A question for the reader – what comes to mind when you think about the claims experience?
THE EMOTIONAL JOURNEY
I have talked a little bit in the past about claims being perhaps the most emotional phase of the insurance lifecycle.
In an industry that can at times be incredibly technical, process heavy and complex; compassion and empathy often become indicative of a poor customer experience as customers struggle to navigate a landscape fraught with complexity.
There is a certain amount of friction that gets generated as a customer moves across the insurance value chain, which typically starts all the way back at the beginning of the journey, with a lack of clarity around what the insured is covered for, what the insured thinks they are covered for and lastly, what the insured should be covered for.
The outcome is an insurance experience that invariably becomes dominated by friction, one that can be incredibly damaging, both for the customer and the insurer.
How can companies leverage people, process, technology, and data to close the underinsurance gap, eliminate the friction and noise, and create a customer experience that exudes compassion and empathy?
Let’s take a dive into several key themes:
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
“Customers expect the Amazon experience, not the 1970’s K-Mart experience.” – Brent Williams – Benekiva
Brent hits the nail on the head. We need to look at the insurance experience as one that encompasses the sort of experience that Amazon provides for their customers. We have all heard the rhetoric around customer 360, know-your-customer etc. but what exactly does that mean for insurance?
TRANSPARENCY
For Amazon, yes, the customer service is exceptional, but so much of that success can be attributed to transparency and knowing where you are on your journey. Product delivery, returns, pick any segment of the amazon journey and there is an element of transparency to it that gives you as a customer insight into exactly where you are on that journey. Claims is no different. No matter where you are on your claim journey, transparency is key.
We are steadily adding a lot of very cool, stand-alone features and capabilities to the claim journey. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning driven image recognition is driving greater insight around the nature of the claim itself. However, so much of the broader journey remains fragmented. In an auto claim last year, I did not find out for three weeks that my claim had been prematurely closed. A phone call to the carrier rectified the problem, however, lack of transparency continues to be a real problem.
“Dominoes has the pizza tracker. You know where your pizza is at, but you don’t know where your claim is at !” – Brent Williams – Benekiva
COLLABORATION
As we move towards the second quarter of 2022, it is becoming clearer that the path to a frictionless and compassionate claims journey does not only require a convergence of ideas and capabilities around people, process, technology, and data, we are also seeing, as Deborah Watkins, Founder and CEO of Care Bridge International has noted, “a convergence of disruption“.
As we know, the pandemic created a huge disruption in the insurance marketplace – remote working, enormous pressure on legacy systems that deliver slow and friction heavy customer engagement, immediate demand for insurance products, high volume of claims, business interruption and cybersecurity issues as a virtual and remote working environment opened itself up to cyber-attacks.
In addition, many organizations offered early retirement packages to an aging insurance workforce. The convergence of these things means there is a need for technology and platforms that can not only improve security but can accommodate and alleviate the disruption in the claims process, mitigate the risk of interruption in the claim process now and into the future, to withstand future risk and uncertainty.
AUGMENTING THE WORKFORCE
As we move steadily towards a younger, less experienced work force, the need for platforms and tools that train, educate, and provide a greater level of actionable insight to our teams becomes even more urgent. Without the experience, we need tools that will help claim professionals perform their roles more effectively – how?
Through the careful alignment of people, process, technology, and data, within platforms that are accessible to all stakeholders across the journey.
At Care Bridge International, we leverage our BridgeIT platform to provide actionable insight and historical data to all our stakeholders.
WALK, RUN, SPRINT!
How as an organization do you get started on this journey?
Technology is more accessible than ever before, but that also opens the door to complexity around integration. It is important to recognize that whilst the journey is one that can take many twists and turns, it is very easy to get started.
It is also incredibly important to get started as soon as you can and capture as much insight as you can early in the claims journey. Take bodily injury, for example, there is a real gap in the claim environment around what is a compensable injury. If you don’t understand that early in the claim process, what is compensable, you start to see the impact later in the claim cycle when you are faced with a very expensive and “messy” claim. At Care Bridge International, we have made it incredibly easy to begin your digital transformation journey to gain greater transparency into your claims environment through Care Bridge International’s WALK, RUN, SPRINT approach – you can come exactly as you are and begin today!
Our Quick Referral form asks only a handful of simple questions so you can quickly be on your way. Think of it as delivering our own version of the Amazon experience.
THE FUTURE
“To be sustainable as an organization, thrive in the future, you have to adapt & adopt” – Deborah Watkins – Care Bridge International
This is no longer a niche conversation around customer journey mapping & design thinking. The InsurTech conversation has become standardized within both the incumbent and InsurTech space. We all recognize that there has been an increasing amount of emphasis over the past couple of years around the customer experience, but as Brent, Bobbie, and Deborah have highlighted, we are now starting to see the rubber hit the road around distribution, servicing, and claims. Now is the time to move and now is the time to act.
“Let’s not change, let’s transform!” – Bobbie Shrivastav – Benekiva
Our consultative, customer journey approach places your needs front and center to create a program that aligns with your companies’ best practices and needs.
For more information, email Bob Schmidt, our Chief Client Officer at Bob@CareBridgeInc.com
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