RPA Frees Up to 25 Hours a Week Improving Customer Experience for Encova Insurance

Encova strives to to improve the agent and customer experience by automating customer retention efforts. When RPA was first introduced, some were skeptical. Once they realized the time being saved from tedious tasks, they embraced their robots.

Motorists Insurance Group and BrickStreet Insurance recently joined forces to become Encova. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Encova encompasses 10 property and casualty insurance, life insurance, and insurance brokerage companies. The company is represented by more than 4,000 independent agents who live and work in local communities throughout a twenty-one state area in the United States (U.S.). The company is dedicated to building a stronger future with combined insights from decades of industry experience and expanded product offerings. Through innovation and collaboration, they are also dedicated to promoting a high quality of life—both for customers and agents. 

Post-merger, Jeffrey Martin, AVP of Customer Experience, had a mandate to use digital transformation to do more with less while improving the workplace experience for employees. He set out to find a solution that would eliminate mundane tasks, paper shuffling, and waiting for data transfer between archaic IT systems.

Martin felt that robotic process automation (RPA) would be a good fit for Encova and set out to find a partner to help him make it happen.

A high-profile proof of concept (PoC) for RPA

Employees were taking turns working half-day shifts to comb through customer files and pinpoint accounts that were in danger of canceling their policies. UiPath helped Martin automate this task, with a single robot pulling data from different websites and then emailing agents with action steps for retaining at-risk customers.

While human agents were at first skeptical about bringing a robot onto the team, once they realized the robot was saving them from the tedious, time-consuming, half-day 'customer retention' shift they embraced the robot and encouraged Martin to let them give the robot a real name instead of calling it "Robot 1."

While Martin is pleased with the results of his high-profile PoC, he is already thinking about his next project saying, "There just seem to be endless use cases for this." He is actively looking to expand on-demand services, including adding intelligent automation that involves artificial intelligence (AI). 

We looked at the big three RPA companies. And with the community, the training, the price point, and the ease of the tool, UiPath set itself apart from the others.

Jeffrey Martin • AVP Customer Experience at Encova