How Service Chain Optimizationcan help insurance providers

deliver a great customer experience in Field Service

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In a world full of on-demand services, customer expectations are

at an all-time high. Regardless of the industry you serve, you’re

competing with companies like Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb that offer

their customers instantaneous service and real-time visibility into

delivery.

So how can organizations that deal with complex tasks and

constant disruptions, keep up with customer demands and meet

business goals? Successful execution requires field res ource

demand forecasting and planning, creating a flexible schedule,

connecting with the field in real time, and measuring the outcome

to continually improve the process. All of this can be accomplished

with Service Chain Optimization.

Service Chain Optimization is a decision making process for ensuring an efficient day of service. It considers the full life-cycle of service delivery, from the early stages of forecasting and planning, to scheduling and dispatching, to execution and analysis. And it’s meant to help you find the optimal balance between business goals and customer expectations. From claims to premium audit to loss control, Service Chain Optimization provides the opportunity to resolve the challenges at hand. It also enables carriers to invest in Field Service solutions to reduce costs and enhance customer experience at limited capital expenditure.

The Need There are 2 reasons why insurance carriers need to invest in field service optimization; new customer service demands and a need to drive down costs - UBERIZATION OF SERVICE AND COST REDUCTION

Empoyment and Independent

Adjuster Management

Forecasting & Planning

Sceduling & Dispatch

Mobile Field Execution

Performance Measurement

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The figures below show an exceptional claims experience.

FNOL

- Complex- Basic

Appointment Booking Confirm/Change

Appointment Verification

Customer Claims Journey Appointment Booking Prior to

Appointment

Predictive Scheduling

Day of Appointment

Estimated Time of Arrival

Vehicle OwnerClicks on text based link to view adjustor’s real time location

After the visit

Customer survey

Audit

Arrival Time

ACCORDING TO A REPORT FROM NEWVOICEMEDIA, POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE IS COSTING BUSINESSES MORE THAN $75 BILLION A YEAR, AN INCREASE OF $13 BILLION SINCE 2016.

Uberization of Service Forrester Research reports that nearly half of the insurance purchase influencers they spoke with cited improving customer experience as a top business priority in 2019. This trend is driven by the “uberization” of service where there is an increased demand from customers for a seamless experience where consumers now expect service to be delivered on their terms and at their convenience. The impact of not being able to provide an uber like service can have a large financial impact. American Express found that 33% of Americans say they’ll consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service. They further found that Americans tell an average of 15 people about a poor service experience, versus the 11 people they’ll tell about a good experience. According to a report from NewVoiceMedia, poor customer service is costing businesses more than $75 billion a year, an increase of $13 billion since 2016. This means that carriers must focus on providing a seamless journey.

Policy Holder

This type of experience and optimization enables carriers to provide an enhanced customer journey to improve retention and provide cross sell opportunities to happy clients. Overall, it provides a better claims journey and enables customer feedback to continually improve operations. According to a survey by Aberdeen It can also have an impact on the top line as 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience.

Cost Reduction In the Forrester survey, they also found that 40% of global insurance providers said that reducing costs was another key priority for them in 2019. As new competitors come into the market with different pricing methodologies, traditional carriers need to adjust their overall cost and revenue structure to match these new models. This means that carriers need to find different ways to reduce costs across their service chain without sacrificing a good customer experience.

Enhancing a Typical Claims Appraisal Workflow When the adjustor visit is complete, and the policy holder receives a link to take a survey and provides feedback to the recent experience in real time:

Integrated Surveys/Survey Builder

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For example, in McKinsey’s Insurance 360° benchmarking survey, they report on the structural changes under way in the industry and the expected impact on costs. The impact on insurers to reduce costs is growing steadily due to the low-interest environment, greater price transparency, and the impact of digitization. New competitors are fundamentally redefining the meaning of customer experience, and the gap between traditional vendors and new

Flexible Appoinment Booking Customers want control over appointment scheduling. With FSM technology, customers can set up service calls via their channel of choice, receive notifications, reschedule appointments and provide additional context to the service provider. The customer has more control over the appointment, increasing satisfaction.

Customer appointment booking using Mobile Self Service In addition, mobile appointment booking helps reduce the number of missed appointments, calls to the call center asking, “when will the adjustor arrive” and provides the customer with an exact time of arrival.

All of these things lead to cross sell oportunities as well as ways to eliminate costly interactions with your organization.

entrants is growing every day. McKinsey states that a change in costs is a must for insurers who wish to remain competitive. Service Chain Optimization with Field Service Management (FSM) software can help drive efficiencies and eliminate costs from your processes. Below are several methods carriers can implement to drive down costs by using FSM technology.

%

McKinsey&Company | Source: McKinsey Insurance 360

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SMS Mobile Appointment Alert

Real-time Routing

Another way to decrease costs is through the use of real-time routing for workers in the field.

Real-time routing enables the continuous optimization of routes on a mobile device. This results in increased employee engagement, decreased fuel costs and the ability to either schedule more appoinments per day or assign idle resources to another appointment nearby using soft boundaries to increase adjustor utilization.

Uber Like Adjustor Arrival Experience Once the adjuster has completed his last appointment, the system automatically sends an alert like you see below along with a link so that the policy holder can view where the adjustor is on the way to their location in an “Uber Like” experience as indicated here:

Your adjuster is on his way, click here to see his approach. https://n.sksw.co/EyZcu

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Truth based Appoinment Booking The key to being able to respond to a call on time is determined by the ability of your FSM system to accurately predict a how long a job will take when taking into account several variables. Factors such as a adjusters skill, travel conditions, and weather conditions all factor into determining how long a job should last and how many appointments you can accurately schedule in a day. While there are a variety of appointment booking methodologies used by carriers, most still assign a claim to the field adjustor and let them figure out how to optimize their time. Click refers to this as suboptimial “Adjuster Self – Optimization”. The right appointment booking solution would enable better schedule optimization which will ensure your external workforce operates at full capacity, better satisfies customers, at less cost and enables a smaller appointment window to become a competitive differentiator.

You can see the difference in accuracy by comparing 2 different scheduling methods – truth-based and quota-based.

Quota Based Booking The quota based appointment booking approach works by separating job types into “buckets” and relying on average job duration and travel times to create the schedule. The problem with averages is that they are usually much different than reality and do not take into account mitigating variables like claim complexity, adjuster experience, travel and weather conditions. In addition, these buckets are created in silos, making it difficult to move time from one bucket to another to best utilize available resources. Even if you could manage it, imagine doing so for hundreds to thousands of buckets, for every region, for every day, and every job type.

For example, let’s say a claim takes an average of 30 minutes. With travel time, that makes one hour per job on average. In theory, you could fit hundreds to thousands. But today’s a quiet day and only six customers called in for claims. That means you have three remaining hours that you could use to squeeze in to the schedule. However, because these appointments were booked in silos, you are not able to move idle resources to other calls, resulting in opportunities to wow the customer and poor utilization rates.

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Truth Based Booking Truth-based appointment booking is the method of booking appointments based on true job durations and true travel time, with the complete, existing schedule in consideration. Truth based booking is an artificial intelligence-driven technology that can use predictive data to reduce idle time, better anticipate travel time, and allow for back up resources to step in quickly when necessary.

For instance, instead of leaving white space in the schedule when a customer cancels, the adjuster can be re-assigned to another job. The system can take the adjuster’s location into account and send them to another nearby job, bundle newly arriving jobs with existing claims – all without delaying other scheduled work. This makes for a more productive day, increased revenue and more highly satisfied customers.

These smart systems can also record disruption data over time to help with future planning. It can track trends, such as weather conditions throughout the year. In the months when there’s a higher probability for snow, the system can schedule more low-priority jobs in case there’s a storm and the tech needs to cancel. It could also look at typical traffic conditions during this weather and account for potential delays.

Because truth-based appointment booking relies on actual data and breaks down silos, it’s the best way to keep your workforce productive and optimize your time. And using this method, an intelligent field service management solution will continuously run and optimize the actual schedule. When another job can be fit in, or if a tech has too much idle time, the system can automatically reshuffle the schedule and assign tasks in a way that fully utilizes your field and desk based resources.

Truth-based appointment booking can help you prepare the schedule for days, weeks, and months in advance. Because it optimizes in real-time, it allows you to maximize time and offer comfortable, and even same-day, appointments you can keep.

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Conclusion In summary, when an Insurance Company moves from their old spreadsheets, outlook or even existing claims assignment systems like Guidewire, Duck Creek and others that we can integrate these capabilities into, they typically enjoy the following customer experience and productivity improvements:

• Increase adjuster efficiency by 20-30%

• Reduce their travel time and gasoline expense by 18%

• Increase the efficiency of your claims center by 25%

• Enable 70% of appointments to be booked on 1st attempt

This means many more claims handled per day and extremely satisfied customers that stay with you longer and are more accepting of cross sell offers after you have exceeded their service expecatations.

Existing vs New Capabilites Matrix It can be difficult to identify and compare your capabilities along with modern FSM capabilities.

Below is a helpful matrix that should help guide you in this process.

For more information contact us at www.clicksoftware.com.