Jeff Rauscher is director of solutions design for RedwoodSoftware.

The primary focus of an insurance company is the customer. But with so many customers generating so much data, it can be achallenge to accurately collect, update and analyze customerinformation across locations and platforms. For efficientclaims processing, you need to eliminate bottlenecks and humanerror wherever possible.

Automation gives you the speed, consistency, quality andefficiency you need to provide the best possible customer serviceas your organization grows. But to really be beneficial, you needto implement it across the entire enterprise.

Many Offices, One Company

As insurance brokerages become more successful, more satelliteoffices also spring up. With more offices, more employeesnaturally follow. The good news is that your company servesmore customers. Unfortunately, that's also the bad news. Withmore customers you now process more claims with more employees andmore offices.

This situation wouldn't be much of a concern if each individualoffice operated autonomously and serviced only customers withinthat geographical region. But in reality that's not what happens atall. Instead, your billing department is in one location,claims processing is in another, and technical support is somewhereelse entirely. Different time zones, geographic boundariesand poor communication can mean that your critical processes takemore time, involve more people and generate more errors. Ultimately, it's the customer who suffers. You do too.

Localized automation doesn't offer much of an advantage to acomplex company. In fact, if records and processes aren't wellconnected between locations, there's really no difference betweenelectronic processing and the old-fashioned paper records we'dnever dream of using anymore. To be truly beneficial to thecustomer and the company, systems should also be automated andconnected like any other business-critical information.

Instead of looking at each individual office or department as anindividual entity, you need to connect and orchestrate yourprocesses together—in every location. Automation is the key. Withone unified automation solution deployed across the entireenterprise, installed on-premises or provided through the cloud,you can link these locations and automate many of the complexprocesses that stretch between them. With automationimplemented across your entire company, you can speed processes,enforce standards and support the visibility you need, wherever andwhenever you need it.

Good for Customers, Great forBusiness

Automating and connecting locations and processes support botheffective customer service and staff efficiency. Once filesand protocols are appropriately connected across your enterprise,staff in all departments, at all locations, can access consistentand complete data no matter where they are. There's no morewaiting for someone in another office to complete a task, makesense of a unique spreadsheet or retrieve data. Instead, theconclusion of one process will trigger a command that immediately,automatically, begins the next. From the customer'sperspective, it's flawless and fast. For your company'spurposes, it's efficient, accurate and reliable.

Let me give you an example. A large insurance provider with morethan 600 branch offices and a server estate of more than 1,000Microsoft Windows and Red Hat systems needed to share critical databetween offices, partners, customers and providers. This was nosimple requirement. Layers of localized procedures madecoordination between everyone difficult—and mostly manual. Thistook time and cost them in human error and slow customerservice.

To solve this problem, the company implemented anenterprise-wide automation solution that gives them a singleplatform to control a wide range of applications and tasks. Now allof their management information gathering and distributionprocesses are linked together and automated in logical, dependentsteps that are fast, accurate and easy to manage. The automationplatform also helped them standardize procedures so that all of theoffices support consistent company policies. Today, they don'twaste time on manual tasks, and everyone's happier as a result.

Ultimately, enterprise-wide solutions like this provideinsurance brokerages the opportunity to improve all of theirservices. They reduce the time required to check and re-checkrecords for accuracy as well as the time required to wait forinformation from another department. That makes a stronger company.Automation also erases time required to process claims or establishcoverage. That makes happy customers. Enterprise-wideautomation can mean a big win for everyone involved. Take a look atyour organization today and see how it might help you. You'llprobably be surprised at how much good you can do.