Trace Id is missing
May 27, 2022

The Hanover Insurance Group’s automation CoE ensures successful solutions can scale

Insurance is all about preparing for what might happen in the future. In The Hanover Insurance Group’s strategic pursuit of innovation that enhances value, the company turned its lens inward and asked how it could best position itself for the future. Digital transformation came into focus. The time-intensive and often manual nature of key aspects of the insurance business means The Hanover needs automation capabilities to achieve real change—true digital transformation. 

 

In just more than two years, The Hanover Insurance Group’s automation center of excellence—Enterprise Automation Practice—enabled productivity gains, higher product performance, stronger stakeholder relationships, and advanced employee mastery. The company developed relationships with strategic implementation partners, leveraged change-management capabilities, and created technology-enhanced solutions. Microsoft Power Platform, especially Microsoft Power Automate, is The Hanover’s go-to solution when it needs to rapidly scale reliable solutions.        

The Hanover Insurance Group

“Automation provides us the flexibility and agility needed to transform our business operations. Microsoft Power Automate brings the right tool to solving the right problem…instead of using standalone tools that require over-engineering and retrofitting.”

Prashant Hinge, Vice President, Automation and Employee Experience, The Hanover Insurance Group

Superior business decision-making

The Hanover Insurance Group provides premier property, casualty, and specialty insurance solutions through nearly 2,500 independent agents, ranging from trusted local practices with a few agents to enterprise, household-name agencies. Writing $5 billion in net premiums in 2021, The Hanover has a 165-year legacy of consistently delivering on its promises to protect businesses and individuals “for today and all your tomorrows.”  

To continue stellar service, The Hanover pursues innovative ways to address industry realities—including manually intensive processes, paper-intensive policy documentation, and specialized underwriter expertise. 

“Our core premise is that if you are an adjuster, an underwriter, an accountant, etc., we want to provide everything needed for a policy or for an account that makes it easier to make very good decisions. Now you can consume more information because you're not spending time just getting the information,” states Prashant Hinge, Vice President, Automation and Employee Experience at The Hanover Insurance Group.  

Hinge and his team are activating employees’ strengths. “We are giving people back the time to focus more on the customer, on the risk, and on the KPIs that are important for the organization.” Automating routine or manually intensive tasks accelerates The Hanover’s ability to succeed at priority initiatives. 

Automation center of excellence improves business decisions’ quality and speed 

Hinge was brought on to create and lead an automation center of excellence (CoE)—Enterprise Automation Practice—a team of technologists and change-management leaders.  

The CoE embodies several trusted roles serving as automation leader, governor, ambassador, coach, and broadcaster. It aligns with business leadership on top priority issues and supports solution-seeking teams to solidify desired outcomes, governance, resource commitments, and expected value creation. “What we are doing is increasing the digital mindset of the business to spot future automation opportunities,” shares Hinge. 

The CoE works side by side with business leaders to create and deploy value-creation solutions scaled through automation. Catherine Nelson, Senior Automation Analyst at The Hanover and a change agent by nature, elaborates, “We (the CoE) recently moved to The Hanover Tech Group (HTG) as part of the digital organization, but our roots are in the business using a co-creation model.” 

As a company, The Hanover has invested in building change-management capabilities to advance the adoption and success of technology and other initiatives. 

Nelson expounds on the team’s ability to amplify the impact of automation by applying dedicated change-management support. “After the design phase, we can start talking about who the impacted audiences are, who the stakeholders are, and what we need to do to support the automation when it moves into production. We act as a consultative partner or as part of the delivery team.” 

Recently, The Hanover required critical commission functionality to launch a legacy system upgrade. The CoE’s business-first attitude enabled the development of an automation solution with Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. As Karen Andrade, Vice President and Chief Operations Officer for Business Insurance at The Hanover Insurance Group, shares, “When we were faced with this lack of functionality in the platform upgrade, it was all hands on deck. It has been an amazing experience overall.”  

The CoE created a solution that enabled “business as usual” instead of significant business disruption. “We can integrate with multiple platforms and obtain a quality, flexible solution that can absorb our growth without adding more resourcing,” adds Andrade. Please refer to the use case section to learn more. 

Power Automate fuels scale and widespread deployment

The team includes four implementation partners to flex capabilities and help address complexity while developing in-house expertise. When selecting technology, the team strategically chose partners who aligned to its long-term vision. Searching for the best automation solutions, the team was attracted to Power Automate as a robust, familiar suite of solutions to address complex business processes. 

Hinge explains, “We soon realized that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) itself won't be able to scale to handle complexity and be sustainable and cost effective. We need something that is going to be smart, intelligent, scalable, and has a large community of users. We focus on journeys and end-to-end process. We want human-enabled automation with maximum impact vs. just task-based impact.” 

“That's where Power Platform with Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Apps came in. We saw connections with Azure and availability in one place. Seamless connectivity and high familiarity with Microsoft 365 tools make Power Automate the most logical fit for our journey.” 

“Automation provides us the flexibility and agility needed to transform our business operations. Microsoft Power Automate brings the right tool to solving the right problem…instead of using standalone tools that require over-engineering and retrofitting,” concludes Hinge. 

Just as insurance agent referrals can come from word of mouth, some initial success of the CoE organically arose from underwriting, rating, claims, sales, accounting, and finance hearing of automation solving issues for other departments and wanting resolution for similar challenges. Other times, the CoE plays matchmaker, spreading solutions beyond the initial intent or pain point. 

The Executive Small Commercial business wanted to make reaching specialized underwriters a turnkey process. The CoE used Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate to resolve that unit’s pain points while building a use case that has infinite possibilities of reapplication. 

Russell Gajos, Executive Small Commercial Sales Manager at The Hanover, partnered with the CoE for the solution and sees it as a big win. “An agent can call me, and in 30 seconds I know exactly which underwriter to connect to,” shared Gajos. Learn more about how Power Automate has been a go-to asset when the COE needs rapid solutioning in the use case section. 

Measuring success through a business lens

While the COE looks at utilization, impact, reach, and reliability, its focus is on helping the business reach KPIs such as growth goals, expense targets, experience and NPS scores, and new product launch success. “We are another tool in the toolkit for the business leader to use in order to help them achieve their day to day and any desired goals that they have in the future,” elaborates Hinge. 

The Hanover Management and Executive Liability Group was looking to build market share and increase product performance—it often does so by solving marketplace issues. “When our agents have issues, we want them to think of The Hanover as a thought partner, not just a vendor. Solutions like The Hanover FastTrack help us do just that,” shares Helen Savaiano, President, Management and Executive Liability at The Hanover Insurance Group. Please refer to the use case section to learn more about the evolution of FastTrack powered by Power Automate. 

What’s now, what’s next?

Hinge, Nelson, and the rest of the team started at the end of 2019 with several proofs of concept to validate the automation focus building the practice steadily through 2021.  

As 2022 gets underway, the CoE embraces its ability to be the “bridge” between business and technology on the company’s largest opportunities to impact value. It has a robust ecosystem of partners and will increase the internal size of the CoE to keep up with mounting demand. Education, awareness, and change management will be continued priorities. The CoE will focus on scaling the largest opportunities and has a pipeline of opportunities where Power Automate will enhance the end-to-end solution.   

As with other automation efforts, a reliable un-siloed database is building. The team looks to highlight trends and opportunities with Microsoft Power BI. It will also advance new capabilities provided with Microsoft AI Builder for automated extraction. The data will help identify trends and analytics. 

The CoE’s aspiration is to inspire colleagues to dream big as they create value.  

Following are just three scenarios of many possibilities that demonstrate how the CoE is making aspirations a reality. 

The Hanover unleashes the power of automation

FastTrack: Operationalizing automation of cognitive capabilities enabled scaling a superior renewal prep solution for policy holders and agents 

Opportunity: Automate a simplified portfolio review process. The Hanover Management and Executive Liability Group saw an opportunity to bring value to the executive liability marketplace by providing a more efficient and profitable way to perform annual renewals. 

Essentially, Helen Savaiano, President, Management and Executive Liability at The Hanover Insurance Group, asked, “How do we change the economies and add value for these policyholders, agents, and The Hanover employees?” She goes on to say, “The industry has been doing a very manual process for placing insurance for these companies regardless of whether it's a billion-dollar company or a million-dollar company.” 

Solution: The Hanover created a solution that required automation to scale broadly. The CoE created “human in the loop automation.” Power Automate orchestrates the flows—one triggered, one set to occur overnight to feed data into relevant upstream and downstream systems. Third-party software created and packaged by The Hanover partner Foundation AI uses machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision to classify, label, and extract information from unstructured documents. If manual intervention occurs, it retrains the system, reducing friction and increasing quality.  

Outcomes: Win-win-win scenario! Enhanced coverage and increased productivity with a low-touch process. 

Surety Commission Solution: Automation prevented commission conundrum  

Opportunity: Automate commission functionality. The Hanover needed to upgrade its 10-year legacy Surety Bond management system. However, the upgrade would eliminate the critical commission functionality.  

Solution: The CoE created an app on Power Apps on which Edith Foriska, Business Operations Manager at The Hanover, and her team leverages to review commissions. Unattended RPA in Power Automate triggers the information to flow downstream to the accounting system overnight.

When asking of Rabbit and Tortoise's Harshita Darwatkar, The Hanover implementation partner and co-owner along with Sambasivarao Pandala, why Power Automate was selected to fuel the solution, she provided a very direct answer: there was no room for error. They needed a solution they knew would work and could be up and running in just a few weeks. “We've been working very closely with Microsoft technical architects. The speed that we have observed is super fast, and if that speed is there, there's nothing that we cannot achieve with this tech stack. Almost everything is in one suite where we can connect the end-to-end dots of almost any process,” elaborated Darwatkar. 

Outcome: “It gave us the ability to replicate the same process faster, was less complicated, and saved on costs,” summed up Andrade. While solving for the issue at hand, the byproduct was a centralized database of information than can impact other decisions. The team is looking at applying AI as well as it takes on enhancing dashboards. 

Find your underwriter: virtual, continuously updated ‘rolodex’ helps solidify increased premium volume  

Opportunity: Enhance the speed of the process that connects agents with underwriters. Russell Gajos, Executive Small Commercial Sales Manager at The Hanover, was a leader in converting specialty opportunities.  

From experience, Gajos knew that quickly finding and connecting agents to the correct underwriter was the key to successfully writing this business.  

“When you get a risk in the door it’s key to connect to the right underwriter. Often, there are lots of different products/specialties an agent may need to leverage to serve a client. Each specialty unit has unique risk,” explains Gajos. The unique opportunity was to help the entire field sales team that supports The Hanover’s 2500 agency partners. COVID-19 exasperated the issue without the opportunity to build face-to-face relationships. 

Solution: The CoE used Power Virtual Agents to create a Chatbot that allows sales folks to easily find the correct underwriter. “I'm able to enter basic information, and then the bot produces back the underwriter who’s responsible for that business unit. I enter two simple inputs, and it's pulling from 25,000 to 30,000 lines of data to return me the exact person for the exact agency,” said Gajos.

The CoE was looking for a right-fit opportunity to try Power Virtual Agents, and this proved to be the perfect use case. The base PVA interface was all that was needed. It also met two critical requirements: ability to access on a phone and ability to make connections in real time. Gajos confirmed, “If an agent is asking questions, I can take the information from the bot, connect on Teams, and have a real-time chat.” 

Outcome: Easy, accurate connection in minutes, leading to faster sales cycles and enriching agent relationships. “Using our expertise, we are able to identify and close coverage gaps for our agents and insureds as well as solidify our own back-end retention,” summarizes Gajos. 

“That's where Power Platform with Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Apps came in. We saw connections with Azure and availability in one place. Seamless connectivity and high familiarity with Microsoft 365 tools make Power Automate the most logical fit for our journey.”

Prashant Hinge, Vice President, Automation and Employee Experience, The Hanover Insurance Group

Take the next step

Fuel innovation with Microsoft

Talk to an expert about custom solutions

Let us help you create customized solutions and achieve your unique business goals.

Drive results with proven solutions

Achieve more with the products and solutions that helped our customers reach their goals.

Follow Microsoft