How the insurance industry uses PDF

It’s an understatement to say that the insurance industry relies on a lot of documents. After all, this is a business that’s primarily about services and agreements—taking the form of contracts, policy endorsements, no-loss statements, claims, and more. Much of that documentation relies on PDF to make documents universally readable. But today’s insurance industry goes even further.

With sophisticated document management solutions, many of which incorporate PDF software to standardize digital documents, insurance is transforming from a paper chase to a streamlined, mobile, anywhere/anytime industry. Let’s take a look.

Signing documents with PDF software

Since over 75% of insurance sales are initiated over the telephone and deals often get closed when customers and agents aren’t in the same locale, today’s insurance agents need to be accessible to their customers anywhere, anytime.

Agents are salespeople, and like all good salespeople, they’re highly mobile, relying on smartphones and tablets to do business anywhere they can get an Internet connection. Since much of insurance agents’ business relies upon customers putting their John or Jane Hancock on documents, PDF software today is at the ready to enable this.

When documents need to be finalized, using mobile PDF-enabled applications, agents have the ability to get a signature immediately. And unlike their inky counterparts, digital signatures generated within PDF software come with an authentication process built right in, capturing information about who signed the PDF document along with the date and time.

Many of today’s sophisticated insurance apps with PDF functionality also automatically send the completed document back to the agent or the agent’s home office while giving customers a copy for their records.

PDF helps email archiving for claims management

Getting an auto, property, medical malpractice, product liability or workers’ compensation claim through the insurance claims process is an exercise for any company. Working with adjusters, investigators, appraisers and attorneys generates volumes of documents, many of which are sent via volumes of email. And that email needs to be archived yet accessible for a long, long time.

In the past, insurance companies may have had to print and then scan emails and attachments in order to ready them for digital archiving. But today, insurance providers implement systems to automate email archiving. These systems even automatically convert email attachments, which are often in Microsoft product formats, into PDFs ready for archiving, and with tags and meta data intact or added, search is streamlined, too.

PDF form creation is quick and easy
PDF software such as Foxit PhantomPDF offers capabilities that enable any company that relies on forms to quickly and easily create forms.

Insurance organizations can scan existing paper insurance forms directly into PDF and call it a day. Or better yet, they can create interactive PDF forms from those scanned PDFs or other existing PDF form files.

Features such as automated form field recognition in PDF software like Foxit PDF Editor Business automatically identifies likely form fields in insurance companies’ PDF forms. After it does all the heavy lifting, anyone creating the form can then touch up the resulting file to add, change or remove fields.

What’s more, insurance agencies can use these time- and work-saving forms to capture data more easily. With Foxit PDF Editor Pro and a little custom JavaScript (which is built-in), they can connect interactive forms to their database and insert, update, or delete database information. That means less manual data entry, which reduces time, cost and errors—valuable for any industry, essential for the insurance industry.