The customers’ claims experience changes everything

When you start building an insurance business from scratch, you initially put your focus on selling and marketing your products — as this is the first and seemingly most important touchpoint in your customer journey.

Win or lose: the customers' claims experience

It’s only after a learning-process of your first 100 claims or so when you realize that — instead of an issue on the bottom of your product roadmap — it is indeed your customers’ claims experience where you win or lose as an InsurTech. Claims is the at-first-not-so-obvious moment of truth; it’s where your customers truly judge and experience your service for the first time (positively or negatively — and actually have a real incentive to give you the according review!). As such — if done right — your claims experience offers the perfect opportunity to set your business up for sustainable and lasting organic growth, driven by higher referral rates, greater customer satisfaction, and less churn.

>2,000 solved claims later, we at Getsafe thought this would be an opportune moment to share a status update on our “claims journey”. Behind us lies a bumpy road of learnings and accomplishments over the past 15 months as digital neo-insurance provider. Ahead lies the untraveled road we have yet to take. But this time, we are better prepared and have a clear goal in mind: we want to create an entirely new, better insurance experience — and a key part of that is a fast, fully digitized claims management and triage process.

Here’s what you’ll learn

• Getsafe uses a data-driven feedback loop to continuously optimize its claim management.
• Our customers value us more after filing a claim with us — this affirms our technological approach with our chatbot Carla who already handles claim notifications fully automated.
• It is our explicit goal to make the claims process as easy and transparent as possible. However, we also develop algorithms that protect our community and make fraud more difficult.
• If a claim is rejected, good communication and transparency is key.

We learned our lessons

While Getsafe started with plenty of experience in acquiring customers and selling insurance, dealing with claims was new to us. And to be honest, we really underestimated the claims issue from a customer’s perspective. We had developed our process on the drawing board. It was good in theory, but largely manual and thus not fast and smooth enough in practice. The consequence was that our customers in the beginning had to wait up to a month or more to receive their money.

Being slow and inconvenient in claims handling seems to be market standard

Surprisingly, most customers didn’t even complain. Somehow, they seemed to be used to this kind of bad service. Still, we wanted to improve. Experiencing our first more severe insurance cases, we realized that claims truly was the moment of truth for our customers — the moment they cared most about their insurance. So we took action and adjusted our focus: developing better claims management and a great service experience for our customers became one of our highest priorities.

No improvement without data

But how can you improve a process without direct feedback of your customers?

Fortunately, with more than 60,000 policies sold and more than 2,000 claims solved, we are now in a position to iteratively adjust and improve our claims management. These are the steps we have taken so far:

Having started with our customer service handling all claims manually, now 100% of all claims are filed in-app via our claims assistant Carla. Detailed, automated claims categorization data allows us to pose the most relevant questions for certain claims, so that Carla is now able to guide the customer through his/her claims process in the most efficient way.

For some products (e.g. a dental tooth cleaning), we successfully developed algorithms that allow our customers to settle their claims end2end fully automatically.

Our customer like what we are doing

For our entire customer base, Getsafe’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures how likely our customers are to recommend Getsafe to their friends and family, is already at 42. Compared to insurance industry benchmarks — where the NPS generally lies around 0! — this is already extraordinary. However, our NPS further increases to 61 (+45%) for customers who have filed a claim with us.

That said, in certain cases, it’s harder to make your customer happy, as his/her claim has to be to be declined for valid reasons. If that’s the case, it’s all about good communication and transparency. So even if we have to tell bad news, Getsafe takes the extra time to make the decision comprehensible and — if possible — easier to accept.

A word on fraud

One important topic was not yet mentioned is fraud.

Our goal at Getsafe is to make our claims process as easy and quick as possible — but ONLY for those customers who play fair. Unfortunately, as is the case everywhere, there will always be some black sheep. Fraud is part of the insurance business, but luckily data gives us new leverage to be tough on those who want to take advantage of the system.

We have already identified 27 indicators that drive fraud and implemented automated checks in our system to monitor them. There’s no tolerance for anyone who steals money from our community, but instead we file a complaint with the police if necessary. Through our constantly improving fraud detection mechanisms, Getsafe is able to close important gaps in the formerly manual fraud recognition process through technology.

What’s next?

We are just seeing the top of the iceberg when it comes to claims — so what are our priorities for this year?

We’ll continue to invest heavily in increasing our speed and accuracy in claims handling, while carving out additional cases for automation. We will also continue to fight fraud and reward people for playing fair. As we launch a series of new products in 2019, there’s further a need to ensure a consistent claims experience of our customers across our entire platform.

But we won’t just stop there. We have made it our mission to reinvent insurance. To achieve this, we will expand our portfolio and add additional services to our app. This will help us create a totally new and consumer-friendly insurance experience, and it will make us an even better companion for our customers.