Encova Insurance: Customer-Focused Innovation at its Best

Peace of mind and financial security in an unpredictable world. That’s what Encova Insurance—created by the merger of Motorists Insurance Group and BrickStreet Insurance—helps deliver to its personal and business customers across 28 states in the U.S.

With the coming together of the two brands in 2017, an exciting new digital journey began. The focus for the newly formed Encova wasn’t just maximizing efficiency, doing more with less, and growing the business. It set about to “push innovation forward for our customers”—the ethos of the company both then and now.

Pursuing automation was a key part of the insurer’s strategy, and it quickly chose UiPath as its partner.

In terms of community, training, price point, and ease of use—UiPath sets itself apart from its competitors.

Jeffrey Martin, Solution Architect at Encova

Securing customer retention through automation

Losing customers is any organization's worst nightmare. Especially when a simple, personalized outreach—delivered at a critical point—may be all that’s needed to keep them onside. Knowing this, Martin chose just the right use case to kick-start Encova’s automation journey. The crucial but time-consuming task of customer retention was selected for a high-profile initial proof of concept (PoC).

Martin automated the process, drawing data from customer files and emailing agents with action steps for customers at risk of canceling their policies. The PoC was a huge success.

Agents no longer had to spend half a day per week combing through customer files to pinpoint accounts that required urgent action. More importantly, teams could refocus their energy on building great client relationships and adding value in different areas of the organization.

When hi-tech meets hi-touch

Encova didn’t stop there. It quickly became clear there were other ways automation could help improve processes and boost customer-centricity.

The claims invoice process was a perfect candidate. Staff were spending half a day per week on this important—but tedious—manual task. That all changed with the adoption of AI-powered UiPath Document Understanding. “We’re seeing [claims] processed faster, fewer errors—and when errors do occur, they’re quick to fix thanks to UiPath Action Center,” he says.

When it comes to document understanding, with traditional optical character recognition (OCR) we were getting 40% through without issues and 30% would be partially completed. With this new [UiPath] process, the success rate is 99%.”

Jeffrey Martin, Solution Architect at Encova

Automated tasks don't just save time and increase efficiency. According to Martin, it “adds value where it matters” with agents spending more time with customers to deliver that all-important trusted, personal service.

Scaling automation and expanding the business

Automation has changed the way Encova’s finance, sales, underwriting, operations, and customer support departments work. In its policy intake program, for instance, manual data entry time has been cut by over 99% over the year. In commercial lines endorsement—another heavily manual process—Martin expects to reduce annual processing time by 95%. “Everyone loves working with UiPath,” he says. “It’s had a positive effect on morale and helps us retain talent.”

We were looking at around 650 hours of manual entry per month [for the policy intake program]. That has gone down to just 12.5 hour per year. For commercial lines endorsements, estimated at 12,000 hours per year, we’d love to take that down to 640 hours of processing time.

Jeffrey Martin, Solution Architect at Encova

Encova continues to scale out automation across the business, with “endless use cases for UiPath.” Specifically, the team is looking to include on-demand services in its automation program as well as exploring intelligent automation.

“Would I recommend working with an automation partner?” Martin reflects. “Definitely. We couldn’t have achieved what we have without UiPath. And the exciting thing is, there’s so much more to do.”

Join us in our webinar and delve deep into Encova's AI-powered automation journey. Hear the story firsthand and gain insights from AI experts.