RAC: An interview with Denis Svilicic
RAC Claims Manager
My name is Denis Svilicic. I'm the Claims Manager at RAC Insurance. I manage supplier relationships, and act as the conduit for the operational areas of motor and home insurance. We want to make the relationship or the transaction between ourselves and the supplier as efficient as possible, while obviously maintaining those great services back to our members.
The growth and transformation strategy
RAC has had a period of intense and rapid growth enabled by technology, to help us improve efficiency and provide a better client experience. We want the customer experience to be faster and quicker, and also to create an environment that’s self-enabling. The Arnie team offered us flexibility and several innovation initiatives that we’ve driven from RAC.
Working with Arnie
I’ve been working with the Arnie team now for just over eight years. Early on was just gaining an understanding of Arie’s capabilities, but over time it's become a workflow solution for our operation. We've expanded some of those connection points outside of the pure assessing, including our component around invoicing and authorities. We built our workflow capabilities through quality management, through referral, add on services, right through to connecting other suppliers on the platform by leveraging the data.
We’ve recently completed the referral process workflow connecting to the external supplier. Feedback from the supplier has been positive. The hire car process, our most recent new workflow has further supported that seamless experience, which is benefiting our members. We keep refining workflow processes to create a better experience.
Measurable outcomes
Arnie’s integration capability is a big plus. Reducing all of those repetitive click box exercises that frontline staff had to do, which offered value delivered savings in administration costs, by re-deploying those 8-9 staff on more value-added activities. Another measurable outcome was a referral process we created, a total loss integration, which delivered further efficiencies and reduced our time to sell a total loss from four days right down to same day settlement.
We experiment together to test new workflow processes. One outcome we believed was going to give a great experience back to a member didn’t deliver that experience, so we pivoted, creating a different referral process, which not only corrected that, but also enhanced the member experience by another 10%.
Working together, sharing operational knowledge, leveraging off each group’s capabilities to move quickly, and delivering on new systems initiatives has worked really well for both parties.
Business benefits
Automation has delivered the greatest business benefits. The company’s growth has been substantial, from eight years ago to today, almost double in size, but certainly we’ve increased the book size by another 50-60%.
Delivering on ideas and initiatives to automate and simplify have enabled to make sure that we're very stable and at the same time, managing our costs.
Automotive workflows
Automation of the automotive workflow has been the key, so we don't need people sitting there performing repetitive functions. The other critical key is the speed of service. Our point of differentiation is that we genuinely believe in giving back to the member in the form of a better experience.
User response
Arnie users are generally positive. The last improvement we delivered was the elimination of a repetitive task that was managed by the call center. They were positive, with comments such as “This is amazing”, “This is great. Can we do more?”, “When's phase two coming?”
The suppliers also had some very laborious tasks with little visibility of the processes that RACi that were managing. We made improvements to enable them to measure themselves, and provide transparency and reporting.
RACi and Arnie are planning for the AI/ML future
There’s a lot more work to be done around machine learning and artificial intelligence integrated into the platforms that we use. Our plan is to automate workflows and find new ways to explore our historical data to guide decision-making. We’ll be working with the Arnie team on the AI/ML image recognition on the Arnie product roadmap. The images will be another core data set we can use for decision-making. We’re hoping to be an early adopter.
We've worked on a multiple complex workflow process initiatives together and the Arnie team has been supportive throughout. Usually, tech companies promise the world and eventually deliver. The Arnie team has routinely executed within an agreed timeframe and cost.