If there’s one thing that’s associated with tremendous amounts of paperwork, it’s insurance companies. From application through claims, a form or letter or piece of paper exists for everything. However, all this paperwork needs to remain organized and accessible for an insurance company to operate effectively. That’s where document management becomes handy, and insurance companies require a solid strategy for it.
Document management is the set of capture, organization, transmission, and storage processes which a company undertakes to keep its documents in order. Many different tools and strategies exist according to the organization and its specific needs. However, all document management best practices deliver a few critical abilities: improved accessibility, top-notch security, and optimal efficiency of the business processes.
For document-intense industries, such as insurance, attaining such abilities means more than seizing a competitive edge. It means staying in business.
Why Insurance Companies Need Document Management
Document management does more than keep documents in order. When paperwork is the real-life force of an organization, a reliable document management strategy empowers employees to:
1. Refine the Customer Experience
According to customer experience expert Blake Michelle Morgan, the more serious a personal disaster, the more critical it is to create a smooth customer experience interaction. Insurance companies typically handle situations which fall on the more extreme end of the personal disaster spectrum. Any opportunity to improve and refine the customer experience means a smoother transaction for everyone.
Document management refines the customer experience by helping agents keep notes and paperwork in order. With deadlines, the need to interact with numerous agencies, and the pressure of managing crisis, lost documents are one thing which neither customers nor insurance agents need to contend with when it matters the most.
2. Collaborate Between Teams
Insurance represents a difficult industry where one person cannot possibly accomplish everything that goes into a claim. Therefore, employees must have the tools to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues easily. Document management solutions such as cloud services allow all parties to access materials quickly and easily, even if geographical locations separate them.
Collaboration has been one of the most significant talking points concerning the rise of insurance technology, or InsurTech, over the past two years. Technology is driving better collaboration, and with it, more opportunities to deliver innovative, winning customer experiences.
3. Expedite Claims and Paperwork Processes
Insurance companies can’t afford to have slow processes. When paperwork doesn’t get filed quickly, it may mean an individual can’t access critical care services or resources to survive. Therefore, a document management strategy is quintessential to help expedite claims and accelerate the paperwork processes which all insurance companies undertake.
Many document management strategies leverage cloud services and integration capabilities to connect with other third-party services. The result? Information moves faster, and people get what they need more quickly.
4. Increase Security While Maintaining Compliance
It’s well-known that healthcare and the financial industry both have monumental compliance requirements – it’s less well-known that the federally mandated compliance requirements for the insurance industry are just as extensive and strict. Insurance companies face the same challenges when developing a document ecosystem: they need to choose software and hardware which meets the compliance mandates.
A document management solutions provider can assist with this. By implementing tools and strategies which are oriented towards compliance, an insurance company can enjoy increased document security alongside compliance requirements.
5. Enjoy Solid Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Insurance companies deal with other people’s disasters, but they should be prepared for their own. There are many disasters, whether natural or human-caused, which can lead to the loss of business documents. When the only copy of a piece of information is lost, it’s gone for good. That’s fatal if the information happened to be critical for business processes.
Document management helps create robust disaster recovery and business continuity by ensuring backups exist. By automating them, a company never needs to worry about forgetting. By storing them offsite, they won’t be affected by any local disasters. Likewise, by choosing cloud options, backups will always be accessible anywhere.
Blue Technologies Helps Insurance Companies Take Control of Their Documents
It’s not an overstatement to say that documents are the lifeforce for businesses; it’s even more true for insurance companies than other types of companies. That makes a document management system even more critical for survival. Blue Technologies helps insurance companies take control of their documents to deliver better customer experiences, increased efficiency, and improved security across the board.
Blue Technologies provides bespoke document management solutions. Start a conversation with us today to learn about what we can do for you.