Seasonal spikes in claims cost insurers a lot of money
Every year, insurers must handle seasonal spikes of insurance claims. Mostly during storms. Some Belgian insurers are still handling insurance claims months after storm Eunice hit Belgian territory. 🤯 Handling all these claims, usually results in hiring an extra temporary workforce. But could it be different?
Seasonal spikes
There can be predictable seasonal spikes in the volumes of documents being sent. Of course, property damage claims during hurricane season are the first ones that come to mind. But even in summer, several big-name insurers in the UK have reported subsidence incidents are up to 20% higher than typical summers, causing spikes in insurance claims. With summers getting hotter due to global warming, more and more houses with older foundations are causing subsidence. A spike in Cyber insurance claims has even been seen due to COVID-19, where the risk of cyber-attacks raised as more people have been working from home and relying on (potentially less secure) digital tools.
But there are also other factors at play that aren’t quite so easy to see coming. Changes to the law might affect compliance regulations dictating document storage. But the volume can also be in flux even when there are no external factors. Sometimes it’s just a matter of certain claims requiring larger volumes of paperwork: one claim might only need a few single page documents while another includes a file that’s nearly 100 pages. Depending on the time of year and the size of the business line, the number of incoming documents could be in the thousands, or the hundreds of thousands.
Hiring extra people
Car insurance, property insurance, renters, health, life flood and fire: all of these products are distinct from one another in terms of what they cover, each with their own set of rules and regulations as to how documents are processed.
Especially for the processing of incoming claims, insurers are hiring extra temporary employees. Manually sorting and distributing all this information, even if it’s done over electronic channels, can be exceptionally complicated and prone to errors. Those who do the actual sorting need to be trained, which on its own isn’t so bad but becomes even worse when you factor in seasonal spikes in the amount of work to be done. It costs the same to train a seasonal employee as it does one who’s a full time, an investment that bears little return when the seasonal worker is gone within two or three months.
Can it be different?
Of course: yes!
Automating the interpretation and extraction of incoming documents could fix all of this. When a document enters the insurer’s organization: a human will read it, try to understand it and extract the information that is relevant for further processing. An IDP (Intelligent Document Processing)-platform can do exactly the same.
Based on Artifical Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural language Processing and Robotic Vision, the models behind IDP are trained to process documents the same way humans do. Actually, they do it more accurately, but let’s not speak about that over here. 😏
It’s not an exaggeration to say that claims management is the most important aspect of any insurance company’s business. Why? There are cost and control considerations to be sure, but the biggest impact to the bottom line might be the customer satisfaction. More than 60% of customer dissatisfaction originates in the back office. This means that automating time-intensive processes like document processing, can have huge impact on insurers.
Interesting cases
Europ Assistance is automating all incoming communications with Metamaze
Processing all these emails and letters requires a lot of time and effort. The data-entry team used to read every email and letter to decide the document type, interpret the context and forward it to the teams that need to process it further. Used to, because now they have Metamaze to automate this document processing.
While the Belgian insurance world was upside down after storm Eunice, Keypoint had nothing to worry about
Metamaze was implemented just before storm Eunice hit Belgian territory. This storm wreaked havoc in Belgium and caused more than 500 million euro in damages. This, in turn, caused extremely high numbers of insurance claims that were submitted, creating enormous amounts of documents that needed to be processed by Keypoint. Luckily, Metamaze was integrated right before all these documents flooded Keypoint’s systems.
What we recommend
A lot of insurance companies have handled document processing from previous storm claims manually. To prevent this from happening again next time, we suggest to get in contact with us so we can build you a proof of concept.
Leverage the pile of documents from this claims season and use it to train the models behind our Metamaze platform. This will speed up accuracy and makes sure you can chill at the Bahamas when the next storm is going to hit ground.
Download our free guide
Download this guide to know more about how Intelligent Document Processing can help you automate claims documents, resulting in faster and more accurate processes.
Metamaze is a no-code Intelligent Document Processing platform that uses AI to automate every document and email workflow.
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Metamaze is a no-code Intelligent Document Processing platform that uses AI to automate every document and email workflow.