Why Task-Based Co-Assignment is Hard
“Can you assign the claim to more than one person for different tasks?” This is one of the top questions Claimatic is asked during early meetings with prospects, and we’re happy to answer that yes, Claimatic absolutely manages that need and manages it well. But it does leave us scratching our heads. As most market-leading core claims systems can manage this, it was a no-brainer in early product engineering efforts to solution for the carrier market. So, if it’s table stakes, why is there such emphasis from our customer prospects? Why do we get that question regardless of what type of claims system they have in place?
Task-based co-assignment has been around for years, in many types of systems across industries. Enabling businesses to take a complex problem and dole it out to different people is not new tech. However, what we find is that while the tech is not new, it’s also not nuanced. Insurance in particular is more complex, more regulated, and more focused on customer experience than it’s ever been, and most tools aren’t built to take into account such broad, dynamic factors. So, claims operations professionals embark on a journey to explain what they know about their business to IT, IT in return provides a rigorous view of that to the business in the form of requirements, the business validates it, and IT begins developing custom code to enable it, then there’s business testing, a few back and forth conversations for tweaks . . . you know the drill. Weeks to months later, the final product is delivered. By that time, the business has moved forward, there’s a new regulation, there’s a new NPS insight, a new way the business understands that those highly specific co-assignments are critical to business success, and another need for change. It’s a constant series of involved custom coding engagements with either a strapped IT department that’s processes don’t move at the speed of business, an expensive engagement with a vendor, or both.
From what we’ve seen, most homegrown systems present issues of a different nature. They don’t accommodate task-based co-assignment very elegantly, if at all. Keeping track of the various moving parts of a claim is often addressed by tags or file notes, so your teams have to know that those exist, know how to search for them, and know what they mean. There’s all sorts of mis-tagging or free-form text with critical information in no specific format, so reporting and analysis of those claims is highly manual and highly subject to error. From the front end training to the post mortem reviews, it creates business process nightmares in an attempt to solve for what the tech can’t deliver. It affects everyone who comes into contact with those claims, creating a drag on the overall business across departments.
So, while task-based co-assignment isn’t a new business need or a new tech concept, today’s capabilities aren’t quite hitting the mark, and that’s why we keep getting the question. Claimatic uniquely puts the power in the hands of the business to move at the pace of industry. Our assignment decisioning engine is highly adaptable, easily incorporates new variables coming into play, and allows you to quickly create logic around what to do with those variables. So, when your business changes, you can you go to the UI, add the variables, update the logic, test, & implement same day. This is the power of insurtech built for insurance by insurance professionals, and we’re excited about what it can do for your business.
