Customer-Centric Automation During Hurricane Season
May 09, 2022
Hurricane season is fast approaching and 2022 is predicted to be as busy as 2021, which was the 3rd most active on record. Insurance carriers are already rallying their operations to get ready for repeat waves of new claim reports that span catastrophic losses to minor damage.
Consumer expectations have evolved at an accelerated pace over the past two years and across all generations. Not only do customers expect the option of easy self-service when interacting with a provider of a service or product. Customers also increasingly see proactive communication as a commodity experience.
When one thinks about service in the context of insurance, the claim journey is understandably the interaction that comes to mind most often. And survey after survey reaffirms that a poor claim experience is a leading reason why a customer changes carriers.
Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) is an opinionated technological stack that handles not just the automation usually handled by things like conversational agents (chatbots), but also knowledge work automation for back-office processes. Ushur handles conversational texts, phone calls, or emails, routes them, and through enterprise-grade integrations (and security), makes customer experiences feel seamless. While other companies have built, or bolted-on, parts and pieces of a CXA stack, Ushur is the only CXA platform that has pre-built the stack to make it possible to achieve time to value quickly and make rapid experimentation effortless.
But before we delve into ways that Customer Experience Automation™ can transform the claim experience, it’s equally important to explore how carriers can also help their customers prepare for a significant weather event.
Loss prevention has traditionally focused more heavily on businesses, with industry specialists providing thought leadership on how to prevent losses from occurring in the first place. However, catastrophic weather events like hurricanes do not discriminate in their impact and destroy homes along with commercial structures.
It’s important for carriers to be able to reach all of their customers - both personal and commercial - to alert them when their insured property is in the predicted path of a hurricane. And while just an alert would be helpful, CXA can make this proactive engagement more meaningful. Many insurance carriers have networks of emergency repair services, like board-up companies, that they engage for rapid post-loss customer assistance. Imagine as part of a proactive hurricane alert received via SMS or email, a carrier could give a customer access to those same resources and empower them to protect their property. That same communication would also include 1-click access to report any subsequent damage.
With the power of CXA, carriers can tailor each customer’s claim journey, be it the result of a hurricane or an individualized cause of loss. Catastrophic damage warrants a person-to-person conversation to dispatch emergency services as quickly as possible. Conversely, customers who may only be dealing with a damaged fence from a fallen tree may prefer the first notice of loss process that they can initiate from their phone or laptop, and with the upload of a photograph and repair estimate, see their claim propel forward to payment. CXA can enable straight-through processing (STP) of claims through its ability to understand, validate, and interface data to a carrier’s back-end core claim system.
Long-running claims include many discrete interactions between the carrier and customer; what we refer to as Micro-Engagements™. While a customer is juggling contractor visits and overseeing clean-up after a severe weather event, and potentially temporarily living in a hotel, they are also still living their day-to-day lives. From working at jobs to coordinating school transportation, and attending extracurricular activities, life doesn’t stop after a hurricane. When a company provides customers an option as easy as a text message to #claimstatus for the timing of their claim payments, the brand is offering the same speed and ease that every customer has learned to expect as an everyday consumer. That same ease doesn’t only apply to customers checking status information. Customer Experience Automation™ also applies when the claims adjuster needs to reach the customer, perhaps to complete and e-sign a proof of loss or even to schedule a convenient time for a phone call.
For this year's hurricane season, if you and your call center and claims operations are already worried about being overwhelmed by new claim volumes and keeping every policyholder satisfied, consider advanced planning to try CXA within your customer service. See what it takes to drive automation from days to minutes, and start with small-scale experiments for customer service automation. Ushur proves value as quickly as a single-click deployment, and with easy development.
If you’re curious about Ushur and how it quickly drives value for your customers in an increasingly busy annual hurricane season via Customer Experience Automation™, contact us at ushur.com/request-demo.
