Understanding the customer journey at a mutual insurer

The challenge

A mutual insurer with 1.2 million members had seen its satisfaction scores for home and motor claims fall for three years in a row. Members were not unhappy with the settlements. They were unhappy with how long it took and how little they heard along the way.

The claims operation, around 380 people across two sites, was busy. Calls to the claims line had risen by 15% in two years without any rise in the number of claims. Leaders assumed the answer was faster settlement and had begun to scope a new claims system.

Before committing to it, the insurer's chief operating officer asked us to find out what members were actually experiencing.

What we did

We spent ten weeks inside the claims operation with a joint team of six: three Halveron consultants and three experienced claims handlers released from their day jobs.

We listened to 1,400 recorded calls and sorted each by the member's reason for calling. Almost half of all calls to the claims line were members chasing progress or asking what happened next. Most of the rest were genuine first notifications and questions about cover.

We then followed 120 claims from first call to settlement. A typical home claim passed through 14 handoffs between teams, loss adjusters and repairers. On average a member was asked for the same information three times, and in most claims there were stretches of more than a week when nobody contacted the member at all. Speed was a problem; silence was a bigger one.

With the claims teams, we redesigned the journey in three ways:

• One owner for every complex claim. A named handler now keeps a claim from first call to settlement, with a direct number the member can use.
• Updates before members ask. A text message or email goes out at each of five agreed milestones, written in plain English and tested with members before launch.
• Information gathered once. We rebuilt the first-notification script so the details adjusters and repairers need are collected on the first call and shared, not requested again.

We piloted the changes in one claims centre for twelve weeks, measured them against the other, then supported the rollout across both sites. The new claims system was rescoped around the redesigned journey and its budget reduced.

The result

Twelve months after rollout, the insurer reported:

Claims handlers said the work was calmer and more satisfying. Staff turnover in the claims operation fell from 29% to 18% over the same year.

“We thought we had a speed problem. It turned out we had a silence problem, and that was much cheaper to fix.”

Head of Claims, the insurer