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
Good decisions come from good information. For many carriers, just having a fully staffed team of skilled underwriters isn’t enough to keep pace, especially when first to quote is first to bind.
Reliably and quickly sourcing the data an underwriting team needs is a persistent and time-consuming challenge, made harder by the variety of documents that need to be manually processed.
A major Canadian P&C insurer recently partnered with SortSpoke to streamline and speed up their intake processes. The result?
- Submission intake speed increased 5x
- Document review times dropped by 90%
Keep reading to learn more about how the technology from SortSpoke significantly transformed this carrier's intake process and more.
The Problem: Entrenched Manual Processes Took Too Much Time
With 2.5 million customers, a major Canadian P&C insurance company struggled with an outdated and inefficient broker submission triage process. They were writing enough policies to stay profitable, but it took an exceptionally long time to find those profitable accounts using manual processes and error-prone automated tools.
“It took ages. We had a team dedicated to application triage, and their entire workload involved entering and validating information from applications. If we’d sent it directly to underwriters, all of their time would be data entry,” recalled one P&C manager.
The team was triaging unstructured data, paperwork and tasks that could result in million-dollar premiums, but they could only win deals if they could quickly get it to the right underwriter. Manual entry of unstructured data was taking too many staffing resources and too much time.
A More Efficient and Consistent Solution in SortSpoke
They tried internal solutions first. This insurance company’s data science team created an in-house industry code predictor application to save their triage and underwriters time on industry searches, but there were thousands of technical codes and next to impossible for the team to use. When implemented, the solution only boasted a 30% accuracy rate.
The team knew it was about more than software. It was about how software tools supported workers who were critical to their workflow but might not yet have the experience to be discerning.
“It tends to be the least experienced people in insurance that work in this triage role, so tasks were routed to the wrong areas.”
If the team could accurately and quickly route tasks, they knew they would improve outcomes.
The P&C manager and her evaluation team scoured the market for different AI-powered document processing tools, but SortSpoke stood out for its success metrics.
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SortSpoke could handle all of their unstructured documents without forcing the company to rebuild its entire IT stack from the ground up to accommodate it.
“Integration is really big for me,” the P&C manager said. “SortSpoke integrated right into our existing systems.”
SortSpoke Improves Metrics and User Experiences
After launch, the triage and underwriting teams saw measurable results immediately in SortSpoke. It eliminated large volumes of tedious data entry and streamlined prioritization so employees could get to decision-making faster.
“This automation eliminated the grunt work so our team could focus on what’s really valuable.”
The P&C manager was pleased to get positive feedback from team leads right away and adoption was swift. Perhaps most importantly, the team got faster and more efficient:
Speed of submission intake increased 5 fold for the triage team.
Document review times dropped by nearly 90 percent for underwriters.
There were some unexpected benefits too. The team gleaned better data on submissions they declined to write, which was rarely available before. Additionally, career development improved for triage staff using the software. They were now training machine learning models for the newest generation of Insurtech instead of simply entering data.
Today, the P&C insurer is working with SortSpoke to deploy more features and increase adoption.
With improved efficiency and speed, the future is bright with SortSpoke.
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.
