How Does Automating 40% Of Your Admin Sound?

A new robotics drive by iGO4 has enabled the digital insurance broker to automate almost 40% of its support and administrative processes, translating into cost savings of over 10% within the next three years. Since October 2020, the company has built over 160 bots as part of a drive to automate repetitive tasks, such as dealing with renewals, direct debits and claims updates.

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) initiative is part of a wider digital transformation programme and has proved significant in helping operations teams adapt to new working practices and expectations during and post pandemic.

CEO Matt Munro, explains: “iGO4 continues to target growth at pace, so it’s important that we can achieve this efficiently. Every new business sale typically involves multiple administrative tasks and if we continue to add business at the current pace, we would have been looking at more than quadrupling our operations support team to handle the increase in workload. Instead, by removing the manual element from these processes, we’re able to scale efficiently.”

Achieving this level of automation has involved upskilling people to create a specialist in-house robotics team, combining subject matter expertise with the ability to design, build, and maintain bots.

So far, their bots have removed 3,000 manual tasks each month. Not only does this improve the efficiency of these tasks, but it also reduces the risk of human error, making for an even better customer experience.

Munro adds: “Our approach has been different. We have invested in software that automates the running of the bots, which gives us processing capacity in time, so that rather than paying for a single bot, we can build multiple bots, slotting together like a jigsaw to optimise a 24-hour bot runner. This has made it financially viable to build RPA for small volume tasks that under a traditional model would not have delivered a return on investment.”

As a result, iGO4 is now tackling less frequently recurring tasks that can sometimes catch people out, automating time-sensitive tasks to support compliance and tackling hybrid tasks which can be part automated before handing over to an agent. It is also working on a bot capable of reading documents to verify or query no claims bonus declarations.

“The time savings are incredible,” explains Munro. “And the technology is starting to transform other areas of the business beyond operations, such as HR and finance. A bot built to copy and paste data out of Excel files had accurately transcribed 360 files within half an hour for example. Using traditional methods, that would have taken a person days to complete.

“And that is significant, because as important as the efficiency benefits are, so too is the impact on job satisfaction. We’re removing monotony from people’s workloads and giving them the opportunity to enjoy more variety in their roles.”