With climate change has come an increase in catastrophic claims. Bushfires 2009, floods in 2010-11 in Brisbane and surrounding areas, more floods in Queensland and NSW in 2017 and 2021 – 2022, and we had the devastating bushfires of 2019 – 2020. And that isn’t mentioning the increase in storm activity – one in hundred year storms seem pretty regular these days.
When a catastrophe hits, the resulting spike in claims places great strain on Insurers’ claim departments. It is difficult to ramp up limited resources quickly – but at the same time the eyes of the media are focused on insurance industry response. Resourcing requirements loom large and a range of options (new hires, temps, outsourcing) are considered.
The Solution
One of our clients wanted to focus their limited resources on their new catastrophe claims arising from a sever flood event. The problem with that is older claims would start to backlog unless they accessed additional resources. Instead of gearing up internally the insurer turned to Proclaim to assist with managing the older claims and any new claims that were not flood related.
The Result
Our client’s brokers still received strong service on existing claims. Our client was able to shift their focus – in the short term – to the high profile flood claims.
Service commitments on existing claims were met while the client was able to excel on new high profile losses. The client was spared increasing their operational costs if they had hired and trained contractors.
Our costs were allocated to files and to the Loss Ratio so operational costs were contained. Some of our local insurer clients work with Proclaim to balance their workloads so in times of peaks in claims volumes they can outsource overflow claims to us. Our experience is we can gear up quickly, we can work with the insurers system if required or we can utilize our digitised systems to create a white label enhanced customer experience.
