How Carriers Can Boost Efficiency, Productivity and Satisfaction with Hi Marley’s Multi-Party Texting

As a company focused solely on improving insurance communication and collaboration, we have noticed a recurring challenge facing our carrier customers. An adjuster starts an initial conversation with a policyholder filing an auto claim, but that person might not be the driver who got into the accident. It might be someone else on their policy, such as their child, spouse or parent. The carrier needs to speak directly with the driver to gather all necessary information for the claim. In these situations, wouldn’t it be great to seamlessly pull everyone into a single conversation thread?

Hi Marley could already assign multiple users to a conversation on the carrier side. However, the text thread only allowed communication with a single end-user participant, typically the policyholder or claimant. To solve this problem, we developed Multi-Party Texting (MPT). With this innovative and valuable feature, carrier users can now add multiple SMS participants to a single conversation in Hi Marley, reducing friction points and making the experience more delightful.

Reduce Cycle Time

We strive to move four needles for our customers with everything we do: save money, reduce cycle time, improve customer satisfaction and make insurance professionals happier. We hypothesized that MPT would move all four needles, and we would see the most impact on reducing cycle times because operators could consolidate several conversations into one thread—something they could not do before!

Operators can use MPT to bring in spouses, parents, children, witnesses, service providers or third-party contractors to keep everyone up-to-date and quickly get the right information from the right people. And MPT’s use extends beyond individuals and policyholders’ families to collaboration with others in the insurance ecosystem. One of our customers, a property claims processor, leverages MPT to pull contractors into their policyholder conversations to smooth out scheduling and claims communications.

Empower Insurance Professionals 

We knew MPT would benefit our customers. However, we did not know how often the need for MPT would arise. If an adjuster processes 100 claims in a month, how often do they need to add additional parties into the conversation?

We thought one-to-two percent of the conversations would require MPT. However, we included six different customers in our Beta process, who leveraged this feature for several hundred conversations. The data showed that closer to ten percent of conversations used MPT. The feature was even more valuable than we predicted.

Delight Policyholders 

We also felt confident MPT would delight policyholders because it would make it easier for everyone to share information and stay informed.

For example, during the Alpha/Beta process, one adjuster spoke with a policyholder whose daughter got into an accident. The adjuster needed pictures of the vehicle’s damage. The carrier quickly invited the daughter into the text thread, and she could share an image from her phone.

Another example included a woman who borrowed her friend’s car and got into an accident. The policyholder was not at the scene, so she could not provide much context to the adjuster. With MPT, the adjuster brought the friend directly into the conversation so she could share details of the accident while keeping the policyholder informed throughout.

Finally, in another case, one spouse was the driver, but the other spouse had more knowledge of the insurance policy. All concerned parties could participate in the conversation and be privy to all information from the carrier.

Ensure Compliance

As an insurance-focused platform, Hi Marley must prioritize security and compliance when introducing any new capability. MPT required a design that ensured a clear, compliant workflow for adding and removing individuals from conversations and controlling what each participant sees. The goal was to create a seamless experience for carrier users, policyholders and any added participants while meeting the data privacy needs of the insurance industry.

We also had to reconsider our platform’s existing communication features, such as intelligent translation, redaction, scheduled messages and media handling. It was important to address the policyholder’s preference of limiting access to certain portions of the chat history. For instance, if the driver shared personal information like a driver’s license, they may not want a witness who was added to the conversation to see that personal information.

With MPT, the carrier operator can control the visibility of such information. Achieving a simple and user-friendly design for this functionality posed a challenge, but the product, design and engineering teams successfully created a simple, elegant solution that ensured visibility, control, compliance and privacy.

Streamline Communication  

Hi Marley began with the vision that it is possible to enable better customer service and improve communication across the entire insurance ecosystem, starting with text messaging. We are furthering that mission with Multi-Party Texting.

Seeing how MPT makes carriers’ jobs easier and more efficient is extremely rewarding. I love to see how carrier customers can benefit from this new capability and how it drives positive experiences—something as simple as the peace of mind a policyholder gets when their spouse can easily be added to the conversation following an accident. MPT helps alleviate policyholder frustration and confusion, furthering Hi Marley’s goal of making insurance lovable.