The insurance industry has long been associated with disjointed and frustrating customer service experiences, particularly when it comes to the claims process. But with pressure from regulators calling for better customer service, more insurers are looking to overhaul their claims management process to address these key pain points for customers.
But doing so without consulting your data can mean you’re neglecting to address key issues that could make all the difference to your claims management process. Here, we explore the insights that you should be paying attention to.
Leveraging insights for better claims management
Claims insights are a critical component when insurers are looking to improve their overall customer service and offerings. By utilizing the information available to them, insurers can gain a holistic understanding of the claims that are being made, and quickly spot emerging trends.
By leveraging the benefits of data analytics and insights for the claims process, you can create easier claims processes and quicker settlements for your customers. These improved claims outcomes can help to significantly enhance the customer service experience. Here are five data points we think could help you achieve this:
1. Claimant identity and history
As part of anti-money laundering legislation, it’s critical for your claims handlers and adjusters to know exactly who each claimant is, and that verification has been run to spot potential cases of fraud. Having claimant identity stored can help insurers to spot potentially risky cases and help them to manage this risk accordingly.
An insurer’s priority should be to use data about a single individual from multiple perspectives. Internally, this could mean looking toward transactional data or customer history reports which can inform whether a claim could be suspicious and should be further investigated as such.
2. Claim type
Whether you’re using analytics or not yet, it’s important that you don’t neglect to investigate the main problem areas that need to be solved, as doing so can mean you sacrifice seeing the full value from your data insights.
As we hit peak season for claims, it’s crucial your team can use the time available settling claims as smartly as possible. Data insights about the claim types that are being submitted can help you to identify what common claims are being made, and identify which of these can be automated, and which will perhaps require redirecting to handlers for further discussion and resolution.
Plus, capturing necessary information that’s unique to the claim type, such as whether it’s worker’s compensation, property, or auto-liability, can provide a better overall view of the claim and help segment these for trend data.
3. Handler/adjuster performance
Knowing where both your customers or internal teams are being tripped up within the claims process is integral to improving the overall service your customers experience. Looking at the overall efficiency and performance of your claims handlers or adjusters will highlight which areas of your claims processing service needs improving, and where there are opportunities to introduce new aspects to help streamline the process.
These insights are also useful if you’re looking to implement an employee reward initiative, and you can even strike up some healthy competition between your claims handlers to see who can settle the most claims while still providing excellent customer service.
4. Settlement duration
Long waiting times are a common customer pain point for all industries, so knowing how long it’s taking to settle customer claims can be a good indicator of whether you need to put some time-saving measures in place. For example, this could mean implementing seasonal claims handlers to help manage the workload during peak periods, such as winter, or automating elements of the claims handling process.
More and more insurers are going digital and relying on AI and automation, whether that’s through implementing chatbots on their website to deal with basic queries or integrating claims management software to help efficiently manage and automate claim processing. There are even features nowadays that allow firms to reference form letters and allow for the claim information to be auto filled into the appropriate fields, to take the manual workload off your team’s hands.
5. Denials
There will always be claims that aren’t eligible for compensation, but knowing more about the cases that have been denied can help you to improve the customer experience for other claimants. For example, by segmenting the denial types, you can instantly see which cases are likely to be denied from the outset, so you can automate your claims submission process to notify claimants of this before they take time to fill out a form.
Similarly, denials data can help to protect your firm, and ultimately other customers, from bad actors. By looking at how many times a customer has had their claim denied, you can work to manage risk appropriately, which will benefit both your customers and your business.
Leverage the power of data and learn how you can utilize these insights to create a smoother, better-informed customer experience for claimants.
Want to learn how our claims management software can help? Get in touch for a chat or to schedule a demo and see ClaimPilot in action.
