Issues & Answers Special Advertising Section:
 September 2021

Issues & Answers: The Human Touch

It’s an interesting relationship. The traditional perspective of commercial insurance is slow toward modernization. But the whole point of business interruption insurance is to get a company back to doing what it does best, which is run its business and be responsive to the customers’ demands for a streamlined process. If the claims process is somewhat deficient in addressing that need to recover quickly, insurtech is trying to take a good look and see where they can help improve things.

We’re seeing more advanced technology investment on the commercial insurance side. Part of what commercial insurers are doing at the moment is learning from and adopting what personal lines insurers have been doing for years with technology, AI and machine learning. Automation is eradicating bottlenecks, increasing efficiencies, and building more proactive communication processes. It’s about evolving the human side and the technology side and melding them together to come up with platforms that work for everybody involved in the claims process.

Why is it important for commercial insurers to leverage both human insight and technology to improve the customer experience?

The race for technology and automation must be taken cautiously. We’ve found that fast forwarding to full automation in the claims process is not without risk. An insurance claim becomes personal, particularly in the small-and-medium enterprise space within the industry. It’s an emotional process. It’s a stressful process. By trying to fast-forward too quickly into full automation, there’s a risk that the human touch is lost. We’ve recognized that. While we’re automating some of the BI claims process, we’re making sure that Quantum, Baker Tilly’s business interruption claims calculation platform, is supported by real people.

What are the top considerations for selecting the right BI claims processing platform for your business?

You first need to consider who developed the platform. Is the tool technology driven or based on hands-on experience and then transformed into a technology solution? With Quantum, we’ve tried to harness and automate our experience and dovetail that with a human touch. Next, consider how the platform got to where it is today. What’s the plan for further development and enhancement? Is it going to be a one-and-done? Or, is it that there’s a plan for enhancements, feedback loops, and versions of the platform that roll out thereafter? We’re at the beginning of the modernization journey, so I would encourage anybody looking at a digital platform or a technology-based solution to consider what the future of that platform looks like. In an industry dealing with wide-area damage scenarios like hurricanes and wildfires, we need the foresight to assess large volumes of business interruption claims and communicate with a high volume of policyholders instantly and efficiently. This means that future scalability of your technology solution will be an important consideration.