3.5 Things to Know About Claims Systems

Part 1 – Your claims process and systems are a customer-experience issue. What is the most important task of a life insurance company? There are many answers to this question. It all depends on your role or paradigm of the company. When you break it all down, I believe there is one task that is most important within a life insurance company. It is to pay claims! Think about it. If a life insurance company is not good at paying claims, then what is its purpose? A recent article in A.M. Best’s journal shared a survey that indicated the top two items that needed technology improvement are:

1. Improving the customer (and agent) experience.
2. Legacy administrative and claims systems.

Let’s discuss #1 first. If you have never read the book called "Delivering Happiness," by Tony Hsieh, I recommend it to everyone in your organization. Stop reading this article and go buy the book or audio version. The idea is, if you focus your attention on customers and their experiences, the business will thrive. Of course, you have to start with a strong culture and hire the right people. You have to give them the atmosphere, tools and freedom to tackle the work. Happy employees will lead to happy customers! We believe that 96% of carriers have decided that claims transformation and digitization is imperative. We believe the 85% of carriers’ executive teams are dedicated to claims excellence and good customer experiences. See also: Finding Efficiencies in Claims Process   You must design your claims process with the customer in mind. Here are some questions to keep in mind as you and your team evaluates the claims process:

• Do customers want to go through an old process of jumping through hoops?
• Do customers want to go to your website, download a PDF claim form that isn’t even fillable, print this form, fill it out and then mail it in, only to receive a five- to eight-page claim packet two weeks later that they feel will need an attorney to complete? YUCK!!
• What kind of experience are you presenting with a process like this? Would you want to go through this experience?
• More importantly, do you think you will ever have a chance to sell this customer any of your products in the future?
• What is your customer acquisition cost if you could retain this client with a great customer experience?

The point is, you must be on a mission to create a better customer experience. Your customers demand it! Today’s consumers expect to have an easy experience. They expect multiple resources to enhance that experience. They want to be able to complete these processes on their time, not the company's. Updating and maintaining technologies are crucial to an insurer's ability to capture and retain these technology-savvy customers. See also: Global Trend Map No. 10: Claims   Stay tuned for next issue – Part 2 – You can reduce your claims expenses and improve the customer experience.