“The way we talk about claims is very functional,” says Lisa Jones, Customer Care Manager at LifeSearch. “It needs to be emotional because it’s about the people we help: the bereaved, the critically ill and the disabled.
“Insurers need to provide the positive stories so that advisers can share them with customers.”
Andrew Gething, managing director at Morgan Ash, told the audience that LifeSearch and Morgan Ash this year collaborated on a paper entitled Feel-good claims, which looks at why the claim should be the core product, not the policy.
It proposes a re-balancing of how customers experience the claims process, by paying as much attention to the emotional as to the functional aspects of getting the transaction right. It calls on insurers to support this goal and sets out how this might be achieved:
- Promptly alert advisers to every missed direct debit payment.
- Promptly alert advisers when a claim is made
- Provide online claim tracking technology.
The paper sets out a common goal - namely, to ensure focused and personal care is: “at the heart of a timely, empathetic and straightforward claims process” with a view to “delivering brilliant outcomes, the blossoming in consumer sentiment protection deserves and transforming the amount of good we do.”
Kevin Carr is managing director and Suzanne Clarkson is associate consultant at Carr Consulting & Communications
