Charles Handy is a noted business guru and these reflections on efficiency rather than effectiveness are very relevant for Claims Directors and Managers and Digital Transformation Leaders.

There is a chorus of demand for automation, straight through processing, leveraging AI and chatbots replacing claims handlers.

Yet just reducing claims costs or speeding up settlement lead times may just be short term gains for long term loss. 

Recent studies by have shown that all insurance customers want a combination of self-service and human empathy from FNOL and throughout the whole claim journey. Even Gen X and Millennials. 

See Lemonade, NPS and the Empathy Factor.

Handy goes on: 

"The drive for efficiency can also seem callous. Mr Handy argues that managers tend to like things more than they like people. If all the staff were replaced by robots, he says, running a business would be a lot easier. As it is, there is a temptation to try to turn people into things by calling them “human resources”. Call someone a resource, and it is a small step to assuming that they can be treated like a thing, subject to being controlled and, ultimately, dispensed with when surplus to requirements."

The Economist Business Section July 26th 2019

  • Do insurers treat claims handlers as resources or people?
  • Do they focus on reducing costs rather than the customer?
  • Do they put "lipstick on the pig" of the current claims process or start again with a blank (digital) sheet?
  • Do they really embrace iterative innovation or to they spec the whole digital claims journey before configuring the digital transformation?
  • Do they embrace "black box thinking" i.e. fail fast and fail often in order to create optimal customer satisfaction?

These are critical questions to ask if you are to be a leader and fight disruption. It is possible to both delight customers and collapse costs whilst also enhancing the roles and effectiveness of the claims team.

But to achieve that you need a No Code platform where you the insurer can innovate and iterate using plain English (or Spanish/French/German/Chinese for that matter) to constantly improve and anticipate the unexpected.

That's where automation and STP, even AI can come a cropper. Dealing with the unexpected and as anyone who has read Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan, Antifragile and Skin in the Game) knows the unexpected is to be expected.

Look to technology partners like 360Globalnet, Snapsheet and RightIndem to provide the solution.