Leverage technology and expedite claims to enhance the customer and employee experience

Gijsbert Cox, Industry Leader, Insurance at Appian, joins a panel of experts at a webinar hosted by Intelligent Insurer to discuss how to “Leverage Technology and Expedite Claims to Enhance the Customer and Employee Experience” on October 1, 2021. To expedite claims, Cox says, most claims operations teams have to “juggle multiple disparate claims and policy systems, which slows down the claims process and increases the potential for inaccurate decision-making, fraud, or losing a customer by not meeting their service expectations”.

He believes the problem is that most insurers are challenged by “a mess of disconnected existing IT systems with data that is dispersed and doesn’t easily integrate, resulting in silos.” Insurers need to resolve this issue. In this webinar you will find out why they need a way to automate and transform the claims process to improve the customer experience while increasing efficiency.

Delegates will also find out why it’s not just about delivering superior customer experience. Optimising claims management permits insurers to empower their own workforce. They need to remain competitive, so the discussion will consider how retaining and attracting top talent can increase competitiveness. Part of the equation is about meeting employees’ digital expectations, and that involves having the right people, processes, and technologies in place.

For example, learn why requiring claims handlers to log into multiple systems to find the data and information they need is counterproductive because of the manual work this inevitably creates—reducing job satisfaction in turn. Find out how streamlining and automating these manual tasks can free up staff time to focus on more high-impact, meaningful work.

With other industry experts, Cox will debate how to:

Cox will be joined by David Fineberg, Head of Claims at Generali UK; Kirsten Westly, Head of Financial and Professional Lines Claims at HDI Global Specialty SE–UK; Martin Kroos, Head of Claims at Achmea; and the session will be moderated by Adrian Gilbert, Claims Director at SX3 Claims.

Ahead of the event, Cox spoke to Intelligent Insurer about his thoughts on leveraging technology and how to expedite claims to improve and enhance the customer and employee experience.

What should insurers do to conquer the challenge of growing technical debt by creating a process landscape around the customer journey?

Liberty Advisory Group cites analyst firm Forrester Research, which estimates that maintaining older applications and technology typically costs 70 percent or more of an organisation’s technology budget. This severely limits what can be spent on innovation or new development for value-added services that would enhance the customer experience.

Using low-code automation, insurers can unify their existing systems without data migration and create a single engagement layer across the entire claims process. This reduces insurers’ technical debt and frees up IT budgets to be spent on more innovative technologies focused on improving the customer journey.

How can insurers optimise FNOL and claims validation processes?

Most insurers now have online submission capabilities for FNOL, along with call centres, but the processes are often siloed and slow. They require manual intervention at multiple points over the lifetime of the claim, resulting in cycle time delays. Complicating matters further, insurers are typically bound to certain data fields and the process is not always user-friendly for the customer, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate information.

As insurers look to future-proof their claims operations, they need to look for ways to be more flexible in their FNOL data capture and gather information outside their legacy system’s proprietary data model. In order to achieve this, insurers need to have the right business rules and technology in place. They need to look for ways to optimise FNOL using new technologies with intelligent document processing and artificial intelligence to automatically extract information from claims documents and expedite intake.

To what extent is this about combining people, technologies, and data in a single workflow?

Imagine a world where all your claim records, policy systems, and customer data are integrated and connected. Where you can access a single, centralised source of truth for each claim, rather than logging in to five or 10 different systems.

Using low-code automation, you can unify claims and data systems without migration and gain a centralised, 360-degree view of claims from all customer relationship management and legacy systems. This, in turn, empowers your team to deliver actionable, accurate information and enable seamless communication for a best-in-class customer experience.

With low-code automation and hyperautomation, you can combine people, technologies, and data into a single workflow to expedite claims handling, reduce leakage, and improve customer satisfaction.

You can also more easily segment the flow of claims to increase straight-through processing, meaning you can automate fewer complex claims while ensuring complex claims and exceptions are picked up by more experienced claims handlers. You can optimise your workflow to orchestrate the claims volumes that come in every day.

What strategies should insurers deploy to enable agile collaboration between IT and the business to expedite claims handling?

There has always been a gap between IT and business at insurers. They often have different mindsets, but you can bring them together in collaborative, multidisciplinary teams. With low-code automation, it’s even easier to build that bridge. Low-code development is very visual. For example, low-code involves drawing flowcharts that you can design with the user in mind and depict exactly what their screen and customer journey needs to look like.

With low-code, development can be done rapidly, allowing you to deliver transparency and efficiency into your claims environment in days, not months. Business users can then quickly review what IT put together and provide instant feedback, and if regulations or market needs change down the road, they can work together to rapidly make adjustments.

What key points would you like attendees to take away from the webinar?

There are innovative low-code automation technologies available to insurers to modernise the claims process and bring their claims handling to the next level for customers and for their employees.

By delivering a digital-first, connected claims experience, insurers can future-proof their claims operations, mitigate leakage, and increase straight-through processing, all while providing a superior customer experience.

Gijsbert Cox, Industry Leader, Insurance at Appian, is speaking at our new webinar “Leverage Technology and Expedite Claims to Enhance the Customer and Employee Experience” (Friday, October 1, 2021).  Register here to learn how to leverage technology to expedite claims and improve the employee and customer experience in this upcoming webinar. If you can’t make it on the day, you’ll be sent the recording.