Simplify Business Processes

FINANCIAL SERVICES (Insurance)

A general Insurance company which handled 50,000 home insurance claims each year and with a claims spend in excess of £200m.

The organisation was very profitable and saw no immediate need for improvement. However they commissioned Reinvigoration to undertake an exploratory piece of work to help understand how Lean Thinking could influence their claims process and in particular claims costs.

The area chosen to focus on was freezer contents claims which had a low annual claims cost of £2m, dictated primarily by the low single claim limit of £1000.

Although freezer contents claims were guided by clear policy terms and conditions, a large amount of variation existed in terms of what was deemed acceptable and despite being simple claims, the average settlement time was 3 weeks.

• Process management techniques were used by Reinvigoration to quickly identify significant opportunities to tackle both claims leakage and process inefficiency.
• Staff handled claims by asking customers to send in an itemised list of the items being claimed. A thorough data gathering exercise identified that this led to claims being grossly overinflated. A claims cost calculator was created using historic claims data which allowed staff to immediately calculate the likely cost of each claim, at the point of registration.
• A structured set of questioning techniques were then used which, when combined with the claims cost calculator, allowed staff to immediately identify those claims that were likely to be exaggerated. Photographic evidence was then requested to further disincentive fraudulent claims.

The approach used provided significant improvements in the area including:

• Annual, and repeatable, claims cost savings of £500k
• 90% of claims settled at first point of contact
• Repudiation rates increased, linked to a reduction in fraudulent claims
• Capacity created in the claims handling teams due to a significant reduction in the number of touches per claim, down from 9 to 2

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