The Elegant Claims Experience

Crawford is a global leader in claims management; why did it launch a separate insurtech claims technology provider to the P&C sector?

Every year, Crawford & Company invests a significant amount of capital into either developing its own solutions or acquiring technology. And it’s been a belief of mine, and supported by the board and our senior staff, that if we’re developing and/or acquiring technology that is relevant to solve big problems in the marketplace, to really stand the test of time and test of market readiness, [we should] put them out there as SaaS solutions in the marketplace. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve carved out digital assets of the company that have the ability to be sold as SaaS offerings and then taken them to market. It’s a combination of acquired technology and developed technology and then blended solutions that include partnership development as well. So, it’s not just what we’ve internally developed, it’s all of those things.

What is Turvi’s market focus?

Our focus right now, and predominantly the solutions that we have in place today, are personal lines, property and casualty, and branching into commercial lines, property and casualty.

Speaking of those big problems when it comes to claims, what are the pain points for customers, brokers, and insurers right now?

What’s interesting to me is that a lot of the challenges have not changed over the years. It’s still very much the basics of good, solid claims handling and having really effective communication with the stakeholders in a claim itself. The challenge you have with technology today is that there’s some wonderful technologies that have created other channels for adjudication, other methods of adjudication, things like self-service in the property space. Think about alternative inspection tools or lighter-touch inspection tools and all the digital 3D modeling capabilities. But the challenge with bringing those solutions into the process is doing it—I use the term “elegantly.” Doing it in such a way that doesn’t aggravate your policyholder or your stakeholders and allows you to get the most of that solution. It may be faster, it may be cheaper, it may be better, more accurate, but at the same time it must not do that at the aggravation of your stakeholders. Right now, customer experience is the Holy Grail. It’s the most important thing. So, that’s where we start. Our focus is really around that customer experience. You’ll see that everything we talk about, and do, is about driving an excellent customer experience and that starts with communication. Communication is the key to that.

We’re all used to these smooth digital customer experiences. How does new technology meet those heightened expectations when it comes to claims?

Well, you said it. The insurance claims, binding, and the production side of the industry and the claim side, post-loss, and the pre-loss side of the industry, have to [meet] the bar that has been set by the Amazons, the retail space, the banking space, and that is the expectation of the consumer today. Regardless of what you’re doing to touch the claim process, you have to be able to communicate effectively and continuously throughout that life cycle to drive a high customer experience. That’s where technology can play a role if implemented properly and thoughtfully, and consideration is given to those moments and handoffs that happen throughout the claim process. Historically that has always fallen to typically a desk adjuster or an adjuster to juggle those balls. No matter how much you threw into that process, it was their job to recover or to keep people informed, or to quarterback that claim. These capabilities today, these communications engines [have] the ability to detect changes in the claim life cycle and to communicate on demand with the policyholder. The well-informed policyholder is typically a happier policyholder. That’s the goal here. I had an old colleague that had a saying that I’ve always tried to remember, which is that a policyholder should make one phone call when they have a claim, and that’s the only phone call they should have to make. The rest of the time, we should be delivering on their behalf and keeping them informed. That’s a high standard. But it’s not unreasonable. It’s absolutely reasonable.

How does Turvi’s technology meet that standard?

It starts with the customer, it really does. Whatever we do, we must ask: Is this technology a benefit to the stakeholders, primarily the end decision-maker, which is the customer? Can we drive a higher customer SAT [satisfaction] score with this technology? We always develop and create and innovate from that perspective. From there, it’s how can we make the process better, more accurate. Faster, as always, tends to be better; to move money more quickly and more accurately into the hands it needs to be handed to. That’s where our focus is.

We already built a rather comprehensive communication platform off several technologies that orchestrate the handoff between the supply chain that’s touching the claim, but also keeps the policyholder informed of claim status updates throughout the process. We’re working right now on a tool for a particularly interesting client of ours that has challenged us with providing a 22-language translation platform leveraging an AI tool. And I will tell you, it’s been a really interesting challenge, testing claim intake through German and Portuguese and now Mandarin Chinese, French, and Spanish…. When I talk about big problems, that’s a big problem which is now I think much closer to being solvable thanks to the advances in some of the generative AI capabilities. That’s where our focus has been.

People like to deal with people, so how do you keep that personal touch in there?

The key is you’re never going to automate or defer to technology 100% of every claim outcome. There will always be a human in the loop for those cases that you can’t automate. What’s really great about our approach to investing in AI, is our intent is to use it as a force multiplier or a productivity enhancer, or an accuracy engine for our workforce and for the insurance ecosystem, not just our own workforce. The key is keeping that human in the loop. When a claim gets to a complexity level or a situation we’ve not seen, that we can’t solve through straight-through processing or automation, then we have an off-ramp that is elegant, that hands it off to the right individual that can really assist that policyholder.

If you fail digitally, your CSAT [customer satisfaction] score actually drops more, so it’s really critical that you recover and that you have off-ramps to processes that can keep the claim moving forward, not delay it, not cause frustration. That’s critical.

How can Turvi help brokers and their customers?

Well, I think it goes back to the focus on the customer itself. The challenge in the broker space on the commercial side, where we’ve attacked the triaging challenge, is that you have more stakeholders [than in personal lines]. The commercial world typically has a much more complex stakeholder landscape. It’s really just about understanding the dimensions of that landscape and making sure that you’re sensitive that you may have multiple locations involved on a property claim [rather than single homes]. Same thing with commercial fleet-type claims. You’ve got lots of locations and lots of complexity. You just need to be responsive to that additional data dimension in that process because those dimensions are people.

But, also, they value some of the same pressures around speed and accuracy. In the business world, in the commercial world, it’s about speed and getting paid…. It’s about getting their business back to business as quickly as possible. So, speed is probably maybe a little more important than even in the personal line space—speed and moving money.

What level of independence does Turvi have from Crawford?

Turvi was established as a completely separate operating segment of the company and that’s in response to a number of client expectations. We service the entire industry. We look at the entire supply chain around the P&C industry and that includes competitors of Crawford & Company as well. So, there has to be a level of distance in terms of even the data environments we manage.

We’re a completely separate data environment in the four primary Tier 1 countries that we operate [in]. We operate out of U.S. and Canada and Australia and the U.K. right now. We have cloud tenants set up in each of these markets today to distribute these applications and also to be able to allow our partners to extend into those markets as well through these products. Now our expectation is to continue to expand the investment arm. Today we are 100% funded through the capital expansion from Crawford & Company, but we expect to seek other investment to diversify that on a global basis.