New Mexico Mutual, which provides worker's compensation insurance for businesses, is using automation technology to help its employees focus more on people.
Albuquerque Business First on May 16 spoke with New Mexico Mutual president and CEO Kellie Mixon and its vice president of underwriting Kristen Carey to learn more.
In short, the idea is to reduce repetitive, lower-level tasks done by humans.
Added Mixon: “What this allows us to do, it gives us the capacity to grow a little bit faster if [the] opportunity presents itself because now our staff is not going to be bogged down … they have the bandwidth to do the higher-level analysis that it takes to underwrite policies.”
That could be significant for New Mexico Mutual, which has roughly 120 employees and more than 9,000 policyholders.
Carey's comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Albuquerque Business First: Can you tell me about what types of automation technology New Mexico Mutual is using?
Kristen Carey: We have several different ways that we are looking to improve technology here. One of them is the [robotic process automation] process … we also have predictive analytics in use in both our underwriting and claims departments for pricing and claims analysis … we’ve digitized most of our documents that go out to our stakeholders. And so really looking to embrace all aspects of digital technology and other ways to both improve the work for our employees — increase their engagement — and also for ease of business with our stakeholders.”
Can you tell me about how this technology has impacted the workforce? “I think the impacts on the workforce that we’ve seen especially with the [robotic process automation] project in particular … one of the things that was most exciting to me about the project when we rolled it out and showed our employee group what the technology group could so and how it would help them have more time to focus on customer engagement … they were really excited and really saw how it would take some of those repetitive tasks off their plate.”
Can you tell me about some of those specific tasks? “In our underwriting department we have about a little over 9,000 policies and those policies are renewed each year. And so we’re utilizing the RPA tool to gather the documents for those renewals, prepare the policy analysis and complete some of [those] initial steps … about 2,000 hours annually are saved in just that part of the underwriting process.”
How has automation impacted the size of the workforce at New Mexico Mutual? “Well, it hasn’t decreased it. I’ll say that for sure. We’re not looking for automation to replace our employees, we’re just looking for automation to help them do their jobs and focus on the areas that are more either relationship building or the parts that are more interesting.”
