This case study is part of an ongoing series that gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at how SortSpoke is solving some of the most challenging and impactful business problems in the insurance industry. We respect our clients’ privacy and have kept this example anonymous.

Case Study Summary

Managing high volumes of incoming documents while maintaining review speed is a continuous challenge for insurance companies. And, as insurance pros know, the variety of unstructured data the industry has to manage to quote and bind a new policy has quickly become untenable. 

When Great American Custom Insurance’s manual document processing challenges became too big to ignore, SortSpoke helped the Fortune 500 company pinpoint problem areas and implement intelligent prioritization solutions, resulting in:

• 5x improvement in underwriting application speed
• 40% more written premiums

Keep reading to learn how SortSpoke helped Great American Custom Insurance overcome structural challenges to improve underwriting processes and speed. 

The Problem: Decentralized Structure and Process Chaos

Manual document processing has always been a major headache for insurers like Great American Custom Insurance. So big of a problem that it caught the attention of an assistant vice president for analytics who was tasked with uncovering and remedying organization-wide inefficiencies. 

The company was succeeding in the marketplace, but highly decentralized with dozens of divisions. Some were spun off from the original company, and others were acquired. To complicate matters, each division had a degree of autonomy in how they operated.

Over time, that decentralized environment led to divergent business processes, especially around document intake, processing new accounts, and in underwriting – anything involving information technology. The AVP was responsible for identifying digital solutions where resources were limited. 

Document processing was a persistent pain point across divisions. Their greatest concern was the excessive manual labor needed from team members to process files, wrangle unstructured data and input information into their system.  

The challenges were familiar: excessive manual labor, untidy unstructured data and cumbersome input. 

The AVP saw an opportunity to improve the underwriting process across divisions with AI-driven document management.

A Complete Solution in SortSpoke

“I was looking specifically for data extraction vendors, but I talked to almost every applicable Insurtech in the industry,” the AVP said. 

Her team came across SortSpoke and realized they could use it to enhance workflows throughout the underwriting process, without removing their experts from the process. With reliable unstructured data collection and processing, her team could develop an enhanced user experience for her business unit and others within the company. With SortSpoke, her insurance raters could easily prioritize reviews, make corrections and incorporate data.  

“Our raters will get applications that don’t always fit into a neat box. There might be multiple layers of documents all piled together. There might be overlapping property or general liability insurance layers because brokers don't want to fill out multiple applications,” she said.

The versatility of SortSpoke’s data extraction capabilities made it the best choice for their needs and could potentially help them mitigate risk in an unpredictable future.

The insurer was at a crossroads. If new federal regulations or precedent-setting legal suits were passed, there could suddenly be an emerging trend for a whole category of related lawsuits against this company’s clients. 

The AVP realized this was the compelling business case she needed for streamlining their document processing. It was a business imperative – their risk assessment success depended on the quality of data collected and analyzed during underwriting. 

I really like SortSpoke because of the ability to extract information from unstructured documents in a very user-friendly, interactive way,” the AVP said. “No other product out in the market does that.” - AVP, Data Analytics, Great American Custom Insurance

Rapid Adoption and Clear Results with SortSpoke

Team members were impressed with the SortSpoke-powered tools right away. The deployment was so successful that other business units within the insurance company soon asked the AVP for assistance deploying it for other use cases.

“We've been able to use SortSpoke for a variety of different types of work. Both short-term for analytics or looking at long-term integrated approaches, like extracting data specifically for analytics purposes,” she said

Adoption grew quickly after team members saw how easy it was to feed SortSpoke documents for processing and analysis. 

The Fortune 500 insurance company is now seeing steady improvement in its underwriting, claims, and other processes. Their metrics show the intake process is four to five times faster per underwriting application, saving their team members valuable time. That has resulted in a 40 percent increase in written premiums.

THE NEW APPROACH

Learn how to boost your submission processing by 2x—no new hires, no loss of control, and without taking humans out of the loop.