Insurance companies make an unspoken promise to their customers: we’ll be there when you need us. Unfortunately, when it comes time to deliver, many policyholders ultimately don’t believe insurance companies are fulfilling this promise.
According to Accenture, 41% of policyholders who submit a claim are likely to switch insurance companies within a year. The survey also reveals that customers who have submitted an insurance claim in the past two years are almost twice as likely to switch insurers in the next 12 months compared to those who have not submitted a claim: 41% compared to 22%.
The importance of claims service
Claims are “the moment of truth” for insurers. Insurance companies might have no better opportunity to leave a positive impression and create loyalty then.
According to JD Power, consumer switching all comes down to poor customer service. As a company whose focus is enabling digital insurance products and experiences, Metromile Enterprise sees many insurers lagging on technology, including using legacy approaches and processes to serve their customers. This doesn’t work in 2020 when consumers have become accustomed to digital and self-service.
Today, we build relationships online. And because of this, digital laggards can find it challenging to establish relationships with their customers and differentiate their products, especially when they interact with them so infrequently. To improve customer satisfaction, insurers must focus on digitizing the claims process and, more importantly, give them the freedom to interact with insurers on their terms. To achieve this, insurers need to start with improving a customer’s first notice of loss (FNOL) experience.
Why insurance companies should consider digital FNOL
Companies like Amazon have set new consumer expectations, and consumers increasingly want digital options from the companies they do business with, including insurers.
By digitizing FNOL, insurers can move the claims process online and provide a more streamlined and improved customer experience.
Compare this to the current FNOL model used by many large insurance companies: Call center employees manually collect incident data in an error-prone, costly, and time-consuming process for the insurer.
Worst still, many insurance companies outsource their FNOL operations to a specialist contact center. Some customers do not want to rely on a call center through the claims process.
A recent survey by Intelligent Insurer found insurance executives identified FNOL (59%) as the part of the customer journey with the greatest potential for digitization, followed by payment (50%) and fraud checks (46%).
For the digital consumer, insurers must offer an omnichannel customer experience. Instead of relying on claims or customer service agents to manually collect and input data or provide critical information, customers should be able to serve themselves on their terms.
Fortunately, some insurers are beginning to make progress. According to Novarica, midsize property and casualty carriers have been slower to adopt the digital FNOL solutions, but more than one-third either have or intend to pilot mobile FNOL soon.
How insurance companies are digitizing their operations
Metromile Enterprise, the software-as-a-service business group of the namesake pay-per-mile car insurance leader, partners with insurance companies to help them operate with greater efficiency.
Insurance carriers are licensing Metromile Enterprise’s platform to automate claims to expedite resolution, reduce losses associated with fraud, and unlock the productivity of employees so they can work on higher-impact experiences.
In short, Metromile Enterprise focuses on providing insurance companies with the best possible omnichannel customer experience supported by intuitive digital processes.
Notably, Metromile Enterprise has a sophisticated touchless claims platform that can work on top of existing claims management software. Metromile launched Metromile Enterprise in 2018 to enable end-to-end digitization of the claims customer journey and make this valuable technology accessible to other property and casualty insurers around the world.
Report, our dynamic FNOL SaaS application, provides a way for carriers to offer 24/7 access to critical services, such as the ability to file claims digitally using their desktop or mobile phone.
Report gives customers a modern digital channel to report a loss of any type and tailor questions dynamically to capture the most necessary and relevant loss information. On average, 55% of all inbound claims at Metromile are filed digitally with Report, and two-thirds of those claims come from a mobile app or mobile browser.
Report is one of many cloud-based applications built on the Metromile touchless claims platform. Designed for claims teams at large insurance companies, Report allows claims subject matter experts to develop FNOL user interfaces without relying on IT resources or writing code. The web-native application can gather intel immediately after a loss through location services, image capture, video capture, and more.
Having a robust digital claim intake technology and process creates a strong foundation for carriers to develop claims straight-through processing capability. According to an Intelligent Insurer survey, getting value from claims data is most insurance executives’ top priority over the next 12 months.
Report can seamlessly capture and pass on the detailed claim data of any loss type to any of the insurer’s existing downstream claim systems to initiate any next steps from claim segmentation, fraud check to liability determination instantaneously.
When used with Detect, Metromile Enterprise’s AI fraud detection, and Streamline, Metromile’s intelligent process automation, Report can feed valuable loss information to Detect for automated fraud checks and to Streamline to give policyholders a digital claims experience, including the opportunity to self-service a claim without a claim adjuster’s help.
Digitizing claims can pay off. By making systematic yet bold moves, insurers could see increased customer satisfaction and reductions in claims expenses by up to 30%.
Reach out to us if you’re interested in learning about how we help insurers fast track their digital claims innovation roadmap.
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Amrish Singh is the general manager of Metromile Enterprise. A lifelong technologist, he has dedicated his career to helping companies operate with greater efficiency and provide a premium customer experience in the enterprise software industry.