(back to 2006 C.I.P.A. Winners)
Royal & SunAlliance Canada
ClaimsFusion
Insurance Company Applies New Ideas in Technology to Put Customer Satisfaction First
Background
The Royal & SunAlliance Canada (R&SA) group of companies includes Roins Financial Services Limited, Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Company of Canada, Quebec Assurance Company, Johnson Inc., Western Assurance Company and Ascentus Insurance Ltd. It is part of the Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Group PLC, the world's oldest property and casualty insurance company.
The Canadian group employs more than 2,500 people and is represented by a large nation-wide network of independent brokers. In 2005, it wrote $1.4 billion in direct premiums, with assets exceeding $4.5 billion.
Challenge
In most instances, an insurance company's only direct contact with customers occurs when they've suffered a loss or had an accident. They want a fast, friendly and, above all, uncomplicated settlement of their claims. Providing such service is the key to customer retention.
At R&SA, it was seen that the key to improving its claims adjustment service and lowering the costs of providing it would be to ensure that most claims could be speedily settled by the first adjuster the customer spoke to. To do this, the adjuster would need to have all the required policy information and various tools immediately at hand, rather than having to collect them after a customer has called.
The company's traditional mainframe-based claims system, however, was designed for the input of data, and the information was not organized for the analysis and proactive settlement of claims. Extracting a customer's policy information and other material was difficult and required considerable training.
Solution
ClaimsFusion is a national, Web-based system, which brings all required information from the mainframe and other sources to the adjusters' computers as soon as it is requested.
The information is well organized, and the policy pages provide real-time relevant coverage information at the time of loss. The adjusters can also directly link to policy wordings and forms and add, view and sort all claims notes, diaries and file reviews. Auto-fill letters and forms eliminate unnecessary typing.
ClaimsFusion also helps adjusters organize their workdays by displaying new claims and other tasks on their home pages. Similarly, the adjusters' supervisors can view their team members' desktops, to monitor the current work flow and assign incoming claims.
Results
The primary result is that adjusters are now free to concentrate on their work, which is to analyze a claim and determine a fair settlement as quickly as possible. With all the facts and tools as their fingertips, this can begin as soon as they are on the phone with a customer.
As a result, employee morale is up. In most cases, a customer now deals with only one person, and customer retention has risen significantly.
Non-core activities, such as paper handling, have been reduced to an estimated 10 per cent of claims staff's time from 30 per cent. Training time has been cut to half a day from three days.
Errors in claim settlement calculations are down 51 per cent. The number of files that sit in the system with no activity for more than three months has dropped by more than 95 per cent.
Previously, it took a supervisor about two days to do everything that was necessary to re-assign a claim from one adjuster to another. This can now be done with a mouse click.
Independent surveys have found that customer satisfaction has risen to an excellent level, and after its own rigorous assessment, the parent company is looking at ClaimsFusion as a corporate-wide solution.
Innovative Use of Technology
By creating a Web-based interface between the adjusters and the mainframe, R&SA achieved many essential improvements without incurring the major costs and disruptions of building an entirely new system. Perhaps the fundamental innovation was in making the seemingly simple conceptual leap that enabled them to re-imagine the system's function.
A 2006 CIPA Winner!
For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems, Royal & SunAlliance Canada has been awarded a 2006 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Customer Care, For Profit category.
(back to top)
