American Family group updates claims systems with customer-centric focus

October 11, 2022 6:17 AM

Digital Insurance spoke with Gwen Olson, enterprise claims strategy associate vice president, American Family Insurance. She leads the company's claims services (AFICS) unit which handles claims for five insurers that comprise the American Family group. She has more than 20 years experience in claims operations, also including time at Liberty Mutual. Olson's work includes retiring legacy systems, aligning different operations systems currently in use and leading customer-focused innovations to provide greater value and change the claims experience. American Family has nearly completed a three-year plan for retiring legacy systems, which Olson expects will free up personnel to focus on innovations.

How long have you been working on this claims revamp strategy?

They have been ongoing for the past five years. Our continuous pursuit is redefining digital avenues so that we provide more self-service options and more tutorials to customers, giving greater transparency into the entire claims process so that customers have the ability to track status, to reach out for help and to understand the end-to-end process of handling the claim.

We want to make sure that we're easing the burden for customers, both after a claim and through loss prevention. So we're focused on doing more in connected home space and telematics, as well as more educational communication and tools for the customers.

Can you describe your implementation strategy?

The past few years have been very involved with a lot of change for our operations and our adjusting services teams. We've had a lot of work and a lot of learning, and also have done a lot of listening across the claims team to make sure that we're creating a brand new company and a brand new culture as we brought all of our team members together. It's making sure that we incorporate the values of the American Family Insurance Company but also recognizing individual nuances and needs of each of the companies in the American Family group. So we brought together team members from these five different companies into the AFICS team. We've also integrated all policy systems into one central claims platform.

We converted all the existing inventory and that's given us the opportunity to retire our legacy claims systems. So the folks adjusting the claims now work in one single platform. They're able to provide services across all of the brands, which allows us to leverage the scale that we have bringing these teams together. We believe it really puts us ahead of most carriers. Certainly as we think across all the brands and all the opportunities that we have, as we look to bring on new technologies and new capabilities, we can scale pretty quickly across all of our teams and all of our brands because we're working with one system and doing that integration work one time.

How do you preserve a human touch in claims while advancing digitally?

Claims handling has really been focused on the customer. As we design digital and enhanced processes, we made a significant departure from the traditional focus on efficiency and the speed to settlement. We're at the forefront of an industry paradigm shift where we really center all of our efforts on customer value.

We give our claims professionals more bandwidth and more time to provide empathy and take care of the human interactions when it's needed the most, and when our customers want that. We give our customers a choice on the path to claims resolution. We feel it's our job to provide value and a positive experience that's right for each customer. The insurance business and the business that we're in, in claims, is definitely a human one. We have the privilege to provide the human support and the empathy to our customers. And they depend on us after they experience a loss.

What are the most interesting or compelling advances in digital technology throughout insurance functions?

Our inspiration is more broad than just insurance. Frankly, the entire insurance industry tends to be behind in digital offerings. As we focus on ensuring customers can exit and enter the digital claims experience when and where they please, we want to make sure that if they want to talk to us, our compassionate claims professionals are available to actively listen and help through the claims process. If customers want the flexibility of digital claims services, we seamlessly provide that. We focus on that optionality in claims and across insurance.

What's the future for digital claims management? Is it just catching up or are there advances you're seeing?

There's definitely advances that we see coming. I don't know that I see those advances led in the insurance space. As we research more broadly into consumer experiences and expectations, we know that our customers' behaviors and their expectations are also influenced by non-insurance situations. That's why we bring that into the way that we design for a future customer experience.