Digitalisation of daily incoming mail in the insurance industry

IRIS Partner: Customized Business Services

The challenge of the KKH

In insurance matters, insured persons usually go directly to the 110 KKH offices throughout Germany. However, for certain issues, such as dental prosthesis benefits or rehabilitation measures, the respective competence centres are responsible, as in the case of all insurance companies, so that letters and other mail have to be redirected internally. At the latest when a letter is forwarded, the employees in a branch office are no longer directly responsible and can usually only partially understand the path of communication with an insured person. There was a lack of transparency and the ability to provide information, and insured persons always had to put up with certain waiting times. Likewise, there was no central overview of correspondence and processing procedures. For health insurance companies in particular, communication with policyholders is more complex than, for example, with property insurance, since on the one hand the strict requirements for the protection of patient data apply, and on the other hand several subject areas are often involved in health issues. Therefore, with the help of IRISPowerscan™ , the approximately 3.3 million mail items received by KKH each year had to be centrally recorded and pre-sorted appropriately.

Solution based on IRISXtract™ and IRISPowerscan™

As part of a public tender, CBS won the contract as service provider at KKH insurance. In a first step, the 130 postal addresses of the insurance company from all over Germany were redirected to Hanover. There, CBS operates its own service centre for KKH with over 30 employees, where incoming mail is pre-sorted. All letters from insured persons, in every conceivable form, concerning benefit issues are then first digitised using eight Canon DR-X10C high-performance document scanners. The files are provided with the appropriate metadata for the following workflow using the IRISPowerscan™ scan client software. The key factor in KKH’s decision was Canon’s extensive experience in document digitisation. Due to the strict legal regulations that apply to health insurance companies and the complex circumstances in the medical field, it was necessary to categorise documents in as much detail as possible for automatic further processing. Together with CBS, KKH defined over 250 document classes and over 100 separation rules for the documents, thereby achieving a maximum degree of automation. In a second step,  IRISXtract™ forwards all digitised documents to the KKH insurance as searchable files (OCR). The processes are then ready for processing in the digital inbox of the clerks.

As a service provider, CBS understood our processes best and implemented the requirements exactly. In addition, Canon offers all the necessary solution components from a single source. Together we are constantly developing the solution further.

Oliver Holz, Head of DMS Operations, KKH Insurance Hannover

Solution with:

  • 12,000 to 21,000 mail items reach the Customer Service Centre every day
  • All incoming mail is recorded and processed on the day of receipt
  • 250 document classes are assigned to the corresponding workflows
  • About 13.5 million pages are digitized annually