Insurers and brokers are entering a new era of claims management.
Overcoming challenges in processing times
Claims departments are facing numerous challenges and one of them is the high volumes of unstructured inbound requests from customers, agents or insurance brokers.
This results in a great deal of manual processing that is time-consuming.
Allianz was looking for a solution to structure the flow of information and documents of the FNOL (First Notification of Loss) process.
Digital FNOL, or digital first-notice-of-loss, is the digital process of notifying an organization's insurance company when a loss has occurred. The FNOL process begins with the detection of a loss and ends with the submission of an insurance claim.
A challenge was to painlessly free up time for handlers working in claims and consequently reduce the average amount of time to process a claims case.
The process of claims-handling was generally based on exchanging e-mails and PDF's to capture the required information, which frequently involved 'ping-pong traffic' between the brokers and Allianz. Hence, it's common that there is missing information or incomplete data.
Moreover, it required significant manual processing to route all the requests that could not be correctly allocated to the correct claims handlers.
Over the last two years, there has been a tremendous increase in the volume of claims-handling and this is related to the 2021 floods and the windstorms beginning of 2022.
In response to these series of unfortunate events, Allianz increased staffing. However, the course of action was costly and more is needed to absorb the backlog.
Accordingly, a structural solution had to be found to facilitate and advance the claims processing.
Modern solutions
Upon examining structural solutions, a partnership came into existence between Allianz and Penbox. There was a need to come up with a solution in a very short term.
Furthermore, the flexibility of the solution to simultaneously tackle the challenges of several use cases was also taken into account, as well as the tools available 'out-of-the-box'.
This allows Allianz to rapidly put the solution into practice, making it available for insurance brokers and claim handlers, with low involvement needed of IT teams.
In the long term, the solution will also be embedded into the application landscape, so it fits in the target state.
Results
In less than 6 weeks, Penbox and Allianz created a digital FNOL workflow together in a time span of 6 weeks. The FNOL workflow makes it possible for insurance brokers to easily generate a customized form in 1 click, capturing and collecting all the required information for handling and processing the claims.
What is the outcome of this?
- an increase in efficiency of the operational teams that can dedicate their time on high-value tasks
- an increase in the broker NPS.
Additionally, upon reception by Allianz, the file is automatically routed to the correct team of experts for processing the file.
The upcoming phase will focus on increasing the integration into the application ecosystem.
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