Raghu Aithal, Vice President and Head of Claims at ValueMomentum

The claims value chain is ripe for the next level of transformation. What does that mean? It means that insurers have to look at redefining the claims journey and it is not a small tweak. There is a need to look at it from more of a top-down lens and looking at that process from beginning to end — all the way from intake to settlement — and seeing what kind of changes do we need to incorporate in that towards delivering some of those goals. There are people implications, there are process implications and technology implications.

From a people perspective I think we are looking at a lot of institutional knowledge that is today sitting within the claims departments of companies and there’s a lot of retirement and the newer folks that are coming in they lack that institutional knowledge. So you need to see how to bridge that gap by investing in more tools and techniques to help them do their job more effectively. The role of a claims adjuster or claims handler is also going to change in the future. They’ll need to play a lot more of the advisory sort of roles — not a person who writes checks or not a person who does a lot of manual work in the background — but really that high-touch advisement that is needed and how do you engage with customers.

From a process perspective the customer experience and the expectations of a digital customer has to be front and center. It’s about having that openness. It’s about balancing between digital and human. It’s about having an empathy in how you interact with your customers. We need to be able to build those experiences for high-touch engagements. And when it comes to experience we only mostly focus on customer experience but we believe that the process change also need to happen in enhancing the adjuster experience because the adjuster experience is reflecting in how the customer is being served and how do you make the adjuster’s life easy by not having them do manual tasks in their workflow and focus more on customer engagement.

From a technology perspective it’s about having that open architecture and ability to integrate and onboard partners easier into that value chain so that they can address specific pain points.