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Giving Underwriters and Claims Adjusters Superpowers

Written by
Amrish Singh
Underwriters and Claims Adjusters Superpowers

Your underwriters and claims professionals need better support. By supplying them with cutting-edge automation, you can reduce the amount of busywork they have. This improves the insurance employee experience and frees your intelligent, capable team members to focus on more impactful initiatives. Stop treating your claims professionals and underwriters like human middleware and start giving them the tools they need to succeed.

Insurance Companies Won’t See Profits Without Talent

The insurance industry has a profitability problem. Faced with a myriad of problems ranging from surging natural disaster costs to skyrocketing inflation, the insurance industry is expected to post a combined ratio of 105 for 2022, according to the Triple-I Blog. That’s an underwriting loss.

But some insurers are faring better than others. Recent research from McKinsey’s Journey Analysis, which looked at Return on Surplus figures for leading commercial-focused P&C companies over the past three decades, found a huge discrepancy between the top and bottom performers. 

Insurers that control their loss ratio with strong underwriting and claims management tend to have significantly better operating performance.

Insurance Professionals Are Being Held Back and Bogged Down

Insurers need their underwriting and claims professionals to operate at peak efficiency, but that’s not happening in many organizations. 

Often, underwriters and claims professionals are competent, but too many manual and time consuming activities (like data entry and administrative tasks) are eating up their precious time. As a result, insurance professionals simply don’t have enough hours left in the day to focus on high-value activities like meetings with clients and core underwriting processes.

To enable your team members to excel at tasks that matter, you need to reduce their busywork. Automation makes this possible. 

Grow Your Insurance Company and Your Profits

To grow, insurance companies need more submissions – and they need more underwriters to process those submissions. If they’re unable to hire enough underwriters, they can’t grow –

At least that’s how it typically works.

However, there is an intriguing alternative. If you leverage automation to boost your underwriters’ capacity, you can manage more submissions without increasing the number of underwriters. The same logic applies to claims professionals: those who are empowered by automation can do more. 

An Insurance Talent Crisis Is Coming 

Between economic issues and catastrophic losses, the insurance industry is already under pressure to squeeze as much value out of each professional as possible. That should be enough motivation to maximize individual performance, but there’s another reason: the insurance industry is experiencing a talent crunch. Skilled underwriters and claims professionals are in high demand; there simply aren’t enough workers to manage all the work. 

The problem will only become worse as more insurance professionals retire. According to WGLT, a recent industry survey found that 14% of insurance companies reduced employment, but only 6% had intended to. Insurance professionals are retiring or leaving the industry for other reasons and insurers can’t hire enough new workers to replace them. As a result, teams are shrinking – but workloads are not.

The solution is automation. Automated processes can …

  • Help insurance professionals take on greater workloads. Automating some work enables people to accomplish more. 
  • Free insurance professionals focus on higher-level tasks. Automation tackles tedious tasks, allowing people to focus on responsibilities that require creative problem-solving and a human touch.
  • Improve job satisfaction and retention. People don’t enjoy busywork. Reducing it can make a job more rewarding, increase engagement and boost retention rates. Just as the insurance customer experience matters, so does the insurance employee experience.
  • Sharpen your recruiting edge. Like your customers, quality job candidates expect to work in a tech-forward environment. If you offer a digitally-equipped workplace and a competing employer does not, you increase your odds of hiring.

How Automation Changes Everything

The old way of doing things isn’t working anymore. 

Traditional underwriting processes require time-consuming manual data entry and don’t make efficient use of third-party data. The same goes for claims: traditional FNOL processes lead to long claims cycles that drive down claimant satisfaction and drain insurance company resources. It’s a lose–lose situation.

Insurers know this and are actively trying to adopt new digital tools that will boost operational efficiency and customer satisfaction in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, many are approaching the problem all wrong. Like a messy plate of spaghetti, current IT systems and applications are tangled, complex, expensive to innovate and challenging to unravel.

The Bottom Line

Automation of claims and underwriting processes is a win-win. It enabled insurers to increase operational profitability by giving their talent the freedom to think, analyze and innovate – all the reasons they joined the company in the first place. When employees can perform work that is both impactful and rewarding, they stay, advance and innovate even more.

Satisfying work is contagious. Happy team members tell their friends. The word gets out and more talented people are drawn in. Suddenly you’re no longer facing a talent crisis.

It's such a simple idea; yet, for many, it’s an intangible dream – perhaps because they’re stuck trying to unravel the their technology debt

There’s a better, faster and less expensive way to automate. Liberate solves the problem of siloed systems with fully-automated, tried and proven workflows that bring different functions together in a seamless experience. 

We provide everything you need to build end-to-end automations – in less time and for less budget than you’re probably expecting. Reach out to us to learn more.