Life and health insurance carriers in Europe are facing a multitude of challenges, including rising claims costs and frequency due to factors such as post-Covid claim volumes, ageing populations, and medical inflation.
In response, carriers are shifting their focus from transactions to building relationships based on trust, leveraging emerging technologies, ethical data use, and stakeholder collaboration to improve the customer experience at the moment of loss.
One of the key areas of focus is claims management, which is emerging as a tangible differentiator for carriers. By investing in technology and data analytics, carriers can improve claims efficiency, accuracy, and empathy, delivering better outcomes for customers, lowering their operating costs, and improving future sales prospects by differentiating on their most important customer touchpoint, their brand promise to the customer which occurs at point of claim.
At Swiss Re Reinsurance Solutions, as retirements and talent pipeline constraints challenge claims leaders to deliver quality claim assessments in a timely and accurate manner, we have seen this uptick in claims management solutions happening for the last 2-3 years, with a clear acceleration in product adoption globally.
Some carriers have also developed a methodology to reduce claims leakages using machine learning algorithms, while others have introduced video and WhatsApp messaging to improve the claims experience for customers.
Whether digitally enabled, face to face or over the phone, the human touch remains important, and carriers are also investing in training and upskilling their front-line employees to treat customers with empathy. The goal is to strike a balance between automation and human engagement, leveraging the strengths of both to deliver the best possible claims experience for customers.
In addition to improving the claims experience and ensuring quality claims assessment decisions, carriers are also exploring ways to differentiate themselves by leveraging positive, empathetic claims experiences to support distribution and growth to the next generation of policyholder – the beneficiaries. For example, Swiss Re Reinsurance Solutions sees the potential for connecting claims to distribution as a game-changing opportunity for carriers that do it well.
In conclusion, the potential for life and health carriers to build stronger relationships with customers is significant, and investing in claims management is now firmly on the agenda. By leveraging technology and data, while also maintaining a focus on empathy and human engagement, carriers can improve the claims experience for customers, differentiate themselves from competitors, and support distribution. However, the challenges are significant, and carriers must carefully manage change and investment to achieve their goals.
