...Especially During Catastrophic Events (CATs)!
As the insurance industry still continues to process the claims from the recent Hurricane Sandy, it is a good time to pause and reflect on the relationship between claim settlement processing and your reputation as a company. The last two years have brought significant challenges to the industry, and your own success hinges on your ability to meet them.
Customer satisfaction matters more than ever. And while a good reputation can take years to build, it can vanish overnight.
Claims Processing In The Internet Age
We live in a real-time world now. In the past decade, consumers have come to expect nearly instant gratification, whether it is a reasonable demand or not. The Internet and, in particular, social media are the driving forces behind this. If a customer has a poor experience with your claim settlement processing, they have the ability to instantly tell hundreds, thousands, even millions of other potential customers about it.
As this article illustrates, a single poorly-worded statement, even one where the company is technically in the right, can do significant damage to their reputation due to the ability of the Internet to spread news quickly.
On the other side of the coin, however, stories of great experiences can spread just as quickly. It all hinges on the ability of your company to adapt to a new age.
Bringing Claim Payment Processing Into The 21st Century
To impress electronically-empowered customers, you need to empower yourself as well. Centralized enterprise-wide middleware solutions optimize your claims payment processing, allowing you to keep up with the rapid pace of the world. As an example, adopting new, disruptive technologies to issue payments is easier with a single disbursement hub, than it is trying to integrate it to each, separate originating source system.
You need the ability to process claims as they happen, where they happen, with as much expediency as possible. This cannot be implemented piecemeal, office by office or department by department. Fast response requires solutions that unify your company, rather than dividing it. Even as your enterprise grows, it needs to shrink at the same time, just as the Internet has caused the world to shrink. You need to be faster, more agile, and more able to meet challenges as they arise.
When combined with online reputation management with an emphasis on building social media connections, your claim payment processing system can become a selling point, rather than a liability.
Recent events have shown how even the largest insurance carriers can be slow to adapt. Now is the time to pull ahead of the pack.
