A 2020 ICTA nomination Toronto, ON (Jan.13, 2020) – This journal of a brokerage’s transformation to a “digital business model” highlights our brokerage path, hurdles, innovation and how we overcome situations when a solution is not available from the market.The entire process took us years of planning, determination and a complete overhaul of business processes – to disrupt a currently working model to a whole new approach, using enterprise resource planning in combination with state-of-the-art technology for efficiency and resource management to overcome fundamental problems facing the industry – a skilled worker shortage and inefficiency in production.

The Postmodern Era ERP: an approach to Enterprise Resource Planning* requires fulfillment of the 6 Hallmarks described here instead of merely a software that can be implemented quickly (i.e.quick quote, ‘smart’ product selection, claims, mobile product, etc), but it is a journey of reviewing the entire ecosystem of a business.Solving this relies on the core six hallmarks for success: AI-Driven, Data-Centric, Consumable, People Augmented, Enabling, and (most of all) Customer facing.

Since the beginning of 2018, our brokerage suffered the reality of a hard market and lack of skilled licensed broker, like every other brokerage in the country.We do, however, moved beyond competing and pay higher wages for talent but instead, seek to enhance efficiency and productivity with the business model recommended.The Enterprise Business Capability, fulfilling the six hallmarks : Customer Facing Tools and implementation – With the development of Natural Language Processing, we have implemented our voice activate chatbot on our telephone system and many of our front end including Facebook messenger, webchat, google home, Alexa.

The learning has been ongoing as we have a dedicated team to observe and listen to the result, improving through reinforced learning to capture the client’s intent, helping customers on bill payment, claims, request for paperwork and more.Throughout the process, we, until to-date managed 23.2% of what clients wanted through automation (i.e.capability to send proof of insurance, assist in help, logging in claim number and provide useful information to clients on 24×7).

The hurdle and future implementation – To date, our telephone bot is taking overflow calls when our (human) brokers are busy or off duty, but many customers (a disappointing 63% of calls hang up) not use to AI-driven answering agent with robotic-like voice answers the call.We are improving this with help of Wavenet – a vendor that creates human-like voice synthesis.This is now being tested on our lab to cross implement to 5 other languages (French, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Vietnamese) Artificial Intelligence Driven Tools and implementation – Artificial Intelligence capability of our system.

1.The chatbot above uses Natural Language Processing power, and continuously studied and put into a reinforced learning model in a multi-language environment.2.

Machine Learning in two areas was being implemented.a) We have our predictor score identifying classic cases of accident/loss in studying the variables available.Current system uses postal code, age, use of aged vehicles, monoline risk, count of default payment on their account, years with us, number of policies cancellation, amount of premium versus number of service calls, emails, choice of (hostile) word from emails comment from CSR, open internet data (our scan bot will search a homeowner phone/address of our client and compare with rental ad site on the internet to identify opportunity to upsell and prevent risk that is potentially misrepresented by homeowner), with these data (as added by our data scientist over time), the black box unit of our machine learning will calculate a score to estimate the profitability to our agency.

b) Though we pride ourselves as paperless, there are tonnes of physical documents being sent to us instead of the electronic copy.With the help of Tesseract (OCR) machine learning and Tensorflow, we can identify the nature of each paperwork received and insert to our CRM system, and create a task for our ERP as follow up as needed.Consumable As insurance becoming more and more commoditized, there are need to integrate with Internet of things, where a consumable product such as Google Home can request for policy change, authentication in multilingual at the comfort of consumer’s home.

Enabling In 2018 when we implement most modules, our employees (CSR) are going through a transformation experience cultural tensions and in competing priorities, which initially create stress and reduction in performance.We were desperately seeking ways to drives employee performance and delivers results.Senior management has to express a strong desired culture in organizational systems, processes, and strategies.

The key to this was constant communication, allowing the employee to participate in “what’s best to them in doing it more efficiently and effectively.” There have been hours of meeting to bring up the pre-filling of CSIO forms, where to get the data and where should the client sign on the form, taking out certain things in the form and a lot more.The higher the participation from the employee, the higher the degree of success is foresight.The idea of SMS triggers pre-fill forms, review of work by our CSR, electronic signatures API, voice-activated leads generation for online commercial quotes (via Apollo Exchange) were all created during this process (given by real-time employee’s feedback as it goes) People Augmented Our business evolves with the technology being implemented, it became obvious that our priorities change along with it.

We have to build a lot of quality assured modules that scanned our paper submission for mistakes, missing entry and more.A lot of decisions that were obvious initially, become harder (if we should focus on missing information on application that were scanned became obsolete once the online binding is available, should we keep building something that CSR focus their attention on when policy can be bind and issued, quality scanning by our team is then replaced with EDI message learning.) The entire team needs to be informed on the change and this is no easy task.The “brave” decision of not using the existing Broker Management system in replacing with our inhouse CRM system that ties with the phone, email, SMS, social media, changing from “Policy Centric” to “Client-Centric” model.

In short, this entire digital transformation has been excited and challenging for our brokerage.And it worked out well.* Source: Gartner’s Model of 4th era of ERP Business Impact 1.

Reduced unwanted calls by 63% As the hard market continue, we have build our chatbot to pre-filter undesired businesses.Prior to implementing this system, we have to turn down over 80% web lead traffic looking for business we do not write.We have listened to phone answered by our bot that asking for quote that we do not write.

Instead of responding to “I need to speak to a broker”, we could quickly qualify the leads obtained via social media marketing by asking what was the intention, request for quote and more.2.Improved loss ratio by 105% Using the predictor score from our machine learning, our system is able to prioritize the desired clients service first, from the undesired / unprofitable clients.

Allocate more time to client retention and “show the door” of undesired clients.6 months after implementation, we have witness our loss ratio quickly reduced by ratio of 105%.3.

Increased productivity by segregated people’s skill.Using the automated pre-fill form generated, we have both clarify the intention of client’s by getting their signature, and able to segregate services to people based on their skill set.(Our licensed broker no longer spend 75% of calls doing research from insurer’s portal, simple request such as, why is my bill more expensive this month compare with last is now being answers by AI, and passed on to our (non license) admin team that deals with billing and response by email or SMS to the client.) About UW Insure Brokers UW Insure Brokers is a leading developer of broker technologies and remains at the front of innovative servicing in the insurance industry.

We stand by our slogan, “Service Through Innovation” and strive to bring convenience to our clientele by utilizing innovative solutions to both streamline and create an enjoyable user experience.We are a firm offering a broad range of services in the property & casualty insurance industry through our highly experienced professional broker team.For more information, visit www.uwinsure.com.

Tags: ICTA nomination