Surge capacity when customers needed it most.

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.

The challenge

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

“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,” says Brian May, AA Insurance Technical Solutions Manager.

The solution: digital employees

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.

“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,” says Dan Rippon, AA Insurance Automation Team Lead.

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.

Delivered in three weeks

“Marvin was developed in three weeks and did the work of approximately 32 staff over 12 days, operating 24/7,” Rippon says.

Thanks to Quanton’s assistance in training and mentoring AA Insurance’s own team, the bulk of the development happened in-house. AA Insurance now has a dedicated Automation and Robotics team, including two Developers and four Business Analysts.

What changed

In an industry known for peaks and troughs, bots deployed by AA Insurance and Quanton have provided surge capacity during natural disasters such as the 2023 Auckland Anniversary flooding and Cyclone Gabrielle. The bot handled nearly 10,000 windscreen claims between January to July 2023.

“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,” May says.