OCR as a Strategy to Win in a Competitive Insurance Industry. Here’s How

In the past, business processes used to be extensive and exhaustive. Today, optical character recognition has become an absolute necessity for insurance businesses owing to the amount of paperwork they have to deal with.

While paperwork and administrative tasks are an important and common use of optical character recognition technology, insurance businesses today can use OCR in smarter ways to compete against their customers.

What Is Optical Character Recognition – An Overview

The smart computer-based technology of optical character recognition is based on artificial intelligence and neural network-based systems and allows computers to convert physical text into a computer-readable format. It is one of the most commonly used technologies, and almost all industries are utilizing OCR for their administrative processes.

Thanks to optical character recognition service, business processes today have become easier and the technology is super common. For example, just the conversion of PDF format text into computer-readable text is an example of optical character recognition.

OCR technology has existed for over a century now. However, as it becomes increasingly polished and advanced, all kinds of businesses are picking up pace and adopting it.

Businesses And OCR Optical Character Recognition

Businesses today are under a lot of pressure to keep up with the industry’s fast pace. As the technology around us evolves, the utilization of this technology also becomes increasingly important.

Paper used to be a crucial component of all businesses in the past. From data records and receipts to banking documents - everything has always been done on paper. In the past, this meant huge piles of paper that required attention, organization, and storage services.

Today, everything is done digitally, but the problem is that most data is still received in paper form. This requires the transference of this paper-based information into digital format.

Insurance companies are one of those that have a lot of paper, printed, or handwritten documentation. For effective storage and analysis, this information needs to go digital, which can be tedious. This can also require additional employees for data entry. Optical character recognition helps make this process simpler.

Optical Character Recognition For The Insurance Industry

Within the insurance industry, optical character recognition allows seamless digital transformation processes. From document onboarding to sorting and analysis, optical character recognition helps to automate all processes while reducing the chance of error.

The insurance industry deals with piles of paper every day. This paper is not just immense to scan through but is also difficult to store. Moreover, it is also a financial burden on businesses. This is because the amount of paper and number of employees required to deal with it can amount to hefty budget costs.

OCR Scanner Apps For Strategic Business Administration

Optical character recognition technology is a major technology when it comes to improved management of paper documents.

Before optical character recognition, insurance companies used to hire individuals specifically to go through hefty paperwork. These people were required to manually scan through each and every data set or pile of paper. Furthermore, these employees were then required to upload each and every document by manually typing it onto a computer.

This was labor intensive, full of errors, and costly. Optical character recognition technology today has removed all these concerns wholly.

OCR For Enhanced Customer Services

Optical character recognition allows efficient processes on part of an insurance company. Before OCR application, businesses were manual. This meant that all business processes took a good few days. For customers or policy havers, this used to be a long wait.

Moreover, manual indexing and administration processes are prone to errors and full of inconsistencies. Therefore, an absence of optical character recognition translates to exhaustion and dissatisfaction for customers. Customers dissatisfied with a business are naturally going to take their business elsewhere.

For an insurance company, this means financial losses and a bad reputation.

Optical Character Recognition For Smarter Client Acquisition

The customer acquisition process typically involves clients hopping on calls with service providers or visiting offices to have thorough discussions based on the customers’ needs as well as the company's policies and plans.

This process is typically a challenging one. This is because there are many businesses offering the same or similar products. Due to competition, businesses, particularly insurance businesses, have to strive hard to land clients. While it may sound peculiar, optical character recognition can help with this as well.

Today all insurance companies have a website where they offer details of their policies and plans. Potential clients can easily visit these websites and find ones that suit them. However, in a digital world when all companies have their own websites, this has become the norm. When everyone is doing the same thing, no one is at an edge.

This makes standing out critical and necessary.

Insurance companies can set up optical character recognition and artificial intelligence-based software on their websites to allow customers to compare their current insurance policies with the business’s policies. When a customer uploads a copy or contract of their current insurance policy, optical character recognition will assess this document and then feed it into the artificial intelligence-based algorithm. This algorithm will then compare the two plans and give a detailed or brief breakdown to the client as per their requirements.

Such new and smart technologies can help businesses improve their client acquisition processes. This eventually helps improve business.

To Sum Up

For insurance companies, optical character recognition or OCR is a smart way to improve business. This is a particularly important task in lieu of the insurance industry's saturation. 

Improved and exceptional customer service is a clever and vital strategy to acquire new customers as well as to retain old ones.

While most insurance companies are already using optical character recognition services, utilizing the technology in smarter ways can help give your business an edge over its competitors.