Improving Claims Best Practices with Insights from Conversational Text Data

Insurance coverage is something people put away and forget about until something goes awry. The moment of truth occurs when a policyholder suffers a loss. In the P&C insurance industry, we make the most positive impact on our policyholders by being fair, empathetic and providing timely, efficient and effective claims service.

Noted Management Guru Peter Drucker once said, “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”

The insured customers’ positive or negative perceptions from their experiences are significantly based on their own expectations. Problems arise when the insurance carrier defines “timely, efficient and effective” without considering the policyholder’s perspective. It’s all about managing expectations from conversation-one with the policyholder, which means interacting in the way they prefer or expect to communicate.

As part of larger digital transformation strategies, text messaging has been widely adopted within the P&C insurance industry to provide more timely, efficient and effective service that meets customers’ shifting communication preferences. Text messaging conversations offer deeper insights into how policyholders feel and how teams perform throughout the claims process. Organizations can leverage the data generated from texting conversations to help identify new service best practices that they should consistently apply throughout the phases of the claims value chain.

Sentiment Data is a Powerful Tool for Managing the Customer Experience

When merged and analyzed properly, conversation transcripts, surveys and conversational sentiment data can be incredibly powerful tools for continuously identifying and managing customer expectations and in turn, providing better experiences.

With a 40+ percent return rate for its customer surveys, Westfield Insurance knows the valuable sentiment data surveys offer. “Our frontline people have the toughest roles, and they do a fantastic job. The surveys give us a true view of their performance and how the claims process is going,” said Robert Bowers, National Claims and Customer Service Leader at Westfield Insurance. “I review every survey comment and send notes to our claims reps and unit leaders, mostly about recognition and reward—each month, we really try to reinforce the great work our teams are doing.”

Carriers can leverage message sentiment data to look for trends and inform and educate their claims organizations in areas where and why they are not meeting their customers’ requirements. For example, one Hi Marley carrier customer looked at scores, comments and sentiment from their customer survey data. One of the most frequent issues driving a sub-optimal experience appeared to be policyholder concern with the timeliness of settlement. However, their cycle times were actually trending lower than the industry average. So, what was the issue? After digging through conversational data, they realized that the true culprit was failing to consistently explain the claims process and set reasonable settlement timelines.

Conversational insights allow supervisors and managers to identify claims friction points easier and proactively build or change processes and implement best practices based on the root causes of issues, rather than risk wasting time and resources focusing on the symptoms of the problem.

Conversational Data Offers Real-time Actionable Insights for Carriers

We recently introduced Hi Marley’s expanded Coaching capabilities that turn unstructured SMS conversational data into actionable insights and AI-enabled message intelligence to help carriers drive their businesses forward.

With three distinct tailored performance dashboards, carriers can visualize and study data from their text conversations, identify critical information and, where applicable, take corrective action that accelerates productivity, efficiency, and improves the customer experience. The My Org Insights Dashboard captures organizational-level data in one place to help leaders drive better outcomes across teams and locations. Supervisors and managers can access team metrics with the My Team Insights dashboard, identify areas for performance improvements, provide targeted team support and recognize and celebrate great work. And, in the My Insights dashboard, employees experience a personalized landing page, highlighting outstanding customer contact tasks and positive customer feedback.

Coaching amplifies the voice of the customer and empowers carriers with the insight they need to provide proactive, supportive, empathetic service.

By integrating the voice of their customer and key operational findings into best practices, P&C carriers can continually measure performance, identify issues and mitigate poor policyholder experiences by improving their approach and processes. The result? Greater policyholder retention and profitability for the organization.

Learn more about how on-the-job Coaching and insights can help your organization accelerate efficiency and improve performance.