Proactive CAT Management
Handling claim surge is all thanks to the amount of planning and effort put forth before they happen. Some vendors ask for as many claims as possible, but then they commonly find themselves overwhelmed, leading to long lead times and dissatisfied customers. A leading indicator of supply chain issues is “time to adjuster contact.” When you see that metric slip from less than 2 hours to 6+ hours, then you as the carrier, recognize that you have overwhelmed your IA firm.
The great IA vendors perform recruiting daily regardless of the season. They perform adjuster outreach, year-round continuation of adjuster training, and ongoing readiness planning throughout the year. While you can’t directly manage for how proactive your IA may be, you will feel it if they aren’t, and you can plan in advance for how to manage around it. Like most things, a good plan is only as good as the one you make. If you don’t make a plan, then you’ll be stuck in a time of need, find it highly difficult to handle the surge of claims, and then all parties servicing the claim will be unable to delight their customers. That’s one reason Claimatic built the ability to pre-stage assignment rules to handle these scenarios, deploy them at will, and easily revert back to normal operations once the surge has passed. You have the power to create a “library” of assignment scenarios, test them, move back and forth between them with ease as demand fluctuates, and update vendor assignment weighting & preferences based on real-world outcomes.
When surge overwhelms capacity, it will lead to lower NPS and higher customer churn. Insureds pay years of premiums to their insurance carriers, and when disasters strike, the only way to keep that client is to be there immediately in their time of loss and help them to get to a sense of normalcy again. Thankfully, a simple bit of planning makes that possible, and purpose-built tech can even make it easy.
