Do you know how long it takes to close your claims?

After years of working in analytics and reporting for insurance organizations, we have come to understand that the time to close claims is an important metric.  Based on data from JD Power, we know that the time to open and close a claim directly impacts customer satisfaction. 

Data from JD Power has shown that from 2021 to 2022, the time complete repairs increased from 2.9 days to 17.8.  That is a 613% increase over the previous year.  Do you know how long this is taking your company?

Using tools like the BizXcel Insurance Analytics Accelerator, insurance companies can start to understand their claim cycle times to identify patterns and find problems.  Through this analysis, companies can also improve internal team morale and performance.

Analytics solutions allow supervisors, managers, directors, vice presidents, and executives to break down information to understand patterns in the data.  Are long cycle times related to specific times of the year, maybe when more team members are out of the office?  Is there a particular line of business, claim types or coverages that are outliers and need to be optimized?  Are automated claim resolution tools not working as expected?  There are many possible reasons, but not knowing is an even bigger problem.

Understanding claim cycle times can also help improve team workload and morale.   Active monitoring of open claims can help identify times when team members might be backlogged or overwhelmed, and workload adjustments can be made to help alleviate internal workload issues.  

Once the problem is understood, different actions can be taken to address the problem, from large to small.  One of the simplest options may be to educate policyholders when they have a claim on how long it may take to resolve their claim.  Knowing upfront that resolution will be a certain number of days will remove surprises from the interaction and help the claim process overall.  From there, other larger initiatives can be taken to address any systemic problems or improve internal processes to reduce cycle times.

Companies that use data to understand their customer experience will be able to serve their customers better as they will understand where their customer’s pain is coming from and be able to develop plans to make interactions better and improve their overall customer satisfaction.