Four Tips on Utilizing Data to Enhance Your Claims Process

Customers typically contact their insurer during situations where they need to make a claim. Meeting expectations at this crucial touchpoint can be the difference between achieving customer excellence or losing a customer: 83% of policyholders who experience a bad claim process will switch insurance providers¹.

Given that insurance policy/customer acquisition expense costs are the highest of any industry (in the US, the insurance industry average is between 3-8% of the total premium²), it's in everyone's interest for the claims experience to be as positive as possible.

How the Right Data Makes the Difference During Claims Execution

Claims execution provides an ideal opportunity to impress your customer and create the stickiness that comes with an excellent customer experience. Here are four tips on how you can utilize the right data in the right way to exceed customer expectations during the claims process.

#1 Embrace Digitalization

Digitalization is already happening in the insurance industry. Insurtech is proof of that. But how can we extend digitalization more effectively to claims? Digitalization is an excellent way to interact with customers during the critical claims period. Utilizing the right data speeds up the claims submission process and reduces your customers' time doing it.

Giving your customers some relief from the pain of what they are going through by ensuring their claim is submitted and acknowledged will win praise from your customers. 

How the right data helps: It supports a claims digitalization strategy, freeing up time and resources to share that all-important care and empathy to customers.

#2 Proactive Communication

Insurers who can proactively and rapidly access the right data during a flood can facilitate proactive claims assessments during an event.

Flood data can be overlaid on your portfolio, showing to a high degree of accuracy and dependability where those claims are likely to be. This insight enables the insurer to reach out to customers in advance, assure them you know what's going on, and explain you have started the claims process for them.

It decreases everyone's time commitment and has the added benefit of saving the insurer money through compressed claims operations, adjustments, and settlement processes.

How the right data helps: It allows insurers to scale up claims throughput effectively, meeting the challenges of significant flood events and dramatically reducing the time to file and adjust claims. It also easily scales down when the event subsides.

#3 Keep It Simple

It's tempting to march full steam ahead on any solution: If it pushes our customer experience to become better, yes, let's do it. Remember that flood risk claims are one part of your business, and whatever you do, it needs to be easy to access, understand and implement with your existing tools and systems. This approach will help integrate the right data with your existing workflows. A rapidly evolving, large-scale flood event is not the time to be looking in the "insights rear view mirror."

How the right data helps: Keeping it simple supports a pre-agreed and straightforward chain of interaction by decision-makers — the fewer hands on the data during rapid decision-making, the better.

#4 Continuous Innovation

Continue to improve customer experience in your claims products and services. Innovative product design and development that include explicit consideration of the claims experience will keep you ahead of the competition, grow your customer loyalty, and ensure you maintain control of claims-related expenses.

Innovations like remote claims settlement are happening today. COVID-19 forced many insurers to embrace this concept for flood claims management. It already has a positive impact; 67% of executives say the pandemic had a positive effect on customer retention in the last year³.


How the right data helps: The right data on flood events can dramatically enhance claims management innovation. When a flood is ongoing, and suddenly an insurance organization has a dramatically different amounts of information than previously during such events, innovation becomes almost an inevitability.

Remote claims management is an innovation at the frontier of claims disruption yet is easily within your organization's reach using ICEYE flood data.

Download: The New Claims Landscape

Our new eBook, The New Claims Landscape: Save Money + Enhance Customer Loyalty is out now. Download your copy and discover how the insurance industry can save $1 billion a year and improve customer relationships with the right data.

1. Accenture Claims Customer Survey 2018: https://insuranceblog.accenture.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Accenture-Global-Claims-Customer-Satisfaction-Survey-executive-summary-POV.pdf
2. https://www.insurancethoughtleadership.com/lowering-costs-customer-acquisition/
3. Intelligent Insurer Claims Survey 2021