Total Loss Process and The Role Technology Plays In Mitigating These Challenges

In an era where total loss auto claims have seen a consistent uptick since 2016, both consumers and industry stakeholders are grappling with challenges such as process uncertainty, disjointed communication, and the intricate navigation of multiple vendors. This session aims to shed light on the multifaceted issues surrounding the Total Loss process, which extends beyond consumer frustration to impact carriers and agents. The escalating costs associated with storage fees, rental expenses, and productivity loss create a headache for industry professionals. Moreover, the extended claim cycle contributes to a negative experience for both policyholders and carriers, resulting in a simultaneous decline in customer loyalty and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). 

Paul Measley and Stephanie Behnke will leverage their expertise in rolling out and implementing Total Loss digital solutions to explore how digitization, network partnerships, and process improvement can simplify the Total Loss journey. Attendees can expect an insightful discussion on enhancing each stage of the process, from the initial notice of loss to the final payment. The goal is to accelerate customer satisfaction and fortify the entire policyholder and agent relationship.


Transcription:

Stephanie Behnke (00:08):
Thank you so much for joining us today. I am with my friend Paul here, and we'll start out by introducing ourselves, but just to make sure you're in the right room, we're going to be talking about total losses, claims, total loss. Yes. Okay, thank you. I know we have,

Paul Measley (00:21):
You can't leave, but we just want to let you know

Stephanie Behnke (00:23):
Exactly. You're trapped now. The door behind you closes. Thank you for joining us. We know you have other choices today, so we appreciate it. I thought we would start out just by introducing ourselves. So Paul, why don't you tell us a little bit about you and Plymouth Rock.

Paul Measley (00:38):
Okay, so my name is Paul Measley. I'm the Chief Claims Officer at Plymouth Rock. We're a regional carrier up in the northeast. We've got a couple million dollars worth of premium. We have about a million or so policies enforce on the auto side. I've been with Plymouth Rock two years as of yesterday, but before that I was with Geico for almost 30 years, mostly in claims.

Stephanie Behnke (01:02):
Thank you. And I am Stephanie Behnke. I'm with Hi Marley. Hi Marley if you're not familiar with, it is a conversational platform and we bring carriers together with their customers and we do that all in a single thread. So when you're talking to your customer, no matter who is talking to them, no matter how many people on your team are talking to them or how many vendors are talking to them, it's all a single thread on their phone. So easy for them to understand what's happening with their claim or the underwriting process, et cetera. So the reason that we're here today is because a little while ago Paul reached out. He was having some of the challenges in total loss like everybody is, and so he reached out to Hi Marley and Copart and asked if we could get together on a solution. We'll talk about that a little bit later. But to get us started, I thought maybe Paul could walk us through some of the challenges that the industry is facing with total losses.

Paul Measley (01:52):
So I'm not going to ask anybody if they've been through a total loss, but if you have what I'm talking about or if you've worked with a team that handles total losses, it's a disaster and it's one of the worst things that can happen to a customer because now their car is totaled. They're going to have to get another one if most of us don't have money just hanging around to go buy another car. And so it can be a very stressful situation. The other thing is that as an industry, we've kind of made it complex. You might talk to somebody when you get the loss reported, then you talk to your claim rep. Now if someone's going to go look at my vehicle now, someone who's going to handle the total loss is going to deal with it and negotiate with you. Oh, by the way, we're going to take your car to a salvage facility, and so you're going to have to talk to somebody there. So there's all these people that you talk to, there's all this paperwork and things that need to get done, and it's overwhelming because on top of all of that, this customer's had a claim. And so it's just a very, very complicated process from getting to the end.

Stephanie Behnke (02:50):
I know Paul, your team is kind of maniacal about the customer experience and you're always looking to remove those friction points in the process. So I'd love to hear about what made you reach out to Hi Marley to solve this problem.

Paul Measley (03:04):
Yeah, so we're lucky in that Hi Marley's literally a couple blocks from our office, and so we'll walk over there, they'll come over to us. They have this great soda machine. This we do makes this wonderful soda that Kevin turns off every time I go over there just to upset me. But we have a great relationship in that we just share ideas and exchange things. And while we're a carrier and they're a vendor, we just like to talk about solutions. And so during one of our sessions, they were mentioning that they had partnered up with Copart, and as we were walking through some of the things that we were thinking about, one of the folks that was there was one of our total loss supervisors. And we just got to ideating around, well, how could we get Copart into this text stream and how could we figure out how to bring a single text strand with total loss and the representative from Plymouth Rock and Enterprise and all this so that the customer didn't have to figure out who am I talking to? And that kind of got the ball rolling where it's like, how do we work on this with the three partners and make it easy for the customer?

Stephanie Behnke (04:06):
Yeah, it's funny because Paul jokes about using our soda machine. He does, but we are actually pretty close. And I think for me, this is where a vendor becomes a partner. We have folks that ride in on the train in the morning with Paul, go to work with Paul and just a train ride to share ideas and exchange ideas. And so a lot of co-collaboration happens there. We were really excited about the opportunity because we care a great deal about the ecosystem. And one of the things that we believe at Hi Marley is that we as partners in the ecosystem need to work together so that carriers have to do less lifting. And what I mean by that is what we'll talk about today with this total loss assist is the name of the product is that we built it with the intention of no carrier ever having to integrate with it.

(04:58):
So we as a communication platform did all of the integration work with Copart Sellers portal so that we could exchange data and all the carrier had to do was turn it on. So you call Copart and you decide that you want to turn it on. Again, we'll walk you through the solution in a minute, but that whole idea was about expanding the ecosystem. I've been coming to these conferences for years. We always talk about the ecosystem and the power of the ecosystem and what can it do for us. And we really feel a responsibility to put vendors together with vendors as partners so that we can solve problems and then bring them to carriers sort of as a package, if you will. So as we talk about the solution itself, Paul, maybe you can walk us through a little bit about how you saw the role of technology.

Paul Measley (05:45):
So as we started moving through this total loss in particular, there's things you got to have. I need you to release that vehicle, I need you to get all your stuff out of the car. And it's amazing what people have in their cars that they don't realize is in their cars. And then we have to get extra keys and we have to coordinate with the shops and all of this kind of stuff. And it's all initially pretty manual or it's a bunch of back and forth phone calls and emails and sometimes even mail and all of that takes time. And while that's ticking, this car could be sitting at a storage lot, could be sitting at a body shop. You could be paying a hundred, 200 bucks a day in storage, which just drives up the cost of insurance for all of us. And so how do you shut that down so that you can get this thing done as fast as possible and eliminate the time where it sits in a bucket, I need to get something from a customer, it sits.

(06:40):
And so it was like how do we use the technology to accelerate that in a way that makes the customer compelled to work with us like they should? Because we're not asking them to do anything just for our sake. We don't want to run 'em through all these things. We like 'em to fill out paperwork. It's things like, I need you to release the vehicle because we're not going to be able to get it unless you sign it over or we don't want to send your vehicle to the salvage yard and you left your golf clubs in the trunk. So it's all for them, but the current system doesn't make it feel like it's for them. It makes it feel like it's for us. So we wanted to leverage technology to make it easier so that they can do those things much more faster.

Stephanie Behnke (07:17):
When I was in the army, we used to call that hurry up and wait. There's a lot of spaces in processes, in claims processes, you move very, very quickly and then you wait and then you move very quickly and you wait. And so we tried to tackle that. And so what you're looking at here on the screen on the left hand side, that is the Hi Marley platform itself. I will tell you it's kind of hard to show you how beautiful an integration is on a static slide. So we can talk about that another time. But that is the platform on the left hand side, on the right hand side, what you see is a customer's phone. And so what we did with the platform is we tried to boil down these really complex communications into this simple text message that's super clear. What do you need to tell your customer right now?

(08:03):
What action does your customer need to take right now? So think about when a lot of us as carriers, a lot of us have maybe videos where you get into an accident and we'll email you a video that'll give you two or three minutes of what you can expect in the event of a claim. Or maybe we send you an email and you can go to a URL and read all about what can happen in a claim. What we believe at Hi Marley is that people really deal best with just in time information. So go ahead and give 'em that two minute video at the beginning, but then as actions are required, walk them through the process in real time so they're not kind of going back to a video and replaying it, trying to figure out sort of what happens next. So again, left hand side is Hi Marley on the right hand side, that phone, that very first phone where it says, grab your stuff, start shopping.

(08:48):
This was a communication that we realized when somebody gets in an accident and their vehicle is not drivable, possibly a total, they have no idea what to do. Most of us fortunately don't have that experience very often. So a very simple message that just says, you can see it's pretty clear language, it's colorful, it's easy to follow. Here's what you can expect and what we need you to do on the right hand side, that very far right, that is an actual phone with the messages going back and forth. And again, super important to note that the messages are all a single thread. So if you're talking to an adjuster, if you're learning about your rental car, if you're hearing from co-part, it's all in a single thread on your phone. You've got one place to go to understand what's happening on your claim.

(09:29):
So we started with a co-part integration. Again, a little bit tough on graphics here, but on the left hand side, that is the co-part, sellers portal. So that's where people go in and say, yep, this car is likely a total loss. I need co-part to go pick it up. And then again, on the right hand side, that's the Hi Marley platform. And the idea was in this massive communication that Paul talked about, everybody chatting with everybody, the body shop's calling you and going get your stuff out of here. Or worse, I guess Paul, they're not calling you because they're earning 200 bucks a day in storage for that car to sit there, Copart's trying to pick up the vehicle, but they can't all this communication back and forth. And so what we did is we said, well, who has the information right at this moment?

(10:10):
Who knows that the car can't successfully be moved? And that's Copart. So Hi Marley integrated with that Copart portal specifically so that in real time we can tell you exactly what's happening. And anytime that that process hits friction, we're going to send you a personalized customized message telling you what to expect, what to do next and what you can expect from that. And the way that the system was designed is so that folks like Paul and his team can go in and change those messages anytime they want. So no IT resources, you're going to say, if somebody hasn't removed their belongings from their vehicle, what do we want to say to them? How do we want to say it? And then that will automatically be sent. So in real time, folks are being alerted to what their role is in this process and what to do next. Now because that's configurable, some carriers are actually using the language total loss. I think you guys played around with the wording a little bit and you found out that was, I think you knew that that wasn't going to be great.

Paul Measley (11:07):
Yeah, I mean we spent a lot of time on the verbiage of these templates and if you think about total loss, when I listen to phone calls almost a hundred percent of the time I would hear, unfortunately your car's a total loss. So when I say the word unfortunately, does something good ever come after that? No, it never does. So we're like get that out of there and just say, look, the car's going to be a total loss. We do this every day. Here's what has to happen. And so you make it so that it's not this traumatic event and that the things that we need aren't impossible to find. I need you to go get a power of attorney. Well, that sounds really confusing. So we tried to make these very simple, the whole grab your stuff. I wanted it to say pack your crap, but they told me that was not appropriate, so we moved off that he's not in marketing, but you just think about if someone came to you and said, Hey, my car's a total loss, what would I do?

(12:01):
What would you tell 'em? You'd say, go find your title, make sure you have your keys, and just go think about what's in your car. And there's a checklist of things that you need to look for because people forget all of the things that they leave in their car, their spouses leave in their car, their kids leave in their car, the stuff that they have lost for a long time that they completely forgot was in their car. And so it's sort of talking to people like you would somebody that you care about and not sending these just really fearful letters or putting people notice that this is going to be a total loss. Watch out. You're going to hate it. I know it. And that's really the way it sounded.

Stephanie Behnke (12:36):
Yeah, you've never heard, unfortunately you won the lottery, right? God, you are really going to hate what comes next. Werner, let me tell you this is bad. So very first, that very thing started with this integration with the sellers portal. And then what we did was again, created a mechanism so that Paul and his team could send these real time alerts messages to their customers. And that's what you see here. And that very first message just says, we need to move your vehicle. So again, every carrier can configure that themselves and say anything they want. But again, sort of taking that emotion out of it, I guess, Paul, to just say, we need to move your vehicle and there's some things that you need to do. One, you need to give us permission to move it. So let the body shop know that you need to do that.

(13:18):
The second thing is, again, grab your stuff and then the third one is dig out that second set of keys that you have floating in a junk drawer somewhere. You're going to need those as well, right? Super easy instructions to follow. Sort of take all the legalese out of it. When we do this deployment for carriers, now we make sure that yes, it passes muster, but it's never meant to be conditions and stipulations and terms, right? It's really just very friendly conversation. That one text message that you're looking at the screen there has significantly reduced friction in the process. That in and of itself actually reduces what we call release issues. So if a car is supposed to be picked up and it can't be picked up, it's called a release issue. Just telling people what to expect has reduced those significantly across the board.

(14:10):
And then what happens is if despite getting that message, maybe you haven't had time and you can't go to pick up your items, if co-part identifies that as a problem, that release issue then triggers a very specific message to you saying, Stephanie, you still need to pick up your belongings and here's the address and here's the phone number of the place where you need to go to do that. And again, because we have data coming back and forth between Copart and Hi Marley, we can give you very specific instructions. So if I go back to my original example of maybe a video where you're setting expectations for your customers, those are always really high level because we don't know what your exact claim is going to look like for you. And so we're pretty general. These messages are very specific. Stephanie, your car is at 1 2 3 Main Street.

(14:56):
I need you to call them at seven one four eight five eight and give them permission to release the vehicle or go pick up your things. So very specific information so that when that's happening, the other thing that's happening is we're creating, within Hi Marley, we're creating a progress bar, if you will, of the total loss event. And so you as an adjuster can always see exactly where you are in the process. Do you have any release issues pending as the yard fulfills those release issues? So let's say the yard says, yep, sissy came in, she dropped off, her keys we're good to go on this side. When they go into the co-part, seller's portal and mark that as, yep, we're ready. You can pick up the car anytime. Again, that's a real time alert. And so now not only does co-part know in real time, but the adjuster knows in real time as does the customer. So again, you can see where cycle time would start reducing significantly just from those really brief conversations. So we've talked a little bit about us and we talked about the process and we talked about the solution itself. So let's talk about the results, why we all started this.

Paul Measley (16:06):
So really there's two things. There's just cycle time in general and then there's the service that you get. And our cycle time, we saved about eight days in doing this. Now that's not necessarily all because of this because we had some other things that we were working through simultaneously, which helped, but it was very contributed quite a lot. But recently we were checking with the data and at least on the release time to release it's shaved a day off of that right away because it gets that process moving. So our cycle time is shrinking, our storage costs are shrinking, and as a result, our rental days are coming down as a result. And then the byproduct of this was that service was better. And so I don't know any of you that have ever looked at claim surveys, but if anybody said, what's the worst category of claim surveys that you can get, it's total loss.

(16:56):
It is historically the worst version of it. People don't like the process, they never get enough money. It took too long. I had too many people to talk to. And so we were curious like, well, what's this going to do? And our surveys for total losses were actually decent, and in fact we were getting perfect scores on some of these. And the skeptics were saying, well, yeah, it's because you're paying 'em more money than they ever thought they would ever get before. And I'm like, well, that may be true, but they're also going to pay more for the car that they're going to have to go buy more than they ever have before. But the things that we were hearing and the comments we were getting were that was easier than I thought it would be, or I thought it was going to take forever and it didn't. So it was those things that when you get complaints about it, it's almost always around this, I don't know what's happening. I've sent this in a million times, I don't know what's going on. And this product really helps bring those to a resolution because it puts it all in front of us.

Stephanie Behnke (17:52):
It was a perfect segue. So when we were preparing for this, I dug up some stats that we had on what does it mean to a customer when they have to repeat their story and the more people that someone has to interact with, what does that do to their experience? And both of those are detractors for customers. So you can take a photo of this or reach out, we can always send you the deck. I think these are really interesting numbers for our industry, but if I have to tell my story more than once, that bothers me. I feel like you should have listened the first time. So when you take that whole conversation and you put it into a single text thread, anyone from your organization that jumps in knows exactly what was said and when and how. And then the same thing with the number of people when it's in a single thread, even though Copart might've jumped into the conversation again with that alert that says you need to do these actions, or it might've been a total loss adjuster and a regular adjuster, and it might even be some rental car information, it's still in a single thread.

(18:55):
So the perception from the consumer is this is one conversation. Now what we do is we put the first name of the person who's having a conversation with the customer. We always put that first. So it's like Stephanie is reaching out to you in text and you can tell that it's me. But the perception is it's one continuous conversation, right? Because it's all in a single text thread. We're all in here together. And so that really helps combat this idea that I had to tell my story once where I'm dealing with multiple people. So as you think about this, Paul, we recognize this doesn't solve everything. What do you think is next for attacking customer service and improving that experience?

Paul Measley (19:37):
Well, I mean this was just sort of the tip of the iceberg because there's so many more aspects of the claim where there's something gets said or something comes in and it doesn't make its way to another adjuster. And so you start going down a path of this is what's happening. Well, no, the customer told somebody else in your organization or maybe somebody in this thread that my father's ill and I can't respond. Well, if I'm ping you going, why aren't you responding? You're like, I told one of your people that was happening. It's like, how do you get these little things that happen in a claim or a customer discussion? How do you feed that in there so everybody can see it so that we sort of know that customer journey and we can respond to that and say, okay, that's right. This person told me that they're going to be gone.

(20:24):
I know that. So I'm going to go ahead and understand that and maybe I send them a reminder and just say, Hey, when you get some time, let me know or I know you're going to be out of town. So it's those little things if we can get those integrated or find ways to put those in there and present them so that we don't lose that information because like you said, if I tell you and you forget, then the trust score kind of goes down and down and down because it sort of gets people to think, well, you really weren't listening to me, or you don't care about what's happening with me. And we do and we want to make sure that we fulfill that promise. They pay us a lot of money for their premium.

Stephanie Behnke (20:56):
Yeah, it's interesting. Something that surprised me recently was that customers, this wasn't a Hi Marley research paper, it was external, but customers trust companies that use emojis. Say it again. Customers trust companies that use emojis. And here's the deal, not an automated emoji, but I'm talking to you and I'm telling you I can't pick my items up out of my car because my son has a baseball tournament and I'm driving to Arizona this weekend and I'm the customer. And the adjuster writes back and says, no problem. I'll wait to hear from you Monday. And signs off with a smiley face. It actually builds trust. And what we're seeing in the data is that you can absolutely build rapport and trust through text messages, and sometimes you can do that even more so than you can on a long phone call. Those are just brief exchanges and people are accustomed to saying whether they're happy now, nothing degrade or degrades or degrades the trust. Then when you're not in a position to be fun with me and you try and insert a smile and this total loss process is not fun. Thank you very much. So it's all contextual. I don't think we would ever automate emojis, but just sort of an interesting piece of information that we learned about customer sentiment and customer preference, which is relatively new.

(22:17):
So think about we talk about sharing the data, saving the data, sharing the data. Again, when you're on the phone with somebody and you're building that rapport and you're sharing stories that's not really captured anywhere, and nobody has ever gone into a file claim note and said, Hey, just want to let you know Paul's going to this great baseball tournament this weekend. And so all that data sort of gets lost and we lose things in between the lines. So that really does it for us. Thank you for listening. We would love to hear your questions. Any questions about the process itself or the product or

Paul Measley (22:52):
Can I add one thing? Oh, please, real quick. So when you implement something like this, we were fortunate enough that we worked with Hi Marley pretty much from the beginning. We had some pilot teams that were part of the process and part of the design, so they knew it kind of intimately. They knew what the implications were, they knew the benefits. And then we had a couple of teams that weren't a part of it, weren't part of the pilot teams that then we implemented this with. And one of the things that you sometimes fail to realize is we do this for the right reasons. It's going to make your job easier, it's going to make the customer's experience better, but you're changing the way they do their jobs. And if you're not prepared for, okay, what's the process? What's their implication? You could potentially have it fail because you've removed all this time.

(23:39):
And if you're used to saying, I'm going to sit this over here for eight days and now I can go work on this, well now it's eight minutes and I don't have time to go over here. So it's like, okay, how do you make sure that workflow works for them because they don't get, and you just leave them with the more complicated items to do. So you got to think about that and not just go, Hey, here it is, and you walk away and go thumbs up. It's that change management and being thoughtful about how impacts everybody. That was probably the thing that most surprised me was that you really do need to spend extra time so that people don't fear automation because a lot of people do because they feel like it's going to replace them or it's going to make their jobs much more complicated and it's really not meant to.

Stephanie Behnke (24:23):
Thank you for that. Paul is covering for me, I was supposed to ask him what surprised him in the process. I love that you covered that though, because I think about the first fully automated underwriting system that my team and I built, and it was this idea of let's do automated address changes, lie holder changes. So some of those most simple underwriting tasks, let's just automate that and get that off the underwriter's desks. And we thought it was brilliant, and so we automated it. And exactly what you just said, you could have predicted it. For my team, what we didn't anticipate was we got a ton of complaints. So we took the easy stuff away and what we left those folks with were the nastiest, most complicated transactions they had to do in a day. And maybe they only did five of those, right? And they did 15 other things.

(25:14):
We took the simple stuff away, gave them the most difficult, and then we're sort of all scratching our heads going, productivity did not do what we thought it was going to do. So you're absolutely right. And the element of change management never underestimating that. And organizations, as I talked to organizations now, I understand that most organizations are at this point of change, fatigue technology is moving so quickly, people are being introduced to a new way of doing their job at least once a quarter, certainly if not more frequently than that. And it's a lot, it's to take on. And so being able to start small with a group that you piloted with, we piloted for a long time because we were obsessed with language. We learned that we scared people When we used the language total loss, we learned that of course, text messages need to be brief, but they also have to give enough information to be valuable. Another faux pa in my career, I automated something. I automated a process where we told people that the inspection had been completed on their vehicle. And yes, I single handedly generated phone calls for the organization because people were calling and going, great, now, okay, how about finishing that sentence, Stephanie, we finished your inspection and we'll call you in the next 24 hours to offer you a settlement. That should have been the rest of that statement. So this team was very careful. I know about all the language that went into those messages.

Paul Measley (26:48):
We would put the message out that we would kind of ask ourselves, okay, is that going to generate something or does that end it? And we found a lot of times there was sort of this cliffhanger and it's like, okay, let's take that back or let's send it at the right time, or let's be clear what the next step is or what the ask is. And the ask may be, don't call me. It's all good. You don't need to do anything.

Stephanie Behnke (27:10):
Yeah, that's a good point. So we have a lot of messages that say, no action is required on your part. This is just so that your vehicle's been moved to the right location. Thank you very much. No action. But intentionally signing off with no action required so that people don't wonder what comes next. So a lot of learnings and that actually evolved the product. So when we first started this journey, we didn't even plan for an entire framework where you can configure your own messages and edit your own messages anytime you want, turn 'em off, turn 'em on anytime you want. But through that pilot process, we learned there was still more to be done. So I think that it was a great learning for all of us. Okay, so now I feel like if you have any questions, we would be happy to take them. Yes, sir.

Audience Member (28:03):
Thank you. I was curious where you introduce the text tool in the claims process, and then what do you do for people whose preferred communication maybe isn't text or they have a complication in the process and they want to talk to somebody?

Paul Measley (28:20):
So for us, I mean at FNOL, we try to make sure that they're opted into the Hi Marley stream. I say we can text and then we start that channel going. There's always exceptions that have to come out. And so the desire is okay, if we need to pick up with the phone and say, look, we've got a complicated issue, then we should do that. And then once we've gone through that hiccup, then we want to try to get them back into the text stream as long as they're comfortable with it. One of the things that you'll see a lot is once they come out, we leave them out and then everything is phone call and mail and it's like, okay, we can get you back into it. It does happen. It just doesn't happen as much.

Stephanie Behnke (28:56):
Yeah, it's actually one of the things that we do when we work with carriers is we go in and we do a discovery session. And what we do in that session is we take the workflow of a carrier and we just create swim lanes. Like this is your tech swim lane, this is your phone call, swim Lane, and we address any of those concerns. So that conversation that says your vehicle can't be safely repaired, that's a conversation. That's always a conversation that's not a text message or an email. So we take that swim lane and when we do the change management, we educate folks on, here are some of the things you're going to want to talk to people about. If you're denying coverage, you're going to talk to them if they're upside down in their loan and they don't have loan gaps. So when they lose this car, not only do they have to buy another car, but they have to finish paying this one off, that's a conversation. And so we walk teams through that so that there isn't sort of any ambiguity and they understand what's appropriate and what's not. From just talking about what percentage of people are willing to text non-standard book of business is somewhere between 75 and 80% of people will say that they're willing to text a standard or preferred book of business is upwards of 80%, close to 90%. We'll text

(30:09):
Any other questions

Paul Measley (30:14):
End time.

Stephanie Behnke (30:15):
Thank you so much for attending.

Paul Measley (30:16):
Thank you.