Tackling the issues in motor vehicle claims in 2021 and beyond

Change is the only constant, and motor insurance claims are no different. There are distinct challenges that have historically impacted insurers, and their customers for longer than the industry would care to admit. There are also recent issues arising due to technology advancements, regulatory changes, customer needs, as well as business imperatives to save costs, find operational efficiencies and improve customer experiences.

Let’s look at the current and emerging issues as we near the end of 2021 and head into another year of roadmaps and business reporting.

As an insurance customer

A lack of transparency and accessibility are still prevalent issues for insurance customers either intending to or who have successfully lodged a motor claim. One of the drivers of the Hayne Royal Commission was to provide openness, honesty and transparency for the insurance customer. Like most business operations, the regulatory changes mean little to the customer unless the intent of the reform is well understood and embedded into the everyday lives of every member of the organization.

These are just a few of the questions our insurance customers may be asking at the time of a motor vehicle claim:

How do I know if I should be making a claim or if it’s going to cost me more than it is worth?
I’ve never made a claim before – what do I do?
Where is my car going to end up?
When will I hear back?
It’s been days and I haven’t heard from anyone; has my car been assessed?
What is the cost of repair?
Will I get a hire car?
How do I manage the hire car?

There’s a challenge to keep the customer informed. It’s easy to systemize updates and provide automated, robotic responses to every stage or change of a motor claim, but is that really providing any valuable insight for the customer? Insurance claims management solutions are now working with insurers to put the power back in the customers’ hands and enable them to do it all from the intent to claim, the first notice of loss, right through to visibility of the claim status, to avoid this uncomfortable, unnecessary and frustrating conversations to the insurer to find out when you’ll hear about your assessment and next steps.

As an insurer

No insurer truly knows the cost of a claim. The cost includes the amount of time invested in reacting to enquiries, triaging, manually processing, following up, classification to support workflows, including allocating jobs to the right people at the right time with the right information and the extensive administration for each step of the way. Insurers often have visibility into customer satisfaction, product retention rates at the time of renewal post-claim, recoveries from third-parties and premium in vs cost of claims out, but there are many gaps in benchmarking and containing costs. Insurance claims management platforms are developing methods to lead the industry by modelling and presenting detailed data in useful ways to help inform business decisions and to enable cost control. Software such as Arnie, created by Yarris Technologies helps insurance companies to understand the true cost of a motor vehicle claim.

Some of the other issues on the agenda for insurance executives include:

Juggling organizational strategy, legal and regulatory requirements, change management and employee wellbeing
Agile digital transformation implementations, software integrations and system development in response to the global pandemic
External demands in a ‘busy’ environment offer distractions from strategically assessing the way claims are and could or should be handled

Partnering has often been one of the most powerful approaches to solving the biggest industry challenges. Finding partners to work with helps you to solve some of the most complex services issues by finding appropriate solutions.

As an insurer’s authorized representative

There are similarities and differences with the present and future issues for authorized representatives, to those experienced by the insurer and the insurance customers. Historically, an unregulated and competitive practice created an ‘us and them’ attitude between insurers and their repairers when they handled motor vehicle claims.

It is inspiring to consider the prospect that insurers and their authorized representatives, including repairers and other third-parties, are now seeing the distinct value of alignment and cooperation. Insurance claims management solutions such as Arnie, 1Q1 and iBodyShop are integrated to combine the claims management and body shop management solutions to enable customers to experience seamless, efficient and successful claims.

Authorized representatives also feel the brunt of these issues:

Without clear industry benchmarks, repairers are often left in the dark when offering competitive quotes for repairs, and they experience a lack of transparency of insurance company work allocation criteria
Processes are often over-engineered, resulting in systems which are not intuitive
Motor industry regulations and insurance industry regulations are often convoluted with limited guidance and support

As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” The future of motor vehicle claims is exciting and rapidly changing to tackle the pain points and fulfill the potential for insurance customers, insurers and their authorized representatives.

You can read more about paperless vehicle claims, insurance CEOs turning to technology and improving the client experience while cutting costs on our Arnie Software Blog here.