In a nutshell
- Insurtechs promise a better customer experience than traditional players, but most of them fail to deliver on that promise.
- The best way to enhance the customer experience is by insourcing claims and customer care.
- Insourcing claims results in faster processing and payouts and centralising care leads to greater customer satisfaction.
All insurtechs have something in common: They all promise to improve the customer experience and treat their customers in a much better way than traditional players.
Yet I’ve been astonished to see that a lot of these so-called ‘disruptive players’ decided to focus on the tech and building a great digital customer acquisition experience, while not investing in customer lifecycle management (aka customer care) – and even less in claims management.
In fact, too many of them simply outsourced these processes – particularly putting claims management in the hands of traditional third-party administrators (TPAs) or even the insurer carrying the risk on its balance sheet.
This ends up being rather hypocritical: companies pretend to enhance the customer experience, but in practice they’re doing the opposite.
Different approaches to insurance claims management
From a strategic perspective, I perfectly understand that the focus of any new player is on acquiring customers. After all, a company that doesn’t sell any insurance contracts doesn’t have to manage claims either, so it makes sense to focus on acquisition first.
At Qover, we decided to insource the full customer care experience (contract lifecycle management) from day one, and to sub-delegate claims management to TPAs or the insurer itself.
We thought this decision was a wise one at the time. We could outsource claims, but the risk carrier still allowed us to control the quality of the process and to step in when needed.
Rather than pure outsourcing, it involved supervising and controlling the claims process, i.e. sub-delegation.
In hindsight, it was the right call in our early days; it enabled our team to focus on acquisition and sign major partnerships across Europe and the UK.
But at the end of 2019, when we began to reach critical mass in terms of claims, we realised that it was time to switch our approach and insource 100% of our claims for the following reasons:
- SLAs were below our extremely high expectations.
- TPAs & risk carriers don’t have the same digital DNA that we do in terms of customer service and satisfaction.
- Claims are the moment of truth in insurance. This is where you can really show your customer that you’re delivering on your promise and building a better world (or not).
- Poor quality of data that we could collect from TPAs or risk carriers.
- And perhaps the most important reason: by not being on the front lines with our customers, we were missing the feedback loop at the moment of truth – which is critical to improving our products, processes and partnerships.
As a consequence, we decided that the future of Qover would be insourcing 100% of our claims (my advice to my peers in the insurtech space: just do it!).
How to create the best digital claims experience ->
Insourcing claims results in faster processing and payouts
Let me share something that most insurtechs won’t:
This graph highlights the number of days it takes to manage claims for one of our very large partners covering around 32 countries.
From December 2020 until December 2021, claims management was sub-delegated to a traditional TPA. The average time it took to manage a claim was around two months.
In 2022, we partnered with global claims platform Five Sigma to insource the entire program – with multiple, complex insurance products – in about 20 different languages.
The average time it took to manage claims immediately dropped to less than a month.
At this stage, our claims processing was still quite traditional, but we had a better cultural mindset in terms of how to treat our customers and manage claims.
Since then, the claims and project teams have continued to improve the process, releasing a solution with more automation. The result: on average, we can manage a claim in about one business week.
The next step? Less than 24 hours, of course!
Centralising customer care, better customer satisfaction
That being said, faster claims handling doesn’t mean skimping on quality.
Our customer care team – which has been centralised in Brussels from the get go – is on-hand to answer questions and concerns in 14 languages.
At each contact point (by phone, email, quote, contract management or claims), we send an automated customer satisfaction survey asking whether they’re satisfied with the answer and support they received.
The fact that it’s a yes or no answer further encourages our customer care and claims teams to offer exceptional customer support.
Check out our CSAT score for our entire portfolio:
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Beyond looking at our CSAT score, part of our DNA is to fundamentally care for our customers and protect them.
To that end, we only partner with brands that share that DNA and put CX at the core of their value proposition.
If a partner would rather have the cheapest price over the best customer experience, then it’s a red flag for us as it contradicts our principle of building a global safety net for all.
The truth is, you can’t really measure ‘care’ through KPIs. You need to be part of it to understand it and feel it.
You could call us and test it out yourself, or you can listen to what you might hear on the other line.
That’s how our customer service might sound to an end user, but what about how it looks?
APIs: The key to a seamless digital claims experience
Insourcing claims management also enables us to go much deeper into the embedded insurance experience by vertically integrating our API into a partner’s app so that we can truly optimise the experience.
By embedding our claims API into their app, our partners can create a next-generation claims experience for their customers – who can file and track their claim all within the partner’s UX.
Explore how our digital claims process could fit into your UX ->
As you can see, providing a top-notch customer and claims experience requires strong sophistication from insurtechs, not to mention having strong tech capabilities as well as the legal and regulatory skills to orchestrate a complex, multi-country insurance program.
That’s why we decided to centralise all of our customer care and claims activities at Qover and why we continue to improve the process to offer the best customer experience for our partners.
