The way an insurance company captures, processes and analyses data is a central part of its business. Much of that data collection happens in the claims area when customers and insurance companies directly interact.
“Where there’s a huge opportunity is to harness some of the softer information or qualitative data around the interaction quality,” said Richard Kimber (pictured), founder and CEO of Daisee, the Australian AI (artificial intelligence) software company.
Kimber is a panellist and sponsor at the upcoming 2022 ClaimsTech Summit Australia. The summit is the country’s leading ClaimsTech event putting the spotlight on the latest challenges in the sector. The summit also focuses on innovations and tech tools that can streamline claims handling, facilitate more effective communication with customers and achieve operational efficiencies.
Kimber’s panel brings industry experts together to discuss Leveraging data collection and analysis to increase productivity. He sees the Summit as a key use case for Daisee technology.
“I think a lot of what insurance companies have done historically has been very quantitative, so in terms of outcomes, numbers and dollars,” he said.
Kimber said his company’s technology can help insurance companies throughout the whole claims process. Insurers, he said, have a massive opportunity to make better use of qualitative data from the claims officer/customer interaction.
“So looking at how well their team performed and, importantly, how customers found the experience and how to improve the experience,” he explained.
“This is one of the critical outcomes, both from a customer perspective but also from the insurance company perspective as well. So there’s a lot of opportunity to improve their processes and also the way that claims are generally managed.”
In October, the Daisee CEO explained to Insurance Business how AI is reaching the point where it can predict the outcome of an insurance claim based on the claimant’s use of language and tone of voice.
“As much as the AI machine learning is used to derive the quality, what we’re also able to do is to actually predict outcomes and this is really important in terms of claims and other aspects of the insurance business,” said Kimber.
In his role as a ClaimsTech panellist, Kimber will further explain this technology.
“It’s fundamentally looking into the words that people use and the language they use. So it’s quite nuanced analysis around how well they [customers] understand the process at a fundamental level,” he said.
Kimber said it’s also about how well customers can follow the claims process and finding out if there are any areas where the process can be improved.
“Then, fundamentally, how did customers feel about it? Do they feel positively towards the insurance company? Or negatively? Do they feel like they were treated fairly and did they get the outcome that they expected?” He said.
Ultimately, Kimber said, that’s what the customers care about.
“From the insurance company perspective, they’d like to understand how efficient their team was, how well they handled any objections or issues and how well they could clarify any of the policy questions,” he said.
Claims can be very complex which means there can be plenty of opportunities for confusion and possible friction between customers and claims officers.
“Typically, a claim requires multiple phone calls, anything from five to 10 calls, so it’s very unlikely to be resolved in one interaction,” said Kimber.
However, insurers need to be wary of repetitive calls, he said, because that can indicate a cranky customer.
“So mapping that whole customer interaction, journey, or lifecycle and then understanding the reasons for each of the calls and if they were resolved effectively or if the clients needed to call up multiple times over the same issue, is very important,” he said.
Kimber said by analysing all this soft data with advanced technology, trends can be identified.
“That’s really the core message for us, that technology can really be an enabler for improvement,” he said.
The 2022 ClaimsTech Summit Australia will take place at the Swissotel Sydney on March 03. The event will unite Australia’s top insurance companies and feature panel discussions, case studies and presentations addressing the most pressing issues in claims, with the goal of promoting innovation and adapting to the changing business environment. You can register here.
