Customer retention is the name of the game for the insurance industry. Agencies maintain good relations with customers through competitive premium rates, responsive customer service, and other client benefits. However, these good faith practices can fall by the wayside in a single transaction if the client is dissatisfied with your claims process.
The client is likely suffering a moment of distress, and the completion of the claims process is the primary hurdle between them and relief. When the process takes too long or is mired by errors that further delay the process, your customer will likely feel frustrated, hurting the likelihood that they’ll continue to be your client.
The average time to complete an automotive claim is about 30 days, while medical claims can take up to six weeks. Depending on several different factors, it’s possible for claims to take months to fully process. This timeframe can completely depend on how efficient your workflow is designed to be and how well your team can carry out the workflow.
Why So Slow?
Too Much Data: To process an insurance claim, there’s a lot of data to collect and organize, plus it rarely ever comes all at once. The sheer amount of data related to a claim ends up scattered across different mediums and platforms. Having multiple data silos means it takes longer to pull up all the necessary data to advance a single claim.
Too Many Manual Steps: Steps like initial review of the claim, verifying the policyholder’s status, verifying their policy, verifying they’re within the network, repricing, risk reviewing, sending the payment, and dozens of others in between all make up the claims process. This is where the slowdown usually occurs. Each of these steps involve routing documents to someone new so the claim can move to the next stage. An adjuster’s assessment of damages may be completed in a timely manner, but because they’re working on several other claims, it doesn’t get routed to their supervisor as quickly as it could have.
Too Many Touch Points: Minor errors such as routing a document to the wrong person, using the wrong coding, or even misplacing a single document can lead to massive delays in the process. Even the most efficient of workflows can fall subject to human error when things are done manually. The opposite can also be true. Due to workforce shortages, important claims will get delayed when there simply aren’t enough people to collect, organize, review, and approve.
How Do We Solve It?
Claims processing and its many stages have great potential to be automated. From first notice of loss, to data collection, investigation, and finally payment, automation can be introduced to streamline those stages and keep the claim process moving along once a team member’s task has been completed.
Process automation allows insurance agencies to make their document-driven procedures completed faster, with a significant reduction in human-error.
When evaluating your claim processing workflow for potential improvements, it all comes down to creating a better customer experience for your policyholders. When retention is a priority, making sure there are absolutely no hiccups in the process can drastically improve the speed and efficiency of the claim process.
Automation will make the process faster, but also ensure that human error is kept to a minimum and that the client gets an accurate and fair payment.
Let’s Get Started
Integrating automation into your claims process is easier than you think. Revver is the premier business process solution for reinventing your workflows, which will result in more positive customer outcomes. Clients will be impressed and relieved when their claim is settled faster than they expected. Revver can:
- Route documents to the right person
- Request documents from customers
- Request eSignatures from customers/employees
- Extract data
- Store documents for easy access later
Revver is your solution for revamping your claims process and meeting your customer satisfaction and retention goals. See for yourself how powerful an impact Revver can make for your agency.
