What Can Happen in a Day?

by Max Life Insurance
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Claims is not only a service differentiator but a moment of truth and Raison d'être for a Life Insurance company.

To know key “outcome expectations” of our customers at claims, a customer insighting study was done by IMRB during FY 2015-16 which revealed, “Claims plays a critical role in selection of a life insurer” and “Claims processing should be faster”. Our Customer transaction surveys also highlighted that key driver for customer experience and in turn customer loyalty is “timelines of claim settlement’’.

Analyzing the above reports, our Vice Chairman & MD, Rajesh Sud, noted that although we were maintaining industry leadership in claims paid percentage, for past three years, there was an opportunity to improve upon on-time processing of claims.

During a fine Oct’15 evening, Ashok SN our SVP & Chief Underwriter, was presenting claims performance to Rajesh & V Viswanand our Senior Director & COO, which showed all key claim matrices in solid green, including performance of our claims service promise of delivering claim settlement in 10 days when, this interesting conversation happened;

Rajesh: what can happen in a day?

Ashok nonchalantly replied, “a lot”.

Rajesh: Can we do claim settlement in one day?

Ashok knew that claims process was already having a dream run and claim settlement in 10 days was already an industry benchmark, but he replied, “nothing is impossible”.

Later, with fair idea of task and challenges ahead, he dialed Head Quality, Vinit Sharma to seek this “Holy Grail”. They formed a cross-functional team of Claims, IT and Finance under leadership of Anil Sharma, Head Claims, to reengineer claims process under Project InstaClaim. Team was assigned a clear goal to improve on-time claims processing in one day to 95% levels by Dec’16.

Project team found that claim processing in one day met % was around 31% and average settlement TAT was seven days. The team followed Six Sigma DMAIC approach, made use of tools viz VSM, SIPOC & Ishikawa to identify improvement opportunities and then systemic changes made in three key levers People, Process and Technology to finally achieve claim processing in one day met % to 95% levels by Dec’16 and average settlement TAT fell to two days a whopping 71 % improvement in our TAT’s.

The project had the desired impact on customer satisfaction; more than 60 % respondents rated claims process as excellent for past seven months in CTA surveys conducted by an independent agency IMRB.

While project success can be attributed to cross functional team efforts with strong buy-in from leadership, we learnt through this journey that nothing is impossible provided we have intent and right quality tools (pun intended). We gathered important insights required for mindset shift and change management experience which broke existing TAT related paradigms to usher in these learnings across company in other key processes viz Policy issuance, payments and surrender payouts etc.

Now, Rajesh was fair bit satisfied that when some dreams and hopes are in jeopardy due to unfortunate event of death, Max Life is able to stand and deliver to keep its promises and keep a few dreams alive, in just one day.

Lessons Learned

  1. How Customer Insighting tools like Ethnography can bring greater efficiency even to a process considered already operating at optimum levels in a service industry
  2. How to identify potential resistance from stakeholders early in the project and get commitment from all stakeholders to bring permanent changes
  3. A rigorous control plan is imperative to hold gains and keep intact systemic changes made in process DNA even after project has long been completed
  4. Daring to go beyond good makes us great; as “InstaClaim” is now industry benchmark as against requirement of 30 days
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