As an insurance professional you know that the customer claims experience is key to being successful in the industry. Collecting quickly on claims after accidents and disasters is why people buy policies – this is one of the great financial safeguards for consumers worldwide. Paying out on valid claims expeditiously is a core value that insurers provide.
Through digital transformation, the insurance industry is currently reimagining the claims process to achieve higher levels of no-touch automation and speed of payment while still being conscious of the increased fraud possibility that can result from making decisions more quickly.
Voice analytics can help your company meet this speed/fraud balance by providing exceptionally accurate claims risk indicators. You can use these indicators to straight-through process the low-risk majority while also reducing current fraud levels.
This marks a new era that heralds a better relationship between insurers and policyholders. Insurers that step up to meet the moment will retain existing customers and attract new ones from those competitors that fail to leverage new technology enablers that can simplify claims processing, speed up the process, and keep fraud in check.
Voice Analytics and Insurance Claims – A Better Claims Experience for Everyone
The Experience for Insurers
Today’s voice analytics technology can detect claims risk without using biometrics, voice stress, or natural language processing, which plays a valuable and objective role in the claims experience.
It can detect risk with a level of precision that no other technology products can, without bias, and without having to rely on prior individual information. This solution, therefore, provides a unique and essential data point that produces faster, more informed decisions about whether to clear-to-pay or do more follow-up.
With many insurers today relying on many external sources of data and prior knowledge of the claimant, voice analysis is refreshing with its ability to assess risk independently from any other data. As such, it adds a lot of value to the faster decision-making process.
For example, claimants can be asked a mix of yes/no and open-ended questions through a mobile app or a telephone call. Some examples:
- Were you intoxicated at the time of the accident?
- Can you please describe what happened?
- Are there any expenses included in your claim that are not related to storm damage?
- Does your claim include expenses for someone not covered by the policy?
The claimant’s voice responses are analyzed for the presence of risk characteristics and if they are present, then to what extent. An overall risk score, as well as a risk score per question, is then provided to the insurer.
When used early in the insurance claims process, the results provide insurers with much higher confidence in straight-through processing for low-risk claimants without increasing the level of fraud.
Also, with the claims environment changing quite rapidly and insurers needing to be able to respond differently than before, voice analytics can help here too. For example, property claims due to extreme weather are expected to rise. Extreme weather drove the proportion of catastrophic losses up 40 percent in 2020 compared to a year earlier, according to LexisNexis. Such claims need prompt resolution to get communities back on their feet.
Promptness also helps insurers avoid negative press and legal actions from delayed payments after a weather disaster. However, the chaos of disaster and a rush to payment creates an environment conducive to inaccurate and fraudulent claims. Using voice analytics to reduce fraud gives insurers more confidence in responding quickly to large-scale events and provides claimants with shorter cycles to claim resolution.
In summary, with the right voice analytics in place, insurers can more easily balance the speed/fraud dynamic and bring very positive change to their policyholder’s experience while improving their own confidence in understanding their claims risk.
A Better Customer Service Experience For Policyholders
Property and casualty policyholders grow more accustomed each day to easy digital experiences with services in their lives. Banking and payments, food delivery, shopping for clothes and cars… all digital. This increased digitization has also accelerated the need for insurers to follow suit and provide a simpler, faster experience to file claims and get paid.
Those insurers who fail to provide this modern experience risk losing their policyholders to competitors who do. A 2020 PwC report says that potential new competitors selling insurance policies could be mobile phone operators, internet retailers, and even social networks—all digital-first businesses.
The PwC report also notes that nearly 70 percent of survey respondents would be willing to download and use an app from their insurance provider. Two-thirds would be willing to have a sensor attached to their car or home if it resulted in a reduction in premium.
Claimants who have been provided an option to fast-track their claims simply by providing voice responses to a few questions through insurers’ mobile apps or via a phone call have been happy to do so and are seeing quicker payouts and less need to have separate conversations with their brokers or with insurance call center agents/adjusters. It’s just a faster, better experience for them.
Improve Customer Experiences With AI-Powered Voice Analytics
If you would like to know more about more straight-through processing of claims with less fraud, request a voice analytics demo today.
