October 2021 – “4.3 Million Workers are Missing…”
Last week, the Wall Street Journal suggested that “4.3 Million Workers are Missing…. Where have they gone?” in an article by Josh Mitchell et al., (click here to review) and provided examples and analysis on the effect across all of industry.
Insurance companies have not escaped and claims operations are getting hammered, at a time when claim volumes are significantly higher than normal, case managers are leaving…
Now is the time to take action!
Never before have claims departments been under so much pressure. There are many more vacancies for claim managers than there are claim managers.
The longer tenured are retiring….
Looking at the population of claim managers by age, in our industry, there is a negative skewed distribution, many case managers have enough service to retire, and that is what they are doing! We have seen this distribution for some time and commented on as a risk in our analysis. Well, now that risk is a reality. The last wave of Boomers are leaving the workforce!
The experienced claim managers, who cannot yet retire, are now enjoying a buoyant market with opportunities for higher pay, better benefits, and remote working. They can now work for any company anywhere, without leaving the comfort of their home office!
Insurers are stepping up their training programs to train younger individuals fresh to the industry. This is probably an 18-month process, assuming that they stay!
Now, this is a really good time to engineer the claim process so you don’t need as many case managers.
Twenty years ago, we did this for life insurance underwriting, developing a repeatable process to assess the risk of issuing life coverage to an individual. Up to this point every case was touched by an underwriter. Then, the adventurous insurance companies and re-insurers developed a process supported by technology to assess the risk of a case and to automatically underwrite the low-risk cases.
We can do the same for long-tail claims, whether Disability Insurance or Workers Compensation.
The technology is here, but the appetite to embrace it has, shall we say, lagged behind!
The claims industry post COVID has given us an excellent opportunity for claims operations to change their course and to finally embrace this change.
The result will be a smaller number of case managers who are highly skilled at tackling the most complex of cases, that the technology platform recognizes are too complex to automate.
The Claim Lab provides a model to automatically perform a risk assessment on your new claims and direct each claim over to your workflow system for optimized processing.
Some claims can then be processed with a low-touch or even a no-touch process, others will be passed to your skilled case managers for maximum attention.
We can do this because we now have the right data to drive this process, we know the data elements that correlate to high risk, and we can help you collect this information.
All you need is the courage to leap forward, into a new way of working.
You now have to do more with less…
We can help you!
Email us at info@claimlab.org