Making a smart choice with Smart Automation

Smart Automation is a modern approach to generate business value, radically improving user experiences. It does so by simplifying interactions, speeding up processes, reducing repetitive tasks, and understanding and emulating human behaviors.

It is the result of a combination of different technologies that can be used to quickly automate key processes in order to achieve higher efficiencies and streamline operational costs. In Generali, we started looking at Smart Automation to help professionals focus on more value-added activities, thus contributing efficiently to strategic objectives, avoiding wasting resources and reducing manual intervention on repetitive tasks, always properly and ethically leveraging data and information.

Today, thanks to increased computational power and data management capabilities, implementing Smart Automation is a successful strategy for Generali to support legacy systems modernization and process digitalization, enabling experts to analyze, simplify and redesign the way the company works.

Insurers are in fact facing significant challenges to better serve customers and liaise with agents and distributors, for example reducing manual and paper-based processes, addressing customer requests for speed and simplification, and avoiding skilled workers completing low-value repetitive tasks.

For Generali, Smart Automation is not only about operation optimization. Due to increasing market pressure, with customers demanding more choices, availability of 24/7 flexible services and easy omni-channel interactions, for example in managing claims, Smart Automation has become crucial to answer with agility: a powerful key digital enabler of the Generali Digital Strategy.

We are leveraging on Smart Automation to accelerate our digital transformation: by combining Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence we are able to manage not only repetitive tasks but also complex processes, improving customer experiences and our agents’ daily job, for example through the automatic processing of several types of documents or with virtual assistants like chatbot and voicebots to access our knowledge base. Furthermore, we are expanding our digital footprint by reducing paper-based processes, and we are introducing new unattended services, for example digitalizing and managing claims in real time.

To accelerate our Smart Automation journey, we have created a Center of excellence for Smart Automation that leverages the most advanced experiences developed in some Business Units to provide centralized services, and a dedicated Community of Practice, a participated worldwide team composed by experts from different functional areas that collaborate to define priorities, identify most relevant processes and scale up local success stories, sharing experiences and promoting strategic initiatives across geographies.

Moreover, in line with the Innovation and Digital Transformation pillar of the Generali 2021 strategy, Smart Automation is part of the upskilling program developed in collaboration with Generali Academy and available to all employees through the online platform Welearn and the soon-to-open “New Role School”, with the aim to prepare the experts that will drive the journey.

We are confident that Smart Automation plays a key role in supporting and accelerating our Lifetime Partner strategy: thanks to this digital transformation, we will continue to improve customers and agents’ experiences and enhance employee satisfaction.