Inflation, inflation, inflation. From 1994 to 2021, the UK’s inflation rate remained below 5%, gently lubricating the economy without causing any anxiety to economists, politicians or businesses. This near 30-year bedrock was then fracked by the awful cocktail of COVID and a war in Europe affecting everything from energy to food, and bicycles to microchips for TVs.

In the insurance claims world, high inflation is a double whammy. First, it hits the indemnity costs for repairing and replacing the parts of home and cars damaged in losses. Second, as consumers feel the pinch, fraud increases, staff costs increase with pay demands and customer service is overstressed by the effect on their lives of macro issues becomes far more difficult to manage.

In this febrile environment, the focus turns with a fresh intensity to supply chain and operational efficiency in claims. Why? Because it is one of the few positive levers that insurers can pull to improve their lot. If an insurer can manage all parties to a claim from customer and claimant expectations to costs incurred in settling the claim, everyone wins. The great barrier to this win, however, is internal fragmentation of systems and services: the common enemy of all efficiency. To the average policyholder, insurers are a single and simple entity. They see a brand and a few phone numbers and imagine everything tied together seamlessly behind a unified front. However, peel back the veneer, what do we find? The operational and supply chains are often complex series of specialised tasks entangled in a web of flakey connectivity and inefficiency.

Policy management, litigation, claims management, fraud detection, building and vehicle repairs, replacement goods, loss adjusters, underwriting and other more niche roles require specialist knowledge and experience to deliver the desired operational efficiency—whilst all the while maintaining desired service levels.

But, for insurers, it’s not quite as simple as going to the market and integrating with ‘best-in-class’ solutions throughout the supply chain. Why? Because each independent point solution interfaces others, and for every point solution added, the number of connections exponentially increases. To join four takes six lines. To join eight takes 28 lines. In short, the more you have to tie together internally to maintain efficiency with good business information, the more there will be compromise, friction and vulnerability.

Further, bringing together multiple point solutions with an internal system is made all the more challenging when you consider that they are external companies not under complete control of the insurer.

System siloing isn’t a new phenomenon. Businesses in every industry face siloing issues but insurers face it on an immense scale, particularly when handling claims where so many elements must be coordinated. Friction between these systems can cause the claims operation to grind together like two tectonic plates. Slow moving, slow changing but unstoppably damaging. The by-product can be a sinkhole of operational expense and customer attrition. Worse, failure to manage those elements can mean surges in indemnity spend with insult added to injury when the customer - who was so costly to acquire - leaves immediately after a poor claim experience.

But herein lies the opportunity…

New technologies that make it easier and cheaper for insurers to build and manage holistic internal claims systems have introduced new levels of efficiency, value and customer service across claims management. Based on the no-code sea change that is sweeping many industries, such technology can bring together many former siloes into a single environment with all the flexibility the insurer needs. Claims departments across the world are starting to fulfil their potential by building complex systems behaviours, ones that are based on the simplicity of pre-determined decision trees of routing and action.

Every action is a result of a decision in a claim. The problem for most insurers is that these are opaque to their own staff and systems as well as to customers. So, to deliver true efficiency and a contemporary customer experience, high levels of automation remove time, cost and error. The human value isn’t lost… it is just moved to where it is truly valuable.

In the past, traditional IT infrastructure practice has made this frictionless goal unrealistic or unaffordable. Conventional ‘spec and build’ architectures are too expensive and take too long to deliver – because by the time the minimum viable product is available, the requirements have usually changed. This is where the power of no-code technology comes into its own.

No-code systems established themselves as a reliable, flexible and cost-effective alternative to traditional developers in the web design industry. That influence is now spreading and insurers have perhaps the most to gain from the flexibility, cost reduction and satisfaction (internal and external!) that are delivered.

At 360Globalnet, our multi-award-winning no-code digital claims platform has quickly become the go-to alternative for claims management stuck in silos. Purpose built from the ground up as a no-code claims platform, we can bring together all parties and claims participants into an integrated environment, or even turbo-charge the specific parts that are failing digitally in legacy systems (often gradually taking over more and more of the inefficient elements that used to be considered indispensable).

Insurers reap the rewards of massively reduced operational expenses and record high customer satisfaction scores.

For the policyholder, this means automated status updates (now the norm within the retail sector) and faster settlement times. For the insurer it means full visibility and control of best-in-breed specialists doing what they do best, slashing operational costs and delivering record retention ratios.

Not only does the no-code aspect enable the claims participants to efficiently interact with each other, but the no-code functionality also enables users to improve, iterate and change the entire claims journey at the desktop, continuously building efficiency into the operation and leaving IT departments to focus on where they add value - infrastructure.

This new generation technology of a low cost and low risk model, but high configurability, is quickly transforming the claims management landscape. Digital claims are now directly correlated with reduced operational costs and customer satisfaction, offering the largest opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

If you’d like to find out more, get in touch today.