Bupa to drive automation deeper into ops

Australian health insurer Bupa has set a strategic objective to embed more artificial intelligence and automation technology into its business operations.

The company said in a statement that it has been ramping up its development and deployment of customer-facing bots since last year.

One of those, the overseas student health cover (OSHC) enrolment bot, had “autonomously processed 22,900 new overseas student enrolments during and outside of business hours” since October 2019.

“This has freed up the international corporate partnerships team to focus on complex issues and enquiries while speeding up the enrolment process for customers,” Bupa said.

The company had “more recently  … rolled out customer service chatbots” and used “natural language understanding” to reduce the number of transfers and navigation points for customers “to get their enquiries resolved.”

Now, director of customer transformation Gael Filippini said the insurer has stood up an internal ‘Automation Innovation Academy’ to find and create more use cases for the technology.

The academy “is focused on upskilling Bupa staff with knowledge and training to enable in-house automation planning, building and implementation,” Filippini said.

“As a health insurance business, we receive huge volumes of data that require a lot of processing,” she said.

“What we want to achieve through the academy is a workforce that can identify those processes that are repetitive or require manual data entry and develop an automation solution. 

“We want our people to spend less time doing those repetitive tasks and spend more time on using that data to develop new customer value opportunities and processes that require human input.”

Filippini said the academy offered Bupa employees “self-paced online and face-to-face learning opportunities in process fundamentals, coding, and change management practices, with mentorship from experts within Bupa as well as from its automation partner UiPath.”