What is OCR?
OCR or Optical Character Recognition is a technology which is used to extract data from scanned images in the form of texts and store them in text files or JSON files. OCR services are becoming a critical technology in the insurance industry due to the ongoing digital transformation. It helps the sector in various ways like document onboarding and sorting, data entry and analysis and speeds up the workflow to a faster and more effective way.
OCR technology in insurance companies
Before Ocr technology was introduced insurance companies scanned paper documents and turned everything into flattened digital image files then they performed manual indexing on the files which involved a person always on screen looking and deciding what data should be filed. Due to human involvement this method is prone to errors and inconsistent. Sometimes many companies might have huge bulks of files to be processed and analysed this may take a normal human being days even weeks to process which delays the entire workflow.
People reach out to their insurance company when they’re dealing with a crisis—whether it’s a fire, theft, or a medical issue that requires immediate resolution. Delayed payments create added stress and erode good faith in an organization’s customer service.
This problem of volume of documents and time management companies are trying out apps where the clients can upload the files as PDF’s and when the files are uploaded it is put through an OCR system which returns fully text PDF document which is then stored and ready for analysis and sorting. This in a way lowers the time delay of the institution.
Automated analytics tools to analyse the policy, and then compare it to the company’s own products to see if they can offer the client better or cheaper protection. No manual process is capable of handling that front-end data capture efficiently. It takes a good OCR process to automatically transform client documents into accurate data that’s in a format fit for automated analysis.
The switch from manual indexing to an automated OCR process by itself would have resulted in a reduction in the resources required to onboard data. Additionally, it would have reduced errors and omissions introduced by manual data entry from five percent to as little as two. But a small number of errors result in the bulk of the costs in a data capture process, mostly in the form of time spent searching for documents that had been incorrectly indexed manually. By keeping those two employees involved at the front end of the system, the small percentage of errors were identified and corrected.
Benefits of OCR technology in insurance companies
OCR has greater benefits to insurance companies than just improving the data capture process. It can also be applied to the vast volumes of legacy data much of its unstructured paper and image files companies have accumulated over their lifespan.
OCR is the cornerstone of data capture and management processes in the insurance industry. It enables companies to get full value from their data and their automated analytics tools. OCR enables companies to provide better customer service, attract more clients, reduce costs, and even predict the future.