Improving the Claims Journey

How can we make the claims journey better for our customers? For us this starts before the product is even sold. At Coplus we consider how we are supporting the claimant right up front, at the product design stage. Of course this is the approach that now aligns with the new product governance requirements of the Insurance Distribution Directive.

In product governance we must make certain the insurance meets the requirements of the target audience and that clearly requires understanding of how the insurance will be utilised and the expectations of customers at the point of claim. A high level of indemnity could be seen as a way to ‘get customers attention’ but if the analysis of the target market and claims experience shows that the customers won’t benefit from the additional cover then it’s of no value, or even worse, could be costing the customer unnecessarily.

In addition to the design of the product, learning from the claims journey itself is paramount in ensuring the claims team are delivering in line with expectations. It is also critical in assessing product suitability and in identifying new product development opportunities.

The claims team amass a vast amount of data on each claim. The systematic analysis and root cause investigation of issues that may be complaints or indicators of dissatisfaction give us essential insights into process failings as well as highlighting where there is potential for innovation. The underlying issues revealed may present a step change in service.

We’ve done just that recently to improve the claims journey on a landlord legal product in partnership with one of our broker customers. When claims data showed a pattern of issues with letting agents we reviewed the claims journey and developed a new approach that supported the agents in a different way.

This led to an enhanced service that now gives the letting agents assistance with their legal obligations and mitigates problems that would occur in the future if they don’t fully understand or what they need to do or if they miss deadlines.

This enhanced service is a great example of how insight can be used to create a better claims experience and has been driven out of observing what has happened but also understanding the purpose of the insurance product itself.