ProtectionJun 10 2019

Supporting the emotional side of making a claim

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Supporting the emotional side of making a claim
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From publishing claims statistics, to the launch of the Protection Distributors Group, much has changed in the past decade to improve the claims experience for vulnerable customers.

I have spent a lot of time considering the next stage in the evolution of how we best serve vulnerable customers.

If you think about it, what a protection adviser and an insurer combine to do is send a cheque to a customer at surely one of the worst times of their life. That’s a wonderful thing to do.

Yet for almost all our customers, their primary emotion is one of being doubted and judged.

In truth customers half expect this, given the reputation of insurers generally, and are grateful for any efficiencies, courtesies and offers of help.

We think that insurers should assume all those who claim are suffering some stress and anxiety and should pro-actively offer support.

But if we enjoy doing the good we do, then it is surely also important that the customer feels well treated throughout – that we go beyond the efficient sending of a cheque to helping our customer through their trauma, or at the very least not making it any worse.

We need to simply change our primary intent from one of checking the facts, to one of caring for a person in their time of need.

'Feel Good Claims' is a paper designed to shift insurers’ and advisers’ thinking to the next stage of caring for our customers.

Knowing little of insurers’ back office processes, I engaged Andrew Gething of MorganAsh, whose job it is to help with those processes.

Our joint paper lays out a rationale and route map for changing the way insurers think about claims management.

Many will feel they are already thinking the way we want them to. But our experience is that there is a long way to go to make good intentions reality.

To put it simply, now that the claims paid rate is exemplary, we need to deliver a claiming customer experience to match.

The globally recognised Temkin Customer Experience Rating finds that half of a customer’s opinion of a brand depends on their emotional response as to how they were treated – how customers feel about the interactions they had with the brand.

So the emotion we engender through the claim is the key and insurers need to review all their claims processes to ensure they are generating the right emotions.

The benefits of doing things better are a valuable prize: a reputation for caring, for fair treatment, for being trustworthy.

That little list is something of a holy grail for an insurance market that historically has been seen as more or less the opposite.

MorganAsh and LifeSearch think that claiming customers need a "customer champion", which could be a nurse case manager or their original adviser, whose job it is to facilitate the claims process on the customer’s behalf, to provide empathy and support, and deliver timely communication.

We think that insurers should assume all those who claim are suffering some stress and anxiety and should pro-actively offer support, as well as encourage the earliest take-up of the support and rehabilitation services they offer.

This would make it as much a rehabilitation and support process as it is a claims one from the moment we know of it, without waiting for the claim to be confirmed.

This approach is already commonplace in the group income protection market where it improves customers’ health and saves insurers money too.

It needs to become universal, even where the commercial gains are reputational, rather than those of cash flow.

The beneficial side-effect of this generosity of spirit and resulting positive emotion would be to turn many claimants into advocates for what we do, something that very few feel able to be today, even though we have fulfilled our contract with them to the letter.

We know this outcome will happen because, where our advisers get involved in helping customers and insurers through a claim, we get wonderful feedback and offers of help in spreading the word.

If all insurers enabled us to deliver the emotional and supportive side of claims management, then the human interest stories that the press and its readers love would be about the good news that happens so often, not the bad news that is so now so rare. 

Tom Baigrie is chief executive of Lifesearch