodge a claim, we can quickly get it through to our suppliers who are able to provide a faster response to the customer, but also means there isn’t a reliance on the manual effort. “For employees who are the first port of call for customers, particularly for the online claims team, it frees them up to focus on more complex claims and supporting our customers, Rippon says.

_{Marvellous Marvin}

Boris was just the first of AA Insurance’s new bot employees. The company has since added a number of others, handling a range of processes including claim centre admin tasks, attaching documents to claims and leaving notes for claim customer managers, and preparing files for bulk receipting in finance.

The bot employees also included ‘temporary worker’ Marvin – or rather eight Marvins – who reviewed nearly 35,000 renewals in 2020-21, removing the premium increase and reissuing notices to customers after AA Insurance implemented a premium freeze during the Covid-19 lockdown period. With the reduced likelihood of motor insurance claims during lockdowns, AA Insurance froze premium increases and offered rebates to motor insurance customers to ensure they wouldn’t be disadvantaged for a situation that was beyond their control.

“Without Marvin, our employees would have been taken away from helping customers directly at a time when they needed us most,” May says. “Marvin was developed in three weeks and did the work of approximately 32 staff over 12 days, operating 24/7,” Rippon says.

_{Growing internal skills}

Marvin was developed three years into AA Insurance’s RPA journey. Thanks to Quanton’s assistance in training and mentoring AA Insurance’s own team, the bulk of the development happened inhouse. “Our developer wasn’t initially experienced with RPA and learned from our Quanton contractor, which enabled us to get to the point where we could build bots in-house,” Rippon says.

Providing the skill set required for Kiwi organisations to develop and grow their own inhouse teams is a key part of Quanton’s ethos.

Garry Green, Managing Director/Founder of Quanton says, “By guiding and mentoring New Zealand businesses as they build and mature their own automation teams, we are helping them harness automation, leveraging best practice so they can scale and deliver meaningful benefits. Quanton is proud to provide that knowledge, guidance and support.”

AA Insurance now has a dedicated Automation and Robotics team, including two Developers and four Business Analysts. “The bots provide us with operational resilience,” May says. “The nature of insurance is one of peaks and troughs, and ensuring the service we provide to our customers isn’t impacted during claims surges is crucial.

“The weather events in early 2023 have really highlighted the value in building the virtual workforce over all these years, providing us with the ability to scale the existing bots we have and see true value when surges occur.” While the bots provide efficiencies, May is clear: “What I’ve enjoyed most about this journey is that it isn’t solely focused on efficiency – it has been around supporting good customer outcomes, removing employee pain points and getting those critical things that need to be delivered, right.”

Rippon says with insurance being a traditionally administration heavy industry, there is plenty of opportunity for automation, combined with artificial intelligence, to help better leverage data and understand patterns and customers, enabling insurance companies to focus increasingly on being more connected and growing trust with customers. “If we can understand, connect and focus on those things and have the technology supporting it in the background, we are in a good place,” he says.