“I’ve devoted a large part of my life applying technology for claims,” said Michael Jackowski (pictured above). “For me, it’s the moment of truth for customers.”
The CEO of Duck Creek Technologies, the US-based global firm specializing in digital insurance technology, was recently in Australia for his firm’s Sydney conference.
Insurance Business was invited and asked Jackowski to get specific about what parts of the claims process insurers should be digitising and how?
The conversation occurred in the context of the ongoing flooding emergencies across Australia’s east coast. The Chicago-based CEO said any digital solutions also need to help insurers scale so they can effectively deal with the large surge of claims they experience during these natural catastrophes.
Jackowski said there are three things Duck Creek does to digitise the claims process.
“The first one is we create a digital claim file so that anybody in the organization always has at their fingertips access to the right information at the right time,” he said.
This digital claim file is more complex and useful than a folder sitting on a computer. Jackowski said anyone helping a customer with the claim – including the customer service rep on the phone, the claims adjuster or the insurer’s response team sorting out repairers, can see all the information at the same time.
“Anyone that picks up the phone immediately sees all the information of what transpired, what happened - it’s right there at their fingertips,” he said. “Then quite often, we have that digitally integrated so when the phone call comes in, the inbound number could trigger that file to pop right up to the adjuster immediately.”
Jackowski said this avoids the need to search for information or transfer the customer to a different person to answer their question.
“That speeds things up, considerably,” he said.
The second thing that Jackowski’s firm is doing, he said, is “automating a ton.”
He referred to the age-old criticism from brokers and underwriting agencies that many insurers still use processes that are very manual, even paper-based. Jackowski said these legacy systems add even further to claims process delays because they require a claim to be dealt with very “sequentially.”
“They [insurers] have to kind of sequentially hand things around the organization,” said Jackowski. “We’ve done some claim adjuster studies and we find that about 50% of a claims adjuster’s work on a legacy system doesn’t influence the outcome of the claim.”
Sending out letters and notifications can be automated into the workflow, he said.
“That saves the adjuster time so they can respond more quickly and they can also, as part of responding quickly, really focus on the customer’s needs at hand,” said Jackowski.
The third claims process digitisation comes by way of the cloud. He said the cloud is particularly “elastic” and can scale up or down according to the insurer’s needs.
“The thing about catastrophes is when they come you have a flood of work that comes in at a peak at a certain time,” he said. “The cloud allows us, on our architecture, to scale the systems up so that response time is always good, we don’t have to provision new servers and new technology in the backplane.”
Jackowski also noted three insurance industry trends, already impacting strongly in the US, that brokers can expect to see gathering pace in Australia.
“Due to what’s happening here and also in the States with catastrophes, for example Hurricane Ian that recently hit the state of Florida,” he said, “insurers are really looking for more effective ways to proactively manage risk, mitigate risk up front and get ahead of that.”
The second trend, he said, is adoption of advanced analytics.
“This is using data to drive automated decision making,” said Jackowski.
The third trend, an industry theme in Australia for some years, is digital transformation.
“The way that is showing up more and more, for example in the broker channel down here,” said Jackowski, “is insurers are enabling their capabilities through an API or an application programming interface so that instead of humans interacting with them, computers in the broker channel can interact.”
Insurers continue to deal with a mounting tide of claims from ongoing floods.
The focus of the current flooding is NSW’s central west. At the town of Condobolin, ABC News reported that the Lachlan River peaked at a record 7.5 metres on Monday, two days earlier than expected.
The state emergency service (SES) ordered residents in parts of West Condobolin to leave immediately before roads were cut by floodwaters. Thousands of sheep, cattle and kangaroos are among those being rescued.
“Most of the kangaroos are being rescued by boat and they are fairly subdued,” said Ken Murphy, the SES incident controller for the Lachlan River. “In most cases they are happy to be rescued and taken to higher ground and safety,” he said.
