Most of the time customers are going through the claim process after some kind of accident or emergency, whether it is personal, at their place of work, or affecting their entire community. Customers start the insurance claim process with anxiety and fear of the unknown. The insurance claims experience can add additional stress to a harrowing occurrence, or it can be something that eases a customer’s anxiety to better allow them to work through damage to their vehicle, property, or injury to themselves or an employee.
During significant weather events, ranging from heavy rain to hurricanes, call centers can be heavily impacted, and people end up spending what can feel like hours on hold. Customer frustration and phone system overloads create an insurance claims experience that begins negatively and builds upon the high emotional cost of a loss. If there are pauses downstream in assigning and acknowledging a new claim, the experience continues the downhill path which influences the entire experience.
After the first notice of loss (FNOL) or injury and the claim intake process, the claim assessment and management stages can add more stress as customers and claims adjusters must be in contact with each other and also coordinate obtaining documentation and information from multiple parties. The process is rarely smooth and often time consuming and confusing. The reality is that no one understands the claims process except a claims professional.
In order to sustain customer loyalty and use their time and resources efficiently, insurers must improve the entire insurance claim journey. Currently, the FNOL step, when the claim journey begins, is the most developed within the claims process. However, when the customer proceeds to the next step, the experience degenerates and leaves the customer with a negative view of the overall process and their insurance company.
In order to strengthen the process and improve the claims experience, insurance companies need to take three actions: communicate, personalize, and streamline. All three can be used to varying degrees throughout the claims process in conjunction with an effective and easy-to-develop Customer Experience Automation™ solution.
Customers in the digital age of online shopping, free delivery, and customized marketing are used to highly personalized customer experiences. This expectation has carried over into the insurance arena where customers expect a user experience that prompts them for information, simplifies the delivery of documentation, and shows them the real-time status of their insurance claim.
Automating your insurance claims process creates a positive claims experience that increases responsiveness to customer inquiries, offers choices throughout the process, and delivers up-to-date access for document resources and claim status.
If a process is sufficiently automated, customers who seek information about their claim can simply look up the process status using their digital device. If documents or data are missing, they can either provide it or work with their claims adjuster to retrieve it. And with a digital solution like Ushur’s Invisible App™, the insurance claim process becomes something that your customers can contribute to and reference. InvisibleApp™ and Ushur’s use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) can offer instant answers to their queries, either through the use of a text message, or an email, or chat applications like WhatsApp.
Disparities in the amount of information available to participating parties erode trust in these high-touch experiences. Just as claims adjusters have data available to them, the customer should also have a level of information that they can review. This added level of transparency enables customers to ask questions using a responsive system rather than depending solely on the claims adjuster and decreases unnecessary calls that lower wait times for customer queries.
The current insurance claims experience begins in a straightforward, streamlined fashion at the FNOL. But then the process degrades as it slips into the traditional way of gathering and transmitting information between the customer and the claims adjuster. The customer grows increasingly distanced from the process and unhappy because of the lack of insight while the claims adjuster manages multiple claims and attempts to maintain goodwill between all the parties involved.
Streamlining the process using automation simply removes the repetitive and predictable tasks and places them in an automated process that can either collect the critical data or retrieve important documents from the customer and other parties directly.
Eliminating redundancies in the process frees the claims adjuster to give their full attention to the customer. The claims process allows your employees to truly shine and be there for your customers and their employees.[4] And customers respond with increased loyalty and satisfaction ratings.
Additionally, automation facilitates faster claim resolution by simplifying the retrieval of information and the collection of data. Automation eliminates the bottleneck when the claims adjuster is the only one who can collect and enter the data into the system. You can have each stakeholder upload their documentation individually. As an example, the body shop estimate would simply be scanned and uploaded directly without the need for intervention by the adjuster. As would the medical records or the rental car agency documentation.
Customer experience research shows that a positive insurance claims experience directly affects a customer’s attitude about their insurance company. It has been proven that customers whose insurance claims experience exceeds their expectations are more likely to stay with their current insurance company even when taking product pricing into consideration. Opening lines of communication to your customers, creating a personalized customer experience, and building an efficient claims process are achievable goals using automation that incorporate machine learning and AI.
Ushur’s AI-powered Customer Experience Automation™ platform puts automation tools in the hands of the users that know your business best. The no-code FlowBuilder makes it easy for business analysts to easily build omnichannel flows to automate the repetitive work that burdens them on a routine basis. Even for users with no coding skills, Ushur can give you fine-grained control over how you engage with customers throughout the claims process.
Ushur enables flexible 2-way customer engagements where the customer is in control of their insurance claim experience from start to finish, regardless of the communication channel. The platform empowers customers with multiple ways to connect; from email, to text, to mobile apps, to chatbots that allow customers to engage directly with their insurance company at any time, from anywhere.
Ushur customers have created and deployed new, high-value automation in hours. They have seen significant inbound call volume reductions and elevated customer satisfaction scores, including proactive claim status updates that allow insurers to build great customer experiences when their customers need them the most.
Let Ushur automate your insurance claims processes to improve customer satisfaction. Let smart technology take your insurance organization to the next level.
Ushur delivers the world’s first AI-powered Customer Experience Automation™ platform that has been purpose-built, from the ground up, to intelligently automate entire customer journeys, end to end. Designed to deliver delightful, hyper-personalized customer experiences through rapid issue resolution and unified, omnichannel engagement, Ushur is the first-of-its-kind system of intelligence. It combines Conversational Automation and Knowledge Work Automation in a No-Code, Cloud-native, SaaS platform to digitally transform every step of the complete enterprise customer experience – from Micro-engagements™ to entire customer journeys.
Backed by leading investors including Third Point Ventures, 8VC, Pentland Ventures, Aflac Ventures and Iron Pillar, Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation™ solutions are currently in production at some of the leading insurance providers across the globe including Irish Life, Unum, Aetna, Cigna and Tower Insurance.
