Gregory Maciag

Good Service Makes Good Sense

"Studies show that satisfying and retaining an existing customer costs insurance carriers five to seven times less than capturing a new customer.” - Tom Clayton, HP insurance industry specialist.

Clayton's quote appears in the context of improving claims processing. He argues that speedy resolution is important to retaining customers, and adds that customers increasingly expect to interact with carriers through multiple channels. Multichannel is an area that many enterprises struggle with, because their existing systems are product-based. It may not be too hard to add a new customer communications channel to an existing system, but if you do it in a piecemeal manner you end up giving the customer a fragmented and frustrating experience.

Insurance customers ought to be able to initiate a claim by phone call, complete it by email or on a web page, and be informed of progress by SMS – or any permutation of these and other channels. This kind of flexible interaction is becoming the norm in other financial services and right across retail. Customers will judge their insurers on their ability to offer coherent and consistent multichannel experiences. The history of the legacy systems sitting behind their interaction don't interest them.

Emerging needs like this inevitably point back to the solution that's been around a long time, but which is forever new: standards. Multichannel demands standards, because standards are the only way you can mediate between different product systems and provide a unified engine for servicing the customer.

 Claims Innovation

 

 

Claims Technology

Property Casualty 360 recently ran a series of interviews about claims processing technology. There are lots of great insights in there, but here's one of of my favorite quotes: “The most significant impact that technology has is that it shortens the lifespan of a claim — everything from contact to inspection to settlement time frames.” - Ken Tolson, vice president, U.S. Property & Casualty Eastern Region, Crawford & Company.

I don't think technologists always recognize how important speed is to business. There's always plenty of talk about “streamlining processes”, but that can come over as a criterion of good design, rather than a real business benefit. But the point of streamlining anything is to make it go faster. Streamlined vehicles offer less wind resistance. Streamlined processes enable businesses to cut to the chase.

Use technology well, and you can manufacture the most precious commodity: time. The original aims of automation were around reducing clerical effort and multiplying scale. Today, the challenge is to get your information moving. If it's sitting some place, it's killing time. Tolson reminds us that taking a timeline perspective is crucial to improving business outcomes.

Insiders Guide to Claim Tech

Streamlining the Process

Clean Claims Data

Insurers in Ireland have been criticized for poor handling of shared claims data:

Ireland's deputy data protection commissioner Gary Davis] said that queries about claims were logged on Insurance Link as if a full claim had been made and that the system had no way to tell the difference between a query and a claim. “The sector was unable to tell the difference between an actual claim and a situation whereby a person just contacted their insurance company to make an inquiry,” Mr Davis said.

It's possible – although unknown at this time – that some customers may have had legitimate claims turned down. But the possibility is serious enough. This is extremely bad news for the image of Ireland's already battered financial sector.

Do I need to even point out the value of standards in avoiding this kind of situation? At their bare minimum, industry standards ensure that data relating to different business concepts are correctly contained and tagged. I guess we all thought this basic idea had been accepted long ago. It seems not.

Claims Falsely Reported