3 ways carriers can boost customer experience and security with trust automation

A little knowledge can be a frustrating thing. Back in the late 1800s, retail giant John Wanamaker complained that he knew half of his advertising budget was useless – he just didn’t know which half.

Fast forward to today’s insurance industry. Property casualty carriers know that fraudsters file only about 10% of the total claims they receive. But because carriers don’t know which claims are the fraudulent ones, they need to examine virtually all of them carefully.

Call it distrust by default.

And it cuts two ways. On the one hand, insurers are typically forced into rigorous and often time-consuming manual processes to minimize fraud when they underwrite policies, conduct investigations and settle claims. On the other hand, what customers often get as a result of these processes is slower service and an inferior customer experience.

Being smart about applying technology to the problem of distrust by default can boost customer experience and security in three key ways:

1.      Underwriters can…

·        Write policies faster, more consistently, and with less bias

·        Gather risk insights for an entire portfolio

·        Combine data for a comprehensive view of every risk

Many insurers with databases of historical business information could answer their risk-related underwriting questions – if only they had the tools and the time to mine that data. What are the relevant characteristics of the new business and are they fully accounted for in the quote? How – and how well – does a given business fit a carrier’s risk appetite? How does that business affect the balance of the carrier’s portfolio.

These questions must be answered accurately and quickly. An unacceptable delay (from the customer’s point of view) can damage the trust relationship with the carrier before it has a chance to begin. As well, the more time you invest in considering a customer you ultimately reject, the more time you’ve wasted from a revenue standpoint. The right technology can help you begin your trust relationships faster and on surer footings, and identify and reject unwanted business more quickly and accurately.

2.      Claims adjusters can…

·        Pay out trustworthy claims faster

·        Consistently screen claims to improve referrals and catch fraud

·        Gain a helicopter view that shows actionable insights from all data points

Carriers may have robust rules and practices in place regarding claims adjustment, yet still face a challenge in implementing them. That’s because the number of adjusters who are well trained and experienced in fraud detection may be small, even within large insurers. Many adjusters are at or near the start of their careers, churn can be high, and fraud detection can be a subtle art. With the volume of claims constantly growing, adjusters are often faced with the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack that’s hurtling past them at increasing speed.

Apps that speed claims submissions from customers can enhance the customer experience, particularly when they speed claims payments, but they can also aid fraudsters by making it easier for them to disguise false claims as legitimate ones. Technology that brings together more points of data than a single adjuster can manage, and finds the relevant fact patterns among them, can help address this dilemma.

3.      Investigators can…

·        Reduce turnaround times for legitimate claims by verifying trust

·        Integrate their work with external vendors in a central environment

·        Easily compile and share case notes when trust should be challenged

Claims investigators are also under pressure to do their jobs faster, identifying valid claims quickly so they can be paid, and spotting the evidence to back up a denial when it’s challenged by the customer, consumer group, regulatory agency, or other third party. Carriers need ways to scale out their investigators’ expertise so they can handle increasing caseloads without experiencing increasing pressure.

One key to achieving this scale is automating the parts of investigators’ work – such as organization and administration of claims – that don’t rely on the investigators’ expertise. Another way is to use technology to make supporting photos and data faster and easier to access. By solving this challenge, insurers can connect all the dots from underwriting to claims adjustment to investigations. The result can be a comprehensive, end-to-end automation solution that works consistently to boost trust and customer satisfaction while weeding out fraud and unacceptable risk.

That’s the theory, anyway. But how do you use technology effectively to achieve these benefits? For an insurance industry fighting to overcome distrust by default, the way forward is trust automation. Automating trust is crucial because it delivers the fast, reliable, and consistent processes that insurers need to safely speed up customer service and boost customer satisfaction and trust without incurring greater risk. It highlights connections among data that an unaided employee could not, giving insurers the confidence that they are doing a better job of underwriting the right risks and paying legitimate claims.

Trust automation works by:

·        Automating data-gathering processes to empower your underwriters to evaluate all risks, including those they couldn’t previously consider for lack of data

·        Distilling data into easy-to-read fraud indicators that empower claims adjusters to flag claims that need deeper reviews

·        Centralizing the investigation and automating tasks, so that the right people have access to the right information in one place, and investigations are completed in a timely manner.

It’s also important to understand what trust automation isn’t. It isn’t a way to replace your people; rather, it’s a way to make them more productive, so they respond to customers more quickly and appropriately, delivering better customer service.

Further, trust automation isn’t a fixed offering. It’s an approach to the need to safely speed up processes to deliver better, faster customer service while maintaining and increasing accuracy and reliability. As such, trust automation isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that you must shoehorn into your current IT infrastructure. Rather, it’s a mindset with which to evolve your infrastructure to address the distinctive challenges you face in delivering your services.

Is trust automation right for your company? The ideal insurer for this solution is already technologically mature, with the data savviness to integrate trust automation into its existing technologies. Also, trust automation works best at companies that have a wealth of historical data to mine in the hunt for fraud, as well as a mature fraud-fighting department and a company culture that promotes fighting fraud and building trust.

How does trust automation work in practice and how might it work for you? Find out in our eBook "Trust Automation - A way for insurers to speed up customer service, enhance trust, and reduce costs"