Insurance

Since the onset of the recession, insurers have begun to shift their focus from volume to value. Although some products will effectively remain commodities, the search is on for customers who are prepared to pay a premium for what they see as ‘value’ in the form of new or better services.

Insurers are working harder to reach those customers, service them more effectively, hold on to them for longer and cross-sell products that are directly relevant to their needs and preferences. At the same time, insurers are paying greater attention to process efficiency and risk control.

The objectives may be clear, but how do insurers know they are being achieved? Take the claims process, once a back-room operation that has now moved centre-stage. Insurers are investing in faster and more efficient processes that take claimants rapidly from first notification of loss to settlement. They offer the potential to improve the customer experience, reduce fraud and minimise leakages during complex loss adjustment. But what exactly is working, and what’s not? Are there important lessons that can be applied elsewhere? Without the transparency provided by a customised reporting system, the claims director often remains in the dark.

Blueprint’s information systems bring transparency to all your business processes, right across the organisation, reporting on what is working and what is not. Sophisticated drill-down capabilities allow you to see what is going on beneath the surface, revealing linkages and exposing problems and bottlenecks.

The issues we are currently working on with our insurance customers include:

1. Claims: ‘There is a class of customer that we’d like to settle with right away, leaving them with that warm feeling about us and hopefully greater loyalty. But which ones should we target, and how can we follow up to see whether the policy is working?’
2. Risk: ‘I want a system that makes sure we are appropriately staffed through peaks and troughs. If there’s a severe weather warning on Saturday, I want an alert that triggers calls offering overtime to turn out and work on Sunday.’
3. Fraud: ‘I want to be able to identify customers who have been with us for some time without making a claim, and who may be disposed to ‘get something back,’ so that I can offer them something first.’
4. Know the customer: ‘We have customer data sitting in silos inherited from the companies we have acquired over the years. We’d like to bring it all together on one screen, so that when a customer calls, we can see the entire history of the relationship.’
5. Sales and marketing: ‘Which customer groups should we target? And what does ‘value’ mean for them? I’d like to bring all our data together so that we can correlate the demographics with customers’ life styles and buying patterns over time.’
6. Monitoring the supply chain: ‘We invest time and money building relationships with our suppliers and setting up commercial agreements with them. I'd like to identify which of them are giving us something in return.’

Interested to know more? Contact Tim Reason on 020 7832 1858 or email treason@bpms.co.uk