Claims professionals worked around the clock this summer and beyond to handle record-breaking claims volume from the wildfires, hailstorms, and floods that wreaked havoc across Canada in July and August.
A concerted effort to automate and triage claims, and set customer expectations during the pre-planning stage, helped claims professionals manage and recover from these unprecedented workloads, experts tell a recent panel discussion at CatIQ Connect.
In just four weeks this summer, the industry received nearly 230,000 claims for natural catastrophe losses in Jasper, Calgary, Toronto, and Quebec.
“[When] you have that many claims, you’re working overtime nonstop, and you’re 12 days on, two days off. It’s a lot for staff,” says Charlene Ferris, national property major events manager for The Co-operators Group.
The summer activity spike was preceded by slow periods during the winter and spring of 2024, says David Mercer, vice president of ServiceMaster Restore. Understanding and planning for that difference in volume is how contractors manage their capacity for claims.
“[Capacity] is such a fluid thing by location, geography, loss type, ease of access, all of these different things,” he says. “It’s really about understanding, what is that localized capacity? What is that mobilized capacity?”
Capacity, he says, is also relative to expectation. For example, the capacity for a seven-day turnaround on claims would be different from the capacity for a 30-day turnaround.
“So it’s really about understanding what’s the need, setting expectations with our insurance partners, with our [independent adjuster] partners, and with the customer, and then understanding what the capacity looks like,” he says.
To that point, service-level agreements (SLAs) between clients, insurers and claims pros can help the latter manage expectations and define metrics for how quickly they’ll be able to resolve claims.
SLAs can prevent claims teams from being inundated with repeat callers who want updates on their claims before adjusters can provide them.
“[We] focused [our efforts] on making sure that we had candid conversations with our customers, to only take what we could control [and] manage, and not overextend ourselves on the front end, to pay the price in the back end,” says Kelly Stevens, senior vice president of loss adjusting at Crawford & Company Canada. “[It was] carefully thought out, making sure that we didn’t burn adjusters out, quite frankly, and also that we could maintain quality service standards.”
It also helps claims professionals triage based on need.
“We look at clients that have pre-Cat planning established with us as a lever to pull, clients that we have a close partnership with that support us regularly,” she says. “Then we have other questions…based on how quickly they can commit, not just inquire about resources, because it changes by the hour for those times.”
Mercer says restoration companies reached the point this summer where they had to triage based on policy limits.
“We saw a lot of cases where there was a $10,000 limit on the basement that’s got $100,000 worth of damage,” he says. “That’s a hard thing, on a first notice of loss intake, to know.
“We got to the point where we had to specify, ‘If the limit is less than this, it just needs to be settled directly with the policyholder,’ because we’ve gone out to these [clients] and 95% of the time they’re saying, ‘Hey, we don’t want services. We just want you to tell us what to do,’” Mercer says. “That takes resources away from people who do need or want our services.”
In Jasper, for example, triaging was based first on vulnerability, then proximity to and efficiency of response.
Another up-front measure that helped adjusters handle the volume from this summer’s Cats was the “automatic creation of claims,” says Stevens.
“A huge bottleneck was relieved when we had robotics creating claims in our system, which took seconds instead of minutes or hours of staff trying to key in new claims for our system and assigning [them] to adjusters,” she says.
She adds that using desk adjusters where possible also helps alleviate the workload of field adjusters and reduces the amount of time spent in the field.
“We assigned claims that were probably 79% desk adjusted, which was a much quicker process than the traditional field models. Then, where we could with volume, we allocated those desk teams and had them dedicated to one or two customers.”
Feature image by iStock.com/Jaap2
